Suppose you are a small business that has made a substantial investment in a website. You may ask yourself after several months why you can’t generate sales from them. As an SEO company in the Philippines, this is the most typical pain point for our clients, regardless of their location, industry niche, and how old their website has existed. Among non-performing websites, we noticed the following characteristics: their websites aren’t performing the way their owners wanted:
- Cluttered layout
- Outdated designs
- Bad backlinks
- Lacking content
- Misplaced CTA (calls to action)
- Hard to navigate
- It doesn’t look good on mobile
- It loads too slowly
To ensure that your website performs appropriately, that is, generates leads and sales, you have to ensure that your website visitors see value on your web pages (note: not just the home page). Having an engaging web design is crucial for local SEO for small business. Even if we rank your website well on search engines, you need to keep your website visitors seeing value on your website. To achieve that, here are twelve tips to make your engaging website make more money for you:
What an Engaging Website Should Have:
A Clean Engaging Web Design
According to Microsoft, the average person’s attention span is now eight seconds. With a clean and modern design with clean visual elements that focuses on your brand message, you can keep interested visitors for longer. The web page “over the fold” (or the area visible without scrolling down) is crucial. This critical part of your website aims to ensure that your site visitors take the next step by either scrolling further down or clicking on a call-to-action. On the other hand, you also need to avoid having too much white space.
Improve Site Navigation on Each Web Page
A properly structured website will affect how long your visitors stay. As your product line grows, displaying all the links to individual pages on a sidebar or a header menu is not advisable. Once you have hundreds of unsorted links, your site visitors will be lost looking for the product they want. A recommended method of providing quick navigation for site visitors is breadcrumb-style navigation with hierarchically organized category pages. Instead of placing individual links on the sidebar, you can add links to top-level category pages.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
With over half of global internet traffic coming through mobile users, your website must be optimized for mobile viewing. For small local businesses looking to tap into people looking for something they can get nearby, you have to ensure that your mobile users will be comfortable with your site once they see them on mobile. You must address problems, such as hard-to-read font sizes and touch points being too close. Once your site visitors feel frustrated, they will leave it immediately.
Publish Long-Form Content Such as Helpful Articles
You can enhance user engagement by publishing long-form content. That is articles, website content, FAQs, and helpful information that appeal to your target audience, such as your business’s story. Content strategy is the backbone of your SEO strategy. With long-form content, you have tremendous opportunities to insert relevant keywords that will help drive your website higher in search rankings. Moreover, helpful content keeps visitors on your site because of the value they provide them. Best of all, content that is helping offers opportunities to engage visitors.
Don’t Use External Links Too Often
Though external links provide references to support specific information, such as relevant data in your articles, external links may send visitors away from your site. Using one external link for every one hundred words of long-form content may be a good rule of thumb. However, it is also helpful to place external links at the bottom of your article rather than within them.
Use Relevant Internal Links
From an SEO standpoint, having internal links are beneficial to a website. However, the primary purpose of internal links is to keep website visitors engaged by guiding them to relevant pages on your website. For instance, you may publish long-form content that discusses a product. Relevant images and phrases may be linked to that specific product page to supplement the primary navigation menu. Moreover, you can also link to related articles and pages on the site.
Add Relevant Images
A website visitor may feel bored when confronted with a long-form article devoid of images. Technically, relevant images supporting your content will make them look at your web page for a while longer, thereby improving your overall bounce rate. However, images add excitement, curiosity, and excitement to a topic, regardless of how academic they may appear. Aside from catchy images, infographics are valuable elements in articles of a successful website. Not only will they read their articles, your site visitors may also share your article with more potential customers.
Add Videos on Web Pages
Videos may affect your site’s loading speed. However, videos arouse more interest for site visitors than any form of media. Visitors will tend to play the video and watch its entire duration, making them stay longer.
Too Many Ads Turns-Off Website Visitors
Publishing ads on behalf of another business can help you monetize your website. From the user perspective however, intrusive advertisements that automatically play with sounds and pop-ups turn many visitors off.
Most Importantly: Improve Your Site’s Loading Speed
With bandwidths improving on most networks, most websites are loading almost instantly. However, not all areas are blessed with broad bandwidths. If your website loads too slowly, visitors may be turned off and look for another site. There are ways to improve your website speed by limiting the number of videos and images, enabling browser caching, and using web-optimized media, among others.
A Successful Website Encourages Engagements
Add a section where site visitors can find helpful user feedback on your products and services. There is rarely any other content on your website that can encourage a purchase than reading helpful reviews. An engaging site should also leave a link on the review section where users can access to leave their reviews. You can also add sections under each blog post encouraging users to share your article on various social media platforms.
Bottom Menu Content
Do not ignore the bottom menu when designing your website layout. Note that there are instances when your potential customers will likely visit your store. As a minimum, you may include your contact details, store hours, links to your social media sites, and other helpful information, such as your BBB accreditation or a link to your professional organization.
Takeaways: An Engaging Website Will Make Money For You
Like social media marketing, websites are crucial elements in digital marketing. Engaging sites have design elements that appeal to catch users attention and keep them on your site for a longer time. With a properly structured website, your users can also quickly access website pages containing your products. Even small businesses should consider how their website appeals to their target audience. By providing an engaging website, your target audience will likely stay longer. The longer your visitors stay, the more they see value in your business and likely take the next step and establish a lasting relationship with you.
