Do you struggle to engage your visitors on your website? Do you have more visits on your homepage than any other page of your website?
It’s okay. I’ve been there. I’m hoping this article will help you engage your visitors today!
It’s taken me years in an uphill battle to get to where I am today. And I still struggle at times. It takes work, this isn’t a quick and easy process. For me, the reward of watching visitor numbers climb and newsletter subscriptions increase is worth the effort.
If you find yourself in a slump when it comes to website traffic, I have actions that you can take today to engage your visitors.
Make your website FAST!
I can’t count the number of websites that I move on from that take too long to load. Your visitors will do the same.
Studies show that if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ve lost your visitor.
That’s a lost sale.
A lost conversion.
If you have a slow website, you have two choices that will engage your visitors.
- Make it fast using my free guide (coming soon!)
- Make it fast with my white-glove service.
Freshen up the look of your website
The internet changes every year. Styles are updated to reflect the new way to engage your visitors. If you haven’t updated your website design in the past three years, you are due for an update.
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) type websites make this easy to do, simply change your theme and update the content to match the new theme.
WordPress users are able to take advantage of resources for different themes and it takes a little more effort to move content over. (I can help with that!)
I recommend checking out the following theme resources for WordPress users:
- Themeforest.com – thousands of different WordPress themes for different business niches.
- Divi by Elegant Themes – I personally use Divi for all my websites and it works great for both drag and drop and backend power.
- Hello Elementor Pro – This theme comes with pre-built layouts that can be modified to suit your need.
Draw your visitors beyond the homepage
Picture yourself a prospective client of your product or service and you land on your homepage. Without scrolling, what do you see?
Does what you see speak to your need or desire as a prospective customer?
Are you compelled to dig in further? Do you want to scroll or go to subpages?
You must engage your visitors as soon as they land on your homepage. Your visitors should be intrigued and want to scroll down and explore other areas of your website.
What kind of content should I have?
To answer that question you must know your ideal customer and what they want.
You kind of need to be a mind reader. But it’s not as hard as you think. You need to research your industry a little.
- What are people saying about your product or service?
- What are their biggest frustrations?
- How does your product or service resolve frustration?
You need to capture your visitors with your first sentence and image.
Make your content pop!
“Professional painters in Seattle, WA are here to deliver professional results to families in need as the best professional painters in Seattle, WA.”
What’s wrong with the above paragraph?
It’s written for search engines to find professional painters in Seattle, WA. Yes, this is an over-exaggeration, but it lands my point. It does not engage your visitors.
Your website text should flow like a conversation with a prospective customer.
The easiest thing to do is imagine your website visitor is sitting right in front of you,
- What would you tell them about your service or product?
- Why should this visitor choose you over your competitors?
- Why does your visitor NEED your product or service?
I once had someone write for my blog years ago, little did I know, they were using a blog spinning tool. They would find a blog article on the internet and put it through this tool that will rewrite it automatically and include any keyword I wanted.
Not only did I lose trust with my visitors, but I also risked getting caught by the search engine bots for duplicate