2020 Best Practices to Keep Potential Customers on Your Website Longer

⏱ Reading Time: 5 minutes

Are you looking for new ways to improve user experience and maximize time spent on the page? If so, you better prepare for it thoroughly because the competition in the content creation field is fierce. With over 1.7 billion websites currently active online, it takes an excellent content strategy to convince visitors to spend more time on your pages.

🚀Read: Omnichannel Guide for Digitally Advanced Brands🚀

You can test dozens of techniques, but some of them proved much better than others. In this post, we will show you the seven best practices to keep potential customers on your website longer. Let’s take a look!

Keep Potential Customers on Your Website Longer – 7 Best Practices

1. Give Visitors What They Are Looking For

If you want people to stick around longer, you have to give them the content they are looking for. It’s a simple trick, but way too many webmasters forget to analyze their target audiences and arrange content to fit the needs of a typical website visitor. 

The point is to learn everything you can about the audience – their interests, online behavior, expectations, values, demographic traits, and so on.

For example, college essay writers know their audience mainly consists of young students who want to see highly authoritative academic posts. Your job is to do the same thing – understand the average visitor and give them the kind of content that they really want to read. 

Read What is User Generated Content?

2. Write Amazing Headlines

Do you know that 80% of users only read headlines, while a mere 20% of people go on to read full articles? It’s a major issue among content creators because it means that only eye-catching titles can convince the audience to keep reading their posts. 

This is why you need to write amazing headlines for every little piece of content on your website. Things that work well in the vast majority of cases are numbers, humor, and power words such as new, free, because, etc. 

If you can’t determine if your headings are good, we recommend you to use CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. It’s a free tool that helps you analyze and improve your headlines.

3. Write Long-Form and High-Quality Articles

The third tactic on our list is by far the most important for webmasters who want to see potential customers spending more time on their sites. Namely, modern users are not interested in reading short and vague posts. 

Instead, they demand high-quality and long-form content because it promises to go deep and explain subjects to the fullest extent. According to the report, the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words. It proves that the most popular posts contain more words than the average article. 

What can you do about it? Well, the idea is to write comprehensive analyses that will cover a topic from all angles and viewpoints. 

Picture 1. High-quality articles

4. Don’t Forget Internal Linking

Content creators understand the importance of backlinks for website authority, but they tend to forget the value of internal linking. If you are hoping to boost time spent on your pages, why wouldn’t you add internal links to redirect visitors to other posts on your site? 

Jane Fisher, a digital marketer at NSBroker, says all you need to do is to select the destination page carefully because you don’t want a user to end up reading a completely irrelevant post: “On the contrary, the goal is to add value and improve user experience by pointing out other useful articles on the same website.”

Picture 2. Internal linking concept

5. Add a List of Related Posts

This practice goes hand in hand with the previous one. Namely, you should add a list of related posts to each page to inspire potential customers to keep engaging with the website. It’s a simple but very efficient trick for businesses looking to increase engagement rates. 

If you are using WordPress to manage content, we suggest installing a plugin such as Contextual Related Posts. The tool automates the whole process, so you don’t have to do anything manually. Contextual Related Posts will analyze keywords to identify the best article suggestions, while you can personalize the feature and make it match your company branding.

6. Add a CTA Button

Calls to action (CTA) represent a mandatory component of every webpage on the Internet. After all, how can you expect users not to leave your website if you don’t give them the reason to stick around a little longer? 

CTAs come in all shapes and sizes, but the only thing that really matters is to make them stand out from the rest of the content on your page. That way, everyone will notice a CTA button. One of the most frequent words of advice in CTAs is to use the so-called “power words” to increase efficiency.

Picture 3. Use of power words in CTA

Some of the most commonly used CTA examples include:

• “Learn more”
• “Read similar posts”
• “Get started”
• “Join us”
• “Sign up for a free trial”
• “What we do”

Read the Importance of CTA in Marketing.

7. Optimize Website Performance

The last strategy on our list is technical but essential for overall positive user experience. If you don’t do it, rest assured many visitors will quickly leave your site disappointed. Here’s what you should do:

• Simplify website navigation to make it easier to find new content
• Optimize your website for mobile, since the majority of visitors browse the internet on their phones.
• Increase your site speed – people hate waiting for a site to load

These steps will make your website load faster and work better, so your audience won’t mind sticking around for a while.

Picture 4. Optimization is important

Are You Keeping Potential Customers?

Only top-performing websites can build an army of recurring visitors and continuously generate high traffic. If you are struggling to improve customer loyalty, you should employ state-of-the-art tactics to make users more interested in your content.

In this article, we showed you the seven best practices to keep potential customers on your website longer. Which one do you consider to be fundamental?

–

Donna James is a highly skilled freelance essay writer and proofreader from Michigan, United States. She currently works on various projects focused on the IT&C industry apart from her work as a technical analysis specialist. She is interested in everyday development and writes blog posts on various topics, such as marketing and technology.