With users’ attention being pulled in ten different directions, fighting for page views is no easy task. Adinah Brown, content manager at Leverate, explains how to do it.
You’ve made the huge effort of creating good content. You’ve done your research, you are in tune with what your audience wants and you’ve created a superb website full of valuable information. You promoted it organically, used PPC and other SEM strategies and yet, users find you and bounce right out without so much as a quick additional page view.
With users’ attention being pulled in ten different directions and their attention span being less than that of a goldfish (really, 9 seconds versus 8 on average), fighting for page views is no easy task.
Think of your website as you would a book. What makes you buy a book? Either because you stumbled across it at a bookshop (equivalent to organic traffic), someone recommended it to you (equivalent to an online testimonial) or because there was a poster of the book right at the entrance of the bookshop that piqued your interest (equivalent to banner ads). Once a reader picks up that book that caught their attention, they are likely to read the back of the book, maybe the prologue and perhaps even the first page to make sure the book meets their initial expectations. If any of cues disappoint them, they’ll put the book back on the shelf (equivalent to bounce back on a website).
Your website is the same as a book. When visitors click through to the first page of your site, their attention needs to be caught immediately and they should be enticed to want to read more.
First things first, a pageview is an impression of a single web page. When a user visits your website and clicks through to additional pages within that website, the number of pages he or she loads is known as pageviews. The indicator opposite to page views is known as bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. A tendency that you will be working to avoid.
While there is no one-size-fits all, tried and true method, here are our best proven tips to increase your website’s page view rate.
Entice, don’t confuse. While a lot of content is good in order to get search engines to recognize your page as a relevant website for what users are looking for, too much content can be off putting. Content that is not organized in a way that is easy to consume or that does not convey relevance within the first two seconds of a visit, will likely cause a visitor to hit the back button or close down the tab.
Speed up your site. How quickly your website displays is a key factor in helping to reduce your bounce rate. Too many graphics and pictures will slow down your loading time, so make sure you optimize the speed either by reducing the weight of the images or through your hosting provider. Another factor that determines the speed at which your site loads is the host location of your site in reference to the location of your users. The farther your users are from where your site is hosted, the longer it will take to load. Most users will close down the tab to your site if it doesn’t fully load in two seconds or less.
Bulk up your site. If you want users to click from one page to the next, you need to give them something worthwhile to click on. If you give visitors more information to click on, your page views will increase.
Use links. I don’t mean simple links by way of a list that doesn’t look engaging, but rather embed links within your content, add a “read more” button to break up a long piece or add a “you may also like” section with additional blog posts. Link from your content to additional information within your site, guiding users in a web funnel, to the next logical step. If you don’t have valuable content to share within your website, adding external links are good too, as they will bring loyalty from your users since you have essentially done them a favor by directing them to more useful information. Don’t add links thinking only of potential SEO benefit, but also what will be to your user’s benefit. Many marketers design their websites thinking of what Google would like, instead of what their audience would like; what they are missing is that Google wants, what the user wants.
Improve the user experience. In order to provide a good and positive user experience, you need to make sure you are providing useful, credible, easy to find and valuable information to your audience. Ask yourself why are people clicking? What did you promise to deliver on the next page that got them to click? Whatever it was that you promised, make sure you deliver. If you deliver good content, users will continue to read and will be more likely to continue to click through to additional pages to read more of what you can provide.
Just as it is cheaper to retain a client than it is to acquire a new one, it is much cheaper to get a visitor who is already on your page to go to another page, than it is to attract a new visitor altogether. Once someone comes through the door to your site, make sure you roll the red carpet for them and give them what they want.