Are you worried about converting visitors to customers?
Do you desire visitors stay longer on your website and interact more with your content?
If your answer is yes, then read on to know what to do.
It is the desire of every online business owner to keep people longer on their website.
One good and cheap way to do that is using Content Marketing. However, that is easier said than done.
According to the National Center of Biotechnology Information at the U.S National Library of Medicine, an average attention span of a human being dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. It is now 8.25 according to Statistic brain.
You know what?
That is one second less than the attention span of a goldfish, which is, 9 seconds.
What is the reason for this?
There are lots of contents circulating on the internet, so people are distracted.
According to the Content marketing Echo chamber, “Attention span is the amount of concentrated time on a task without becoming distracted. Most educators and psychologists agree that the ability to focus attention on a task is crucial for the achievement of one’s goals. It’s no surprise attention spans have been decreasing over the past decade with the increase in external stimulation.”
So, what do you do to keep your website visitors attention on your website?
Before I go into that I will like to state here that keeping visitors’ attention is very crucial to your conversion rate. The more visitors stay on your website, the more you can convert them into buying customers with your content.
How do you know whether visitors are staying on your website or not?
This is where your analytics come into play. The answer is to measure your bounce rate.
What is a bounce rate?
Google Analytics defined bounce rate as “The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”
When a visitor gets to your web page and leaves without checking out other pages on your website, it is called a bounce. Now, your bounce rate is the percentage of all visitors who enters and exit on the same page, without clicking other pages on your website.
To check your bounce rate, log into your Google analytics. Click on Report > Behaviour > Site content > Landing pages. You will see all your content links displayed with the bounce rate as shown below.
As you can see in the image above, the bounce rate of the website is high, except for the content in number 6 which is 33.33%.
This brings us to this question, how do you know your bounce rate is high or low?.
Neil patel gave an insight into the standard bounce rate for every industry (shown in the image below):
Check your industry and the standard bounce rate.
Therefore, if people are leaving your websites without clicking on other pages, your bounce rate will be high. So how do you reduce your bounce rate to increase conversion?
Let’s take a look at the ten ways you can use Content marketing to keep people longer on your website, reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion.
1. Know your audience personas
It is difficult to create content that will keep visitors longer on your web page and converting them, without knowing what they like to read. Spending hours writing what visitors will not read is a waste of time. You need to know what content will attract, engage and convert them into customers. You need to know who your target customers are and their interest.
This is where you need to design a buyer persona. It is a profile of your buyer, specifying who they are, their demographic, interest, pain points etc.
For example, Goodbye Crutches is a business that sells crutch alternatives such as the Knee scooter, the Knee walker and more. Their products help people to stay active and productive while they heal. The company has four buyer personas.
- Jude the Athlete is 21-35 years old who hurt himself while playing soccer
- Jones the Grandpa is 55-75 years old and is always worried about hurting himself
- Sally the motivated mom is 35-55 and is fully active, but worries about taking care of her family
- Sammy the working dad is worried about carrying out household chores without having an injury.
These are their target customers. Look at their website and see how they factor this into their blog posts.
This blog post is directed towards Jude the athlete who hurt himself while playing soccer. If you look at the CTA, it is about an offer for items that Jude will need for a better recovery. They have a good mix of content that solves the problem of their different buyer personas and a great lead generation content to back it up.
This is what you should be doing for your business. It will keep visitors longer on your page and also increase your conversion.
Check out this resource for a sample buyer persona
2. Create an attention grabbing headlines
Now that you know what content will suit your readers, it is easy to create a post topic that will attract them to read. According to Copyblogger, you will get 8 out of 10 people to read your headline, but only two will continue to read. The headline is the ingredient that drives people to read your content.
There are lots of content out there and the only way you can distinguish yourself to stand out is a strong attention grabbing headline.
Readers have developed the habit of scanning content. This is why you need to also add subheadings to organize and break up your content.
According to a post written by bufferapp, readers absorb the first and last three words of a headline. This is why you need to include power words in your headlines.
You can get a list of power words from this post from boost traffic.
To write an attention grabbing headline:
- Include numbers, such as “21 things you need to do to beat your competition“
- Add the right product or service keywords in your heading. For example, if you are selling wedding gifts, conduct a proper search on google keyword tool and use it to write your heading. An example is “Top 10 wedding gift for your friend“.
