It's fairly common to hear that a client wishes to increase 'user engagement' on their website, but what exactly does this mean? Firstly, let's look at how TechTarget defines the term;
User engagement is an assessment of an individual's response to some type of offering, such as a product, a service or a website. A website user, for example, might click links, comment, download documents and watch videos, among other possibilities.
TechTarget
In other words; on the web, user engagement is the amount of interaction that a visitor has with your website and the content within. More interaction suggests that a user is finding and enjoying the content they came to your website for, which can in turn mean more 'conversions' for your service or product. For membership organisations, charites and non-profits this equals more members, more donations or more shop users.
Here are four key tips that can help you to improve user engagement on your site.
Keep your site easy to navigate
- Making your site easy to navigate is key to encouraging visitors to stay. If a user can’t find what they're looking for they'll quickly leave to find an alternative elsewhere.
- Keeping content consistent is also very important, and a good digital agency provide you with a content guideline document once your site is launched to help you when creating a new pages on the site.
- Take the time to link to related pages when you can. This will help your members find more information about the subject they're interested in and encourage them to stay on your site. Our CMS River, for example, allows you to simply add links or edit content whenever you need to usher visitors to other areas of the site.
Choose the navigation that's right for your members.
- We recommend a main navigation for your header, a list navigation to appear in a sidebar of each page and a power navigation in your footer. The main and list navigations show users an overall sitemap, whilst the power navigation can be customised to include any links you want.
- Clear, succinct naming of navigation is crucial for users to understand the structure of your site.
Create a content schedule (and stick to it)
- Sticking to a regular content schedule means that your users know when to expect new content on the site. This will encourage users to check back regularly to keep up to date.
- An easy way to generate new content regularly is with a news module. Ours can be used to publish articles in a number of formats. This means that you can have a number of different styles of fresh content such as news updates, events updates or just typical blog posts.
Offer ways for visitors to interact with each other through your content
- Making it easy for users to communicate with one another over your content is a great way to improve overall user engagement. Create talking points across the site, such as unique news articles or interesting page compositions and use a comments module so your visitors can have their say.
- Encourage users to share your content on social media. Social sharing will not only engage your current users, but could also catch the interest of new users too.
Provide content that is visually stimulating
- Visual stimulation can help keep an audience interested in a topic. Including related images, creating blockquotes and utilising sub headings can help to break up long pieces of text and keep a user focussed.
- Find a CMS that offers you the ability to add multimedia elements to your pages. Make sure your pages are designed to best utilise space and include large banner areas that contain high quality imagery or even video.
In summary, there are a number of very easy things that you can do to keep your site engaging. The suggestions listed above can all be implemented and maintained easily, but can offer large benefits for your site and its users in return. Take a look at our portfolio to see some of the engaging sites we've created, hopefully they will give you some ideas for your own, and if you'd like to chat about anything we've mentioned, just get in touch.
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