Web Visitors: Make Them Stick 10 Tips

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Pete Hollier in Search Optimization, Web Usability

A great deal of financial and human resources goes into generating traffic to your web site. All too often when reviewing a web site I come across issues which affect the stickiness of the web site. To ensure your web site supports your business objectives, when you get your visitors to your site you must ensure they stay as long as possible.

1. Identify and Define: Proper identification of potential web site visitors is an absolute necessity. If potential visitors have not been identified correctly authoritative, targeted keyword research and content development is not possible.

Without the right content your web site will be unable to capture and engage visitors attention.

2. Live up to visitor expectations: Providing what visitors expect is paramount to keeping them on your site. Visitors may learn of your site from various locations such as Search Engines, Pay per Click advertising or Social Networking web sites. All of these locations will have provided some incentive to encourage your potential visitor to click through to your site.

Ensure your advertisement, search snippet or Social Media interaction is relevant to the page your web site visitors will use to enter your web site. Failure to do this is the primary cause of high web site Bounce Rates.

3. Web site is visually appealing: Ensure your web site is visually appealing including quality graphics, design elements and content which is easy to scan. Your visitors will be evaluating what value your site has to them on aesthetic grounds, long before they have a chance to delve into the web site’s content.

4. Page Load Times: How quickly the web page loads for your visitors is critical. Increasingly Internet users are becoming impatient and are unwilling to wait for long page load times and will frequently exit the site seeking their information or other requirements elsewhere.

Page load times are also becoming an important factor with regards to Search Engine Visibility as Google has begun to prioritize web pages with short load times in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

5. High quality relevant content: Face the facts, people are visiting your web site to satisfy a need, be it purchasing a product or acquiring information. In both cases the quality and relevance of the content is the primary driver to engage visitors and to satisfy their needs. If the information is not of high quality and relevance the visitor will seek products, information and services elsewhere.

6. Clearly define benefits: Ensuring your visitors can quickly determine what your web site has to offer at a glance is critical. No offence intended, but the average Internet user has the attention span of a 2 year old. If it cannot be quickly and easily determined what benefits are gained from venturing further into the web site, Internet users are likely to venture back to the web to find a web site which makes determining benefits easy.

7. Don’t lead your visitors astray: Don’t get me wrong here the Internet is built on links. Inbound and outbound links are an important aspect of any web site’s linking environment. However, on Home Pages and Landing Pages do not include links which lead to other web sites unless you opt to open them in a new browser window. If the links open in the same window it is likely you have lost their interest and in many cases these visitors will not return to your web site.

8. Make your site easy to share: Making your web site easy to share and remember, assists to improve not only enabling visitors to return but also can effectively increase web site traffic. Providing Social Book Marking for sites such as Digg and Delicious, a highly visible RSS Feed button and enabling visitors to easily subscribe to a News Letter or Blog Update notification is an easy method to improve your web site stickiness.

9. Keep in Fresh – Blog : Constant updates are necessary. If the content is static and dated web site visitors have no incentive to return to your web site. Blogging is an ideal method to keep the content fresh and engaging for your web site visitors providing the ideal incentive to have them return on a regular basis.

10. Link to additional content: Keep your visitors engaged by offering them links to additional information and web pages relevant to the page they are currently visiting. This encourages visitors to view more web pages and ultimately spend more time on your business’s web site.

Want to use this content on your web site?

If you would like to use this article on your web site please contact pete@seowizardry.ca for an html version. All I request is you provide Pete Hollier and Seo Wizardry with a reference to this article and provide a link back to www.seowizardry.ca