Building a very attractive website is one thing, getting visitors on the website is another. As a business, your aim is to attract as much visitors as possible to your website.

When you finally get someone to visit your website, the next goal will to keep the visitor for as long as possible.

The longer your visitors stay on your site, the more engaged they’ll be, and the higher the chance for them to convert.

Read Also: How to Create Eye-Catching Content to Crush Your Competition

The goal of this article is to provide you with the tips you will need to both attract visitors to your website, and also keep them for as long as possible. Look out for the following points within the article.

• Advertise
• Create great Content that Attracts
• Utilize Social media
• Multimedia
• Match the Headline with the Main Content
• Don’t Neglect Email Marketing
• Add a call-to-action at the end of each post
• Customize your thank you pages with helpful content
• Clear Navigation and User Experience
• Reduce page loading time
• Use an exit intent popup
• Provide Value in Comment Sections
• Go After Referral Traffic
• Related Articles on Blog Posts
• Research the Competition

Advertise

This point might be the first one to come to your mind, we’re going to look at it first. Paid search, social media advertising and display advertising are all excellent ways of attracting visitors, building your brand and getting your site in front of people.

Adjust your paid strategies to suit your goals – do you just want more traffic, or are you looking to increase conversions, too? Each paid channel has its pros and cons, so think carefully about your objectives before you reach for your credit card.

If you’re hoping that more traffic to your site will also result in more sales, you’ll need to target high commercial intent keywords as part of your paid search strategies. Yes, competition for these search terms can be fierce (and expensive), but the payoffs can be worth it.

Create great Content that Attracts

Did you know that users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s content?

People rarely read your content word for word. Instead, they scan the page to pick out important words and phrases.

If your content is made of long sentences and paragraphs that are hard to scan, no one’s going to stick around to read more. Instead, they’ll leave to find content that’s easier to consume.

Here are a few actionable tips you can follow to make your content more scannable:

• Ensure readability: Make sure your font size and line spacing are large enough to read easily, without causing eye strain. Simply increasing the font size and line spacing on your site can often give a quick boost in your engagement metrics.
• Break up your content: Posts without visual breaks in the content are hard on the eyes. For maximum scannability, keep your sentences short and most of your paragraphs to three or four sentences at most.
• Craft engaging subheadings: Subheadings are powerful tools to keep readers engaged. Not only do they provide a visual break in your content, but a well-crafted subheading can pique the curiosity of a reader, keeping them from losing interest and clicking away.
• Use bulleted lists: Lists stand out from the rest of your text and help the reader to scan your content for the important points.

Utilize Social media

The existence of different social media platforms makes it necessary for you to tap into this opportunity. It is very fitting because a large number of people spend their time on this platforms.

It’s not enough to produce great content and hope that people find it – you have to be proactive, use social media channels to promote your content.

Twitter is ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Google promotion can help your site show up in personalized search results and seems especially effective in B2B niches.

If you’re a B2C product company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram. Here’s more advice on making the most of social media marketing.

Multimedia

One popular way to increase the time that visitors are spending on your site is to add multimedia to your webpages, especially your homepage. 

Videos have been shown to increase user engagement and can be a great way to showcase your products or solutions.  There are many ways to do this. 

Some modern sites are using a full-width video as the background of the homepage, while others have an embedded video player at the top of the page.  However you choose to incorporate video, it can certainly help to engage visitors from the start.

Match the Headline with the Main Content

Getting clicks on your headlines is one thing, but if you want people to stay on your website longer, your content needs to match the title. Don’t let your headlines make promises your content doesn’t keep.

A click-worthy headline written by the most gifted copywriter won’t do anything for your business if the content doesn’t live up to the hype.

Don’t Neglect Email Marketing

So many businesses are focused on attracting new customers through content marketing that they forget about more traditional methods.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool, and even a moderately successful email blast can result in a significant uptick in traffic. Just be careful not to bombard people with relentless emails about every single update in your business.

Also, don’t overlook the power of word-of-mouth marketing, especially from people who are already enjoying your products or services. A friendly email reminder about a new service or product can help you boost your traffic, too.

Add a call-to-action at the end of each post

The best time to ask your visitors to take action is just after they’ve finished reading a blog post. This is one way of how to keep visitors on your website.

Readers tend to leave your site once they’ve found the information they’re looking for. But with an appropriate call-to-action (CTA), you can give them a reason to stay on your site, or stay in touch via your email newsletter.

But the question is, are your readers noticing that call to action? The problem with a static CTA placed below the content area of your post is that most of your visitors tend to ignore it.

One of the best ways to combat this visitor ignorance is by using a slide-in opt-in. An animated slide-in grabs attention without disturbing your audience.

