How to keep visitors on your site for longer

We recently looked at visitor durations (the time your visitors stay on your site) and how making improvements in this area improves your organic (SEO) ranking. This is because search engines see that your site appears to match what visitors were looking for. Makes sense, right?

Here are 6 simple ways to keep visitors on your site for longer:

1. Make your content relevant and interesting

Your text has to match what you do with what your audience expects to read when they come to you. And it needs to be interesting enough for them to stay and read.

Look around to see some great examples of what other similar organisations are doing.

If you are driving people to your site pages through ads, emails, social media etc. then make sure the descriptions match the content to avoid leaving visitors disappointed and immediately leaving the site.

2. Appealing Headings

The main heading is the first thing your visitors will see when they land on the page. Ensure this is appealing and matches the content of the page.

Without a compelling heading, your page content is likely to go unread so give this careful thought before publishing any page.

3. Split into easily readable sections

It is unlikely people will read your content word by word so having clearly split out sections with sub-headings will make it easier for visitors to scan the content and consume what is relevant to them.

Take into consideration increasing font sizes, line spacing and introducing page breaks for easy readability.

4. Think about your calls to actions & links

Think about the journey you are trying to map out for a visitor and make sure you embed the right links and buttons at the right time. Give them a reason to stay and interact.

You’ve done all this work getting a visitor to a specially created landing page, so think about what you want them to do and what they might be thinking about: Do they just want to donate, or do they want more information? By thinking through the user experience and journey, you’ll avoid frustrated visitors who don’t want to come back.

5. Engaging Videos & Visuals

Videos can work wonders to keep visitors on your site for longer. Many visitors prefer watching videos rather than reading just text.

Adding relevant and interesting visual content on you site such as short videos will boost user engagement and your SEO ranking. Having videos high up on pages will certainly help engage visitors from the start.

6. Improve Page Load Time

This is one of the most important things you need to address if you want to keep visitors on your site for longer. If pages are simply taking too long to load, then visitors will exit and unlikely to return.

Reduce your site pages load time by compressing images, using cache plugins etc. We’ll cover more on this in later blogs.

We hope this has been useful and has left you with plenty to get on with. Keep an eye out on more useful guides and tips we’ll share to help your charity reach its potential.