Are you worried about your local business website engagement? Are you struggling to retain visitors to your website?
Getting visitors to your website is one part of the challenge of staying competitive. However, getting visitors to stick on and proactively engage with your site content, to convert them, or get them to make a buying decision is where the real challenge lies for most local businesses.
For local businesses that operate within highly competitive market spaces, often competing with established brand names, visitor retention is a major hurdle.
There are, however, a few things you can do to boost your local business website engagement and encourage visitors to respond positively to your site’s CTAs.
In this article, we will look at eight simple tips that can help you boost your site’s engagement potential.
1. Easy and Simplified Discoverability
When visitors come to your site, they want to quickly access information that is both valuable and relevant to their needs. Once they are on your site, unless they can quickly find the information they are looking for, they will not hesitate to move away to a competitor’s site.
So ensure that your local business website has a clear table of contents or an easy- to-follow menu. Ensure that each of the links and pages in the table of contents is working. The last thing you want is for a visitor to click on a link and find that the link is not working.
2. Simplified Site Layout
Continuing with the above point, another aspect of easy discoverability is simplified site navigation. You want to make sure that visitors find it easy to navigate your website and easily access the different resources you have on your site.
A simplified layout will help boost engagement as opposed to a site that is cluttered. So ensure you carefully organize the different resources on your site. Include internal links (make sure they work) so users can quickly find pages or items of specific interest quickly and easily.
3. Work on your Mission Statement
Your mission statement tells people the purpose of your local business website, your business goals, and how it can align with the expectations of your site visitors.
So spend some time when you come up with a mission statement. Keep it concise and clear.
Three things to keep in mind when creating your mission statement;
- Provide your readers with an overview of your business.
- Let people know who you are and what your business stands for.
- Showcase your brand/business value.
4. Populate your Site with Quality Content
Your website content should be of high quality and highly relevant to the needs of visitors if you want to drive site engagement.
In addition to important information about your business, your services, and products, identify common customer queries and topics of interest and create valuable content around those topics. Another great idea for quality content is to identify common customer pain points and then provide solutions for those issues. The idea is to deliver value to your site visitors. This will keep them engaged and also have them coming back to your website for more quality content.
Consistently providing high quality content that is relevant to customer queries is a great way to engage with your audience, build trust in your expertise, and establish yourself as an industry expert.
5. Use Visual Content
Visual content sells. It is actively consumed over all platforms. Most people prefer visual content over other forms of content because it offers a greater degree of engagement and is easier to consume.
When creating your content, include visual elements, such as pictures and images, as well as videos to help elevate the quality or value of that piece of content.
Use video to talk about your business, your services, and your products, or even go behind the scenes and introduce yourself and your team. There is so much that you can do with visual content and the results are always good. Not to mention, it will drive your website engagement potential.
6. Invest in Responsive Design
Your customers use a variety of devices to access your website. So you need to ensure that your local business website can be easily accessed over different device types and is optimized for use over multiple screens.
Not the mention that search engines such as Google expect websites to be mobile- optimized for improved user experience.
A responsive design will ensure that your local business websites can be viewed on any type of screen and can adjust to all screen sizes.
7. Page Load Speed
The average page load speed of a website is around 3 seconds.
Page load speed is another aspect of website engagement that you should focus on to ensure visitors engage with your site and keep coming back. Unless your site loads within seconds, users will not hesitate to drop your site in favor of another site that loads faster.
There are several online tools that you can use to check your website page load including Google PageSpeed Insights.
8. Include Compelling CTAs
The purpose of using CTAs on your website is to encourage positive brand engagement or buying action from your site visitors. CTAs can be used to direct your visitors to comment on your articles or you can use CTAs to ask them to subscribe to your email list. CTAs can also be used to ask visitors to connect with you via social media. Not to forget, CTAs can be used to guide visitors to make a buying decisions.
However, when it comes to boosting customer engagement, you want to ensure that you use your site CTAs prudently. In addition, the placement and language of your CTAs are also important factors to consider.
The key is to create CTAs that can draw the attention of visitors instantly without being too intrusive. Also, make sure that you pepper your CTA copy with unique words to make them more attractive.
In Conclusion
Your local business website engagement is one of the factors that will impact site conversion. In addition, if your website engagement potential is high, visitors will want to keep coming back for more.
In a competitive market space, you want customers to look at your brand website as the go-to source for all their needs and queries. In addition to establishing your brand reputation, robust website engagement can also help drive customer loyalty.
Use the above strategies to drive better website engagement and build a robust brand reputation for your local business.
