How to Make Your Website More Engaging (& Keep Visitors Around Longer)

Put yourself in your customer's shoes.

Is your website inviting enough for them to want to take off their coat and stay awhile?

While a steady stream of website traffic is healthy, it's important that you're presenting visitors with a website that not only meets, but exceeds their needs.

We're talking clear, fast, engaging, and visually appealing. 

Essentially, you want to be sure that the information you want them to consume (the information they need to convert) is practically shining in marquee lights. 

Worried that your website isn't living up to their expectations?

If you’re company needs help keeping your visitors hooked, we’ve come up with four considerations that are worth making note of.

Simplify content

Some businesses think that the more content they throw on their website, the longer their visitors will stay. 

Wrong. 

I don't know where to look, I'm not sure what to click, and I'm feeling a little anxiety coming on. In other words, there's really no reason for me to stick around.

While this is certainly an extreme example, many other businesses are committing similar "word crimes":

This text-heavy approach is ineffective, as most visitors have grown accustomed to quickly scanning websites to decide whether or not they meet their needs. 

To simplify pages like these, consider implementing clear, concise bullet point, adding more spaces between blocks of text, or quite simply, cutting the copy in half.

Add links

While you want your website copy to be easily digestible, you also want it to be highly informative. Aware that conveying a lot of value in just a few sentences can feel like trying to fit two mismatched puzzle pieces together, linking to clarifying content aims to make it easier. 

Take a look at how MailChimp leverages links to their blog content to deliver information-packed content without dragging it out:

By directing visitors to additional resources, MailChimp is essentially inviting their visitors to stick around. 

Suggest next steps

While an abundance of calls-to-action will surely help you keep visitors clicking around, they're not the end all be all. 

Check out an article on The HubSpot Blog and you'll find that below each post they display additional blog articles to keep readers engaged. 

Rather than just finish the article and bounce off the page, these related articles provide more opportunities for readers to further educate themselves. At the end of the day, the more educated your leads are, the more sales-ready they'll be. 

Add a chat feature

I think we can all agree that getting through to a real person on the phone is one of the greater feelings in life (right up there with warm towels and Corgi puppies.)

With that said, imagine how much "stickier" your website would be if your visitors had an opportunity to talk to a real human in real-time. 

Enabling a chat feature will allow you to do just that. 

With a chat feature in place, your business has the ability to answer your visitor's questions as they make their way through your site. 

Check out this example:

Dress shopping is the worst (I'm sure the ladies on the blog all agree.)

However, thanks to Lulu's live chat feature, I was able to turn up 3 contenders for an upcoming wedding in minutes. 

Without this feature, it's likely that I would have taken one look at their 25+ pages of dresses, skimmed through a few, gotten frustrated, and moved on. 

Needless to say, this tool saved the sale. 

Want to keep visitors engaged and start converting them into sales? Check out these live chat tools:

• SnapEngage 
• PureChat 
• Liveperson