How to increase the amount of people who visit and spend time on your website
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Working Backwards for Better Website Performance
If you want to improve your website's appeal to your target audience, you first need to determine where it is failing. The way forward is to work back from the desired visitor actions on your website.
You need to analyse how people are getting to that point on your website, e.g. if you want visitors to complete a contact details form, you need to find out the difference between the number of visitors who viewed the form and the percentage who actually completed it.
If this percentage is low then this illustrates that either the form is not friendly; or people may not be comfortable in how their personal information will be used; or people do not have enough incentive to actually complete their details. Simplifying language, adding interactivity and throwing in a freebie for submitting a completed form will not only increase the percentage of people completing the form, it may even spark off a viral marketing as people respond to the 'email to your friends' link below which qualifies them to a grand sweepstakes bonanza.
People like easy to read content and easy to navigate layouts and finally like to be rewarded for the time they spend interacting with your website elements. However, as different web pages have different 'call to action' content requirements its important to establish visitor needs and desired action plans for each page separately via a shopping section, product comparison and payment modes page. It also pays to add innovation to the dull chore of filling up details on the payment page. You could add an animated mascot whose expression changes from joy to sheer delight as visitor fills up the form. Some web sites even offer further discounts or freebies, the moment visitors try to leave the shopping site before completing the purchase form.
Boosting Site Popularity and Interactivity
The more people know about your website, the more visitors you will have. While sustained SEO efforts do build your site's popularity and search engine rankings over time, it's important to supplement them with the following efforts for higher visitation and increasing the time they spend on individual web pages:
1. Tap other people/organizations to display your website links: Explore business synergies with businesses with similar interests. Having established brand names display your web links is important. However this can be difficult so first you could offer to exchange links with targeted organisations and if that does not work, you can even post messages with your weblinks (as part of your signing off signature) on their message boards in relevant discussion threads. Submitting your website at popular web directories is another way to increase your web-visibility and popularity in the long run.
2. Have a web friendly content style: writing copy for websites requires different style as web-visitors tend to scan more than engaging in serious reading. Instead of long wordy paragraphs, it pays to have crisp content with indicative sub headings. Key points can be highlighted/repeated in stand alone 'content-islands', so that even if visitors read these main points, they can grasp the key issues or even be persuaded to read more in further web pages.
3. Understand your business and its website's strengths & weaknesses: A thorough business analysis of your existing business situation and what competition is doing helps you to arrive at logical web-popularity plans. It pays to use neutral data and tools like Google analytics to know about any website flaws impacting your site's visitation statistics. You need to look at the following reports:
- The least and most popular web-pages
- -Which search terms lead to your website
-Average time visitors spend on your site
- Total number of people visiting your site
Use this information to enhance your site-experience according to what the numbers of your web-statistics tell you.
4. Regularly update your site: Your business is constantly changing and evolving so share these updates with your customers by regular adding content to your site. People soon get bored with unchanged content and web layouts. It pays to add 'life' to your site by frequently adding new content and changing the overall look and feel (within the researched target audience sensibilities). You could even inform visitors about your new look through e-mails to prospects and posts on relevant blogs.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 08 January 2008 )
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