With an opt-in builder like OptinMonster, you can easily build a slide-in opt-in on the bottom right-hand corner as the user scrolls down your page.

Customize your thank you pages with helpful contents

Once your visitors have engaged with your call to action, they’re more likely to leave your site. This is especially true if your email subscription thank you page doesn’t provide any helpful content to encourage visitors to stay on the site.

Your thank you pages should be more than just a confirmation. They mark the exact moment when a cold visitor becomes a warm lead.

You can seize that opportunity to engage by highlighting relevant, useful content on your site.

For example, Kissmetrics displays several exclusive infographics on their thank you page:

If you’re running an e-commerce business, you can also upsell related products in your thank you page.

Not only does this practice make them more engaged, if done right, you can increase the revenue per customer as well.

Clear Navigation and User Experience

Another great way to keep visitors on your site longer is to have a clear, simple navigation as well as an intuitive user experience. 

In many cases, navigation menus on websites have too many links, drop-downs, and options, which can lead to visitors feeling lost.  Be sure to simplify your main navigation, highlighting the key website pages you want visitors to read. 

Another piece to consider here is mobile responsiveness.  Around half of website traffic comes from mobile browsers, and if your site is not responsive, you will most likely see a significant increase in bounce rate.

Reduce page loading time

One of the essential things you need to do to keep your visitor on your site longer is to reduce the time it takes your site to load.

The best content in the world won’t help your business if your visitors won’t wait for it to load.

Even a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions. If you don’t take page speed seriously, chances are you’re leaving money on the table.

There are many steps you can take on your site to reduce the page loading time, but two of the most important are:

• Image compression: Your images will have a huge impact on loading time. You can reduce the size by compressing images if they’re unnecessarily large. If you’re on WordPress, you can use a free plugin like WP Smush It.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN is a network of multiple servers distributed throughout various locations around the world to reduce the loading time. Your CDN service will cache the files of your site, and deliver the content to your site visitor through a server that is closest to them.

Use an exit intent popup

When most visitors who abandon your website never return, that means your marketing efforts are going to waste.

With an exit intent popup, you can detect when your visitor intends to leave your site and prompt them with a targeted campaign to stay engaged.

Exit intent popups are highly effective because they’re attention-grabbing without disturbing your visitors.

Aside from encouraging users to stay on your site, exit intent has proven to reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase overall conversion rate.

Below are a few things you can do with an exit intent popup to keep visitors on your site:

• Invite visitors to chat with a support agent
• Recommend popular blog posts to read
• Offer an irresistible lead magnet in exchange for joining your email list

Provide Value in Comment Sections

You probably visit at least a few sites that are relevant to your business on a regular basis, so why not join the conversation?

Commenting doesn’t necessarily provide an immediate boost to referral traffic right away, but making a name for yourself by providing insightful, thought-provoking comments on industry blogs and sites is a great way to get your name out there – which can subsequently result in driving more traffic to your own site.

Just remember that, as with guest posting, quality and relevance are key – you should be engaging with other people in your niche, not dropping spam links on unrelated websites.

Go After Referral Traffic

Rather than trying to persuade other sites to link back to you (a tedious and time-intensive process), create content that just begs to be linked to.

When Larry wrote about the kick in the proverbial teeth that eBay took from Google’s Panda update, Wordstream managed to secure a link from Ars Technica in the Editor’s Pick section alongside links to The New York Times and National Geographic. Not too shabby – and neither was the resulting spike in referral traffic.

Related Articles on Blog Posts

Blogs are a great way to engage visitors on your site with relevant content.  To maximize this benefit, it can be helpful to offer related blogs on a similar topic at the end of the article. 

Many content management systems have a module that will provide a handful of additional blogs within the same category, which you can place at the bottom of a blog post.  This will keep visitors engaged while improving your thought leadership and expertise on a particular subject.

Research the Competition

If you haven’t used software like BuzzSumo to check out what your competitors are up to, you’re at a huge disadvantage.

These services aggregate the social performance of specific sites and content to provide you with an at-a-glance view of what topics are resonating with readers and, most importantly, making the rounds on social media.

Read Also: How To Make Money Online With Mobile Marketing

Find out what people are reading (and talking about), and emulate that kind of content to bring traffic to your website.

The more engaging your website is, the longer visitors will stay.  This is the central theme of optimization for user experience and website behavior. 

Above, we’ve listed 15 steps you can take to keep visitors on your site even longer.  By doing so, you can expect an increase in visit-to-lead conversion and high quality of new contacts.

Also, remember that you might not hit the ground running immediately you create your website. Consistency will get you your desired results, just continue to put in the work.