For anyone looking to increase their community members and overall brand awareness, website engagement is a key strategic component that should be prioritized at all times.
Before this can happen, however, you should be able to define what website engagement actually is. This term goes beyond simply bringing over traffic and getting clicks through your advertising and optimization efforts.
Your brand’s website will have many different pages of content to read through, categories to browse, and call-to-action prompts, such as a way to subscribe or sign up for membership. Ideally, you want your audience to engage with your brand more thoroughly through all of these, which is what website engagement is really about.
You can visit this website to learn more about website engagement as its own topic and concept, but we’ll be providing expert guidance on how you can go about increasing website engagement on your own platform.
Contents
How do we define website engagement?
Website engagement refers to your audience’s level of involvement across the various interactions they’ll have with your platform. Users that are more engaged with your website will spend more time reading your pages, and they tend to browse through other categories to find more content. Eventually, they may even decide to buy into your premium services by signing up for a membership or subscription.
A higher level of website engagement has many beneficial connections to other positive factors, like brand loyalty and promoting your brand through word-of-mouth to their acquaintances, which leads to even more traffic and potential conversions.
Ways in which website engagement takes place
Reading and consuming content
Users that find your content engaging, interesting, and worth the time will actually read through it and spend more time engaging with it instead of glancing through and moving on. By taking in your content and considering the other offerings you have, they’re actively engaging with your website, which is exactly what you want.
This makes having interesting, accurate, and relevant content one of the fundamental aspects of creating an engaging platform for your audience members.
In the digital age, we now have a variety of additional tools and functions to supplement written content and coverage. Images offer a window into the happenings of an event or a sports game, and videos provide live coverage which makes them especially engaging for audience members that prefer watching to reading content.
High quality and resolution are a must on both of these types of media, as it’s simply easier on the eyes and more engaging as a whole.
Making comments and participating in discussions
Possibly the most important feature for modern digital media brands, the ability to leave comments and discuss your content with others on the platform is a staple of website engagement. This is a more active form of participation and can arguably be considered the most engaging way in which your community can interact with your brand.
Whether it’s responding to the assertions made within a new article, or discussing the final scores in a sports match, comments are a great way for your audience to engage with not just your content, but also each other. This is essentially the backbone of forming a community around your brand and is essential to driving website engagement.
Tips on Increasing your Website Engagement
Now that we’ve established what website engagement is and why its so important, we can go over some strategies you can use to increase engagement on your platform and drive conversions.
Improve your website design and layout
If your website is difficult to navigate or is cluttered with too many options and icons, it can be overwhelming, especially for first-time visitors to your platform. You don’t want to scare away potential conversions and subscribers because of this, so it’s important to review the design choices and layout for your website, to ensure that it’s easy on the eyes and can be navigated in a simple and logical manner.
White space is important to help your audience naturally separate and take in visual cues and information, so make sure you have enough of it on your pages. Also make sure to pay attention to fonts and text size to make sure your content is clearly legible and easy to read.
This will make sure that your content can be read and absorbed without much issue and won’t serve as a barrier to website engagement.
If you cover multiple topics or categories of content, it’s important to make sure that your website navigation is designed to take users where they want to be as efficiently as possible. Complicated navigation with too many miscellaneous pages to go through has a huge negative impact on website engagement and may cause your visitors to leave.
It shouldn’t take more than two to three clicks for your users to find the content they want to access. Also, it’s important to make sure that any links that lead to other pages are descriptive, intuitive and work properly, leading to the correct places.
Make sure your pages load quickly
Having to wait for pages to load can be extremely annoying, and are a big contributing factor to increased bounce rates and lowered website engagement. Your load times should be as close to instant as possible, as an increase of even a second in load times can drastically affect your conversions.
Usually, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to assess each of your web pages for load time, and also identify ways in which they can be improved, such as removing miscellaneous web code or decreasing the number of loaded images at any given time.
Conclusion
We’ve established that website engagement is an important metric for any digital media brand looking to increase their audience membership and conversions. With a direct link between website and content quality and engagement rates, it’s clear that taking the time and effort to adjust your platform and its functionalities towards what your audiences are looking for is a great way to successfully grow your community. Use our suggestions to improve your website and get a jump start on increased website engagement!
