It’s important for companies to have visually appealing and easy to navigate websites. Having a chaotic
and messy website will turn away visitors and potential customers, and in turn, your company may lose revenue. Building a custom website can be expensive, but it’s a worthwhile investment to create a unique experience for site visitors that’s built to meet the needs of your company and your clients.
Having an aesthetically pleasing website isn’t enough, though. If your website doesn’t encourage visitor engagement, then you still won’t see results. Website Magazine agrees with this train of thought, too. You can have all of the most important information written on your site, but if it doesn’t engage your visitors, then the quality of the information almost doesn’t matter.
This begs the question– how do I create engaging content?
There are a variety of ways you can engage viewers on your website. Here are a few:
• Use video. Maybe you can create a “How To” video, demonstrating how your product or service works. Maybe you can create a brief, humorous ad that will make your visitors laugh. Whatever it may be, a good, quality video, will encourage visitors to engage with your product or service, as well as your website.
• Call-to-action buttons. Many companies will include a “contact us today,” statement in the body of their text. This gets lost in the rest of the text, and so visitors are less likely to actually contact your company. Consider creating a contact us today or any other kind of call-to-action link on your website. A colorful, set apart, button will encourage your visitors to click it, and it will stand out due to being a separate color.
• Social media links. Having icons on your website that link to your company’s social media pages and blog encourage your visitors to continue interacting with your brand on Facebook or Twitter.
• Pictures with roll over captions. Having pictures on your website is excellent, but with rollover captions, your visitors will engage with the pictures, causing them to spend more time with your website.
• Less is more. If your company’s website is busy (too much text, too many buttons, too many colors, etc.), this could distract and overwhelm your visitors, and therefore turn them away. Make sure to have the necessary information on your website, but keep it simple. Only use a few colors, only bold key words, and keep paragraphs and text short.
These tips are great and are proven to increase visitor engagement on your websites. Having an engaging website will also keep your visitors coming back to your site. You might be asking yourself, how do I know if my website engages people?
Here are a few tips for how to check the success of your website in terms of engagement:
• Check Google Analytics. These statistics are great in tracking your websites traffic. If traffic is high, then you likely have a website that engages people.
• A heat map. In the Website Magazine article, they say a heat map is a good way to determine where visitors are clicking and which information seems most valuable to them. That way you can structure your website and engagement technique around this knowledge.
• Surveys. You can also survey your visitors. Ask them what they liked or disliked about your website, what was helpful and what wasn’t. People love to leave feedback, and surveys are also good for engaging the audience!
At JB Systems, we can help you in designing a more engaging, custom website. Contact us today to get started!
