Getting visitors to your website is only half the battle. Keeping them there long enough to get them to take action – like subscribing to your newsletter, buying a product, or contacting you – is the next hurdle to creating an effective lead generating website.
Do You Know Your Bounce Rate?
Your bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site and leave before visiting another page.
The reality is that the majority of people who visit your website won’t stick around to learn more. As a website owner, one of your primary goals should be to decrease the number of people who leave after viewing only one or two pages.
How To Keep Visitors On Your Website
You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention and get them to stay. Here are seven tips to keep visitors on your website longer.
- Provide valuable content. People don’t want to read lots of hype or a sales pitch for your products and services. Rather, they want information that will help them solve a problem or make an informed decision. Your content should focus on their concerns and interests – what do they want to know?
- Describe benefits, not features. Regardless of whether you sell products or services, provide the emotional benefits prospects will receive if they purchase your product or service. How will it help them save time or money? Whenever possible, provide pictures to help your visitors visualize how life will be different once they purchase your solution.
- Highlight privacy and security. If you sell products online, make sure visitors know their purchase is secure. If you ask people to subscribe to your newsletter or to provide contact information, offer a privacy policy that states how you will use their information.
- Use simple navigation. Don’t make visitors think about how to find information on your site. Some like to search, so provide a search box. Others like clear navigational links that tell them where to go. Create your webpages in a way that leads readers from one page to the next.
- Provide customer testimonials. Testimonials give your product or service third-party credibility and can build trust. Make sure you comply with the FTC’s testimonial policy if you do use them.
- Update your web content. Keep your content as accurate as possible and update your website frequently. If you run a blog, consider updating or deleting old posts.
- Test. Test. Test. As with any marketing campaign, always test how visitors respond to changes to your website. If you roll out a new feature or redesign your page, compare your statistics to the “before” model. Consider using web analytics software to figure out what people do on your website and which pages perform best. Then, modify your site accordingly. Small changes can lead to big results.
Successful sites provide visitors with easy-to-find content that is focused on their wants and needs. The more you test your site, collect feedback, and modify it based on real-world data, the more likely visitors will stick around in the future.
This 40+ page guide will teach you, step by step, how to create a marketing plan to attract new clients over the next 30 days.
