By Wade Danforth

Who is visiting your website? Do you know? Or perhaps the more important question is who is visiting your website but leaving without taking any action. Visitors may have many reasons for a quick visit to your site. But whatever the reason may be, the reality is that a quickly fleeing visitor represents a wasted interaction with a potential customer. You may be wondering if there are things that can be done to keep visitors from leaving your website prematurely. I believe that there are, and I discuss five keys to increasing website engagement below.

Fast Load Speed

When it comes to online behavior, patience is no longer a virtue. A recent study from DoubleClick (a Google subsidiary) found that 53% of website visitors will choose to leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. An eager prospective customer who lands on your website with the intention of learning more about your business or even purchasing your product or service will not tolerate a website that does not load in a reasonable amount of time. And there are things you can do to make sure your site loads quickly. We design our websites with clean and uncomplicated code which speeds up load time. We also are in the process of moving all our hosted websites onto virtual private servers (VPS), which means that each website will have its own bandwidth without having to compete with any other sites.

Intuitive Navigation

The internet has been dubbed the information superhighway, and you can think of your website as a destination located alongside this proverbial freeway. But unclear navigation can make your visitors feel like they have stumbled onto some confusing meandering neighborhood from which escape seems unlikely. Similarly, broken links will lead prospects to the conclusion that they have taken a wrong turn and find themselves at a dead end. As we build websites, we carefully think through how we can make the navigation simple, clear, and intuitive. We know that good navigation will serve as a map, leading visitors to the information they seek and keeping them from instead heading down the road to a competitor.

Common Sense Organization

An intuitive navigation structure is just one example of effective organization. But that’s only the beginning. Each page of your website must also be organized in a simple and straightforward manner. This will help visitors to find what they are looking for and also what you want them to find. The last thing you want is for your content to be organized in a haphazard way that requires potential customers to work to understand what you have to offer. At Inspire Marketing, we value solid organization of content. We utilize headlines, bullets, and tables whenever appropriate to make it easy on the reader.

Helpful Content

“What does that mean?” “Why do I care about that?” Have you ever found yourself saying these things in response to the content on a website? These are definitely not questions that you want your website to elicit. That’s why you want to choose your website content carefully. All content should be clear and customer-oriented. Think about what your customers would want to know and what would appeal to them. We work to craft content that is centered around the benefits that typical customers are interested in. Then we present those ideas as clearly as we can. We don’t want visitors to have to connect the dots or wonder what is meant.

Encouraged Contact

Finally, if you’ve done things right, visitors will stick around to get the information they need to move closer to becoming a customer or making a purchase. You do not want to lose them here by making it difficult to contact you. You want to encourage visitors to make contact right away and with ease. In order to facilitate contact, we typically add one or more forms to our websites which are placed strategically and which operate flawlessly. Lead-generating forms that are well-placed and functioning correctly will help you convert your visitors into customers. We can also help you use case studies, e-books, infographics, and other informational downloads to capture prospect information.

Have you thought about these strategies for keeping visitors from leaving your website? Well, we have. We help businesses in the Indianapolis area to attract, keep, and convert visitors. If you’re ready to get more leads from your website, give me a call at 317.220.6005 ext. 707 and find out what Inspire Marketing can do for you.