9 Ways to Keep Visitors Around Longer

If you want to have any success with online marketing, you need to build a website that people will stick around on for a while. If people hit “back” the second they land on your page, you need to follow these tips for lowering your bounce rate. A lower bounce rate means improved conversions and more money in your pocket.

1. Seek Targeted Traffic – The first step to keeping visitors around longer is to ensure they should be there in the first place. If you seek targeted traffic, you’ll improve your chances of getting sticky traffic significantly. What’s the best way to attract targeted traffic? Through SEO. Optimizing your site for the right keywords will make certain the visitors landing on your website actually want to be there. Quality traffic=lower bounce rate.
2. Update Content Regularly – One way to keep visitors coming back and to make them stay longer is to update your content regularly. Fresh content not only shows your website is relevant, but it also helps you rank better in the search engines. Try to set a schedule for updating your content regularly; otherwise, you’ll keep overlooking it for “more important” tasks.
3. Keep Navigation Simple – Once you get visitors to land on your website, the last thing you want to do is scare them away with confusing navigation, so make your site as easy-to-use as possible. Great website usability makes visitors feel welcome, and it helps them move through your site easier. Avoid confusing, “creative” navigation at all costs.
4. Stay Focused – This is another usability issue. Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew on a particular page. Instead, stay focused. Limit the number of distractions on each page to give your website a clean, welcoming feel. Analyze each page to determine if there is anything that distracts the user from the main message. If there is, get rid of it. Focused websites keep visitors engaged.
5. Encourage Participation - The Internet is an inherently social platform. It’s the interactivity of the web that makes marketing so effective. If you want to give your website visitors a reason to stick around, allow them to participate. Comments, polls, forums, and ratings are just a few of the ways to coax your visitors into participating on your website.
6. Test Regularly – Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” If your website constantly has high bounce rates, you need to start changing things. That’s why you need to constantly test your website. Tweaking the content and layout of your site will help you create the most effective pages with the lowest bounce rates. Test! Test! Test!
7. Use Interlinking – How do you keep your traffic moving forward through your site? Interlinking throughout your content gives your readers a reason to keep clicking. Of course, you have to make sure that your links have a purpose. For example, if you’re blogging about a particular topic, you might want to link to a background story on your site that gives more clarity to your post. Never interlink simply for the sake of dropping more links. Every link should add value to the user experience.
8. Improve Load Time – The faster your pages load, the likelier it is that your visitors won’t click “back” immediately. Try to avoid things that slow down your website’s loading time. Heavy graphics, flash intros, and auto-play videos are just a few of the things that kill your load times. Keep your pages simple and fast-loading to give your visitors the best chance of sticking around more than a few seconds.
9. Focus on the Headline- When it comes down to it, the headline is perhaps the most important part of your pages. It’s what lets visitors know if the page has something of value to offer them. If your headline is a dud, your traffic won’t stick around to read the rest of your content. On the other hand, if your headline is compelling, your visitors are likelier to read through your content and to move onto other pages on your site. Focus on the headline to help everything else fall into place.

Try to implement these tips into your website over the next few months. I think you’ll find your traffic is of higher quality, and you’ll begin to see them sticking around for longer periods of time. Stay focused. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

About Eric Brantner

You can follow Eric on Twitter at @Eric_Brantner.