Is your site struggling with low engagement? Online engagement is essential to having a thriving 21st-century business. However, it’s hard to build website engagement at the onset. Here are some common signs of poor engagement and a few effective ways to increase engagement on your site.
Why is Engagement Important?
Engagement is a sign that your website is flourishing and your content is being interacted with. In simple terms, engagement is the number of people who visit your site, how long they stay on your site, and whether or not they interact with your content. You’re able to measure your engagement in several ways, including how many pageviews your site receives and how much time visitors spend on those pages.
The first step to boosting your engagement is identifying signs of poor engagement.
5 Signs of Poor Engagement
1. Low Number of Pageviews
If you are finding that your site frequently has a low number of pageviews, you have poor engagement on your site. The number of pageviews is one of the easiest ways to identify engagement on your site, as it shows you how many people are truly visiting each page, no matter how long they stay there. If you aren’t getting pageviews, it’s impossible for people to be interacting with your site. Identifying which pages are struggling to get views can help you identify other problem areas that may be causing low engagement.
2. Low Amount of Time Spent on Pages
The amount of time spent on each page is extremely important—without much time spent on a page, your visitors have no chance of actually interacting with your content. Some businesses may look at their pageviews and not think they have an issue with engagement. But then they struggle with getting sales and wonder why. The source could be the amount of time visitors are spending on individual pages. If people are viewing your pages, but are spending a limited amount of time there, that’s an engagement problem that needs to be addressed.
3. Low Number of Pages Interacted With
Similarly to identifying the amount of time spent on each page, you also need to look at how many pages on your site are actually interacted with, not just viewed. If you are seeing a pattern of engagement occurring only on certain pages, then you know which pages have problem areas that need to be fixed. These problems could be with the page’s content or structure.
4. Pages with High Exit Rates
A high exit rate means that visitors are clicking off the page quickly after visiting it. These pages are good enough to be clicked on, but not good enough to actually hold the attention of visitors. Pages with high exit rates tend to be struggling with content, structure, or navigability.
5. Poor Social Media Engagement
Your social media engagement is almost as important as the interactions on your website itself. Engagement with your social media pages is a pretty good indicator of the popularity of your content and your website. For example, maybe you share blog posts on your business page on Facebook. But if people aren’t sharing that post or liking and commenting on your post, it means not many people are going to be seeing the content in their feed.
5 Ways to Increase Engagement on Your Site
1. Better, Engaging Content
Having content that’s higher quality, more interesting, and more engaging can keep your visitors on your site longer. It can also encourage them to interact with more pages rather than quickly clicking off.
Fixing the content on your site to improve engagement can be done in a few different ways. First, you can simply add more text to each page. This encourages visitors to spend more time on the page, as they have to spend more time looking through the content. However, too much text will bore your visitors. That’s why it’s important to break up your text with headings and media such as pictures or videos. Including popular, trendy content in your blog posts can also help increase engagement.
2. Make Your Content Flow
Increasing engagement means having content that flows together. Content should link together, make sense within your site’s layout, and be simple to navigate. If your content doesn’t link together, it can cause confusion and lead to a higher exit rate. In addition, if your content doesn’t make sense within the layout or it isn’t easy to navigate, users tend to leave the page. Try changing your content layout so visitors don’t have to spend much time figuring out how to navigate your site.
3. Up Your Social Media Engagement
Increasing your social media engagement may help you gain more website visitors. By posting more, replying to comments, and sharing good info on your social media accounts, you’ll be able to increase engagement with your followers. Not only will this help you build relationships with customers online but it will also send more people to your site.
4. Increase Load Speeds
Users are more likely to stay on a page if the load speed is short and are more likely to leave the page if it’s slow. Look into programs online that can help your website load more quickly to hold the attention of impatient visitors. Google Analytics offers a simple solution for the user, letting them choose the site speed and change it as they need to.
5. Make Your Site More Mobile-Friendly
More and more users are choosing to interact with websites through their mobile devices. Since people are rarely without their smartphones, it’s easier for users to access web pages on their phones. Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly. This may mean having a mobile version of your site, or simply changing the layout so that it is easily viewable on both mobile and the web.
Fix Your Low Engagement Today!
Good engagement generally means that your content is being interacted with and you have a higher chance of gaining business or interactions. As your engagement goes up, so does the popularity of your site. Use these five methods to identify your problem areas and improve your engagement!