- Limit your headline to 60 characters
- Use power words such as Staggering, Breathtaking, Amazing, Surprising, Wondrous etc.
Check out these resources for writing great headlines
The step by step guide for a perfect headline –
How to write magnetic headlines
3. Create a long-form content
Initially, I don’t really like writing long form content. It is tasking. It takes a lot of time and research if you want to create a quality content. It is also costly to produce a quality long form content. But, the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. When I discovered that it is good for ranking high in search engines and that it gives readers enormous information, and helps them to stay longer on the page, I changed my mind. I started creating long-form content of at least 1,000 words.
In a research carried out by OkDork and Buzzumo, it is discovered that the longer your content, the more traffic and shares it brings.
If you write lengthy content that is useful to your readers, it will bring in links and shares for you. It will also keep your readers on your website longer than you can imagine.
4. Create a hooking Introduction
Hmmm! This is what Neil Patel does very well. I am still learning from him. Check out one of his introduction below:
He uses the method Brian dean of Backlinko calls Bucket brigade
It is a way of starting your introduction with short, punchy sentences that will captivate your readers into reading more.
The main purpose of an introduction is to compel your readers to read the rest of the content.
A good introduction should not be more than 1-2 seconds per line.
5. Use engaging images, lists and qoutes
It is boring to read long form content without images, list and quotes in-between.
However, you will need to balance it up. Don’t use too many images in between your text. According to buffer app you can use at least one picture for every 350 words.
But this depends on the topic you are writing on. You can also include list. I do it a lot to make it easy for readers to skim through the post.
Quotes are also good for establishing your point.
6. Add internal links to your content
This is a great strategy that will improve your search engine ranking and also keep visitors longer on your wesite. A great example of this is from Wikipedia. They use lots of links on their web pages. Check out an example below:
But, the thing is Wikipedia uses lots of internal linking, but you can’t do that. You are only allowed to use 2-5 links in your post. It is advisable you link to older content on your blog.
You can easily do it from your WordPress blog (if that is what you use). Highlight the word you want to link and click on “add link”, type the URL of the content you want to link it to and click done. That is it!
As visitors read the content, they can click on the link to read related posts. This will keep them longer on your webpage.
7. Use related blog post plugin (YAPP)
Related posts is a WordPress plugin you can use to display posts that are related to your current content. It reduces bounce rate as visitors will have the option to read articles related to the one they are currently perusing. It increases website traffic and improves on page SEO.
A very good example of this plugin is the YAPP.
Head over to google, search for the plugin and install it on your WordPress.
It adds a widget at the bottom of your blog to suggest other posts readers may be interested in. Check it right under this post.
8. Keep your blog fresh with the right content
Creating content on a constant basis will bring back your readers from time to time and keep them longer on your website. Leaving your website stale is not good for your search engine ranking.
Can you imagine a situation where you go to Yahoo news seven days in a row and find no new articles on their pages.
I am sure you will be bored and wouldn’t bother to check back the site again.
The same thing goes for all business websites. If visitors are not seeing new and improved content on your website, they may not check back again.
The same thing for the search engines. If you are not writing new post, you will find it difficult to entice the spiders to crawl your website and rank your pages.
If you find it difficult to update your website, look for content writers , who can do it for you easily on a consistent basis.
9. Create high-quality content
If you want to get a good result in content marketing, you need to create superb and high content.
It needs to be better than what is obtainable in your industry. That is the only way you can beat your competition and steal their customers.
It is also a key to keep your visitors reading and coming back for more.
To create a better content you need to:
- Make it more detail
- Thoroughly formatted
- Better than what your competitors are offering.
10. Add a compelling call to action
Most online marketers fail to persuade their readers to take action after attracting their attention through the headline, and reading the content.
Call to action is very important to encourage your readers to take action. The following are calls to action you can include after your post:
- Ask readers to leave a comment
- Ask them to share the post
- Ask them to take any action you want.
For example, if I want to write a call to action in this post, I can say ” What do you think? Let me know your thoughts on other ways to keep visitors longer on your website.
It is simple and yet very effective.
In conclusion, I have given you ten ways you can keep your visitors longer on your website to reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion. They are simple things you can start implementing right now.
What are the methods you use in keeping customers on your website? Let’s discuss it.