Enhance Your Visitor Experience
You’ve worked hard to get every single visitor to your website: email marketing, promotions, print marketing, social media, search engine optimization, digital ads, events, webinars, networking, etc. Yes, all the ways you drive traffic to your website adds up to getting new customers.
Once they land on your website, now your job is keeping them there: to explore, to learn more, to engage. The longer your visitors stick around on your website, the more likely they are to get to know you, like you, trust you to do business with you.
That’s what I call “Stickiness” – the strategy behind keeping a visitor ON your website as long as possible to answer their questions, to find your resources, to learn what makes your services unique, to review your packages, to discover how you work with your customers, and ultimately to book an appointment with you.
Stickiness is the number one goal behind every web page design. The metrics to measure “Stickiness” are:
- How long your visitors stay on your web pages, and
- How many of those visitors interact, engage and convert.
How you measure these two key metrics are distinctly different, but the end result is discovering insights to
- how you’ve attracted people to your website,
- whether the message and design connects with your online visitors, and
- where on your web pages your visitors have taken action to engage and explore.
These are the insights that can guide your brand strategy to create a “stickier” website, one that performs better and attracts the right customers, as well as to create a better digital visitor experience.
Create a 5 Star Visitor Experience
How do you create a digital five star visitor experience? Same as in person: go out of your way to anticipate their needs, give them more than they expect and over deliver upon your promise. By anticipating what your visitors are looking for, and by over delivering on your promise to serve, you can create an enhanced customer experience while also improving your website optimization and ranking.
How Does Visitor Experience Affect SEO?
Google understands that if you have a quick-loading website, a site that delivers exceptional content and information, and a site that is straightforward and inviting, then that means that you have happy visitors!
The longer your online visitors stay on your site, the better that shows to Google that your site provides relevant information to your visitors’ questions.
Google now uses visitor experience to help rank in search engine optimization. That means that Google is measuring your site page speed, as well as how long your visitors stay on your web pages to influence how your pages rank in the search results.
3 Strategies to Stickiness
So what are the 3 top strategies that make a website sticky?
- A responsive website that loads quickly
- Design that delights and is easy to navigate
- Communicate a message that is inviting and informative to your ideal audience
1) Optimize your website so that it loads quickly
This is the first thing your visitors experience when they engage with your website. How long the page takes to load is critical to ensuring that your visitors stick around to get to learn more about you and your business. I know you’ve done this…. Navigate to a website, see that the page is spinning and not loading right – so you are off finding another solution, answer, option. Don’t let that be your site!
It’s important to focus on optimizing your page load time to make getting to your website the best visitor experience it can be. This means taking the time to make sure your pages load quickly. There are a few tools to help you measure the time it takes to load your web pages. Some of these tools tell you detailed information on what elements are taking the longest times to load, and provide recommendations to fix the biggest issues.
Why is this so important? There is nothing more frustrating than landing on a web page that never loads. You only have a split second to keep your potential visitors’ attention. Otherwise, they’re quickly off to find another solution. To encourage engagement, your site has to load quickly so your visitors can begin their journey.
Two Resources
Here are two resources we use to measure page load time, as well as gain helpful insights to potential improvements.
2) Deliver a modern and simple design that captures delight
Your website design plays many roles in your business. It is your number one marketing tool and brings your brand to life to your online visitors. At the same time, it is meant to draw your visitors in, and invite them to look around.
Your website is the digital storefront of your business. When you’re designing your website, make sure the design meets the expectations of your ideal customers. A site designed for automotive car services will look very different from one that sells coaching services for women business owners.
Expect more from your design. Today’s design elements can delight your visitors as they scroll through the information on your site. With modern features like parallax background images that visually catch your eye as you scroll down the page; Images that move into place, colors or photos that change as you hover. Design elements can foster delight by giving your visitor an opportunity to play and explore – and get them to stick around longer on your site.
Do you have opt-ins or lead magnets that your audience could find useful? Give your visitors something to do on your site to get them engaged as they learn more about you and your business. Use your understanding of your customers to design freebies and giveaways that provide value and information along their journey.
Your website design should reflect the “feeling” of your brand. Create a design that is modern, in alignment with your visual brand, and is simple and easy to use.
- Large photos set the stage and the ambience of your website.
- Simple headlines that are clear and easy to understand let your visitors know that they are on the right page.
- Navigation should be easy to understand and guide your visitors to find the right information.
- The photos on your site should be on-brand and make sense for the content.
These are a few simple things that will keep your customers from bouncing off, ultimately improving the “stickiness” of your website.
Design Examples
Parallax Scrolling and Flip Boxes
Video, Flip Boxes and hover images
Sliding Images, Sliding Testimonials, Sliding Icons
3) Communicate a message that is inviting and informative
The first few initial seconds a visitor is on your site is the most critical time to capture their attention. Your message and headlines, your visuals and colors should draw them in. Knowing your audience and what brings them searching for a solution will give you the insights to what they are looking for. Using those words–those key phrases that the visitor uses to find you will be the easiest way to keep them on your site reading and learning more about your solutions.
FAQs
Beefing up the FAQs of your website is one simple easy way that can make quite an impact on your content, user experience, and search engine optimization. FAQs are the questions and answers that your customers are always asking you. These are the most common questions that your customers ask. Make these questions a part of your content.
How many FAQs should you have? I recommend one general FAQ page, where you include all the general questions and answers. I also recommend an FAQ section on each of your service pages. As service-based businesses, FAQs are one way to truly showcase your understanding of your customers, as well as your expertise, by identifying the questions you know are important to your customers, as well as the expertise to answer them so that your visitors can make informed decisions.
Testimonials
Testimonials are so important to providing information on how your services deliver results. By placing testimonials from your customers on your website, using their focused and strategic words to shout praises about your services, highly influences your online visitors to build trust in your expertise and your offerings.
A good testimonial should: speak to the results and reflect upon where they were before working with you, and then show where they are now after working with you. A great testimonial also speaks to the transformation experienced by those results they experienced. Testimonials should be transparent, by providing the name, title, company or any other personal information that can show the relevance and trust for the testimonial.
Link to book an appointment
If you are a service provider and serve your customers through appointments, you should include a link to your online scheduler on each of your service pages. That makes it easy to have a simple sales page for each service – with testimonials, FAQs, and any other relevant information needed prior to setting an appointment
Here is a good example of how to setup a service page that answers questions, provides all the facts and information someone would need, as well as to book an appointment:
Highlight your process
One way to set your business apart from your competitors, is to speak to your process and how you work with your customers. It helps your customers feel confident in your expertise, as well as sets the tone for what to expect.
Here are a few examples how to detail your process and set expectations:
Conclusion
Design a site that is easy to use and you’ll keep your visitors on your site longer!
By making “Stickiness” one of your website objectives, you can analyze the way your visitors experience your site, and make the necessary improvements to increase the effectiveness of your website.
Your website pages have many objectives. Everything on your page should be intentional and with purpose. By keeping visitor experience top of mind, you not only have the right purpose and focus, but the right mindset to create the perfect page content and design that will promote your business and be the best marketing and sales tool your website can be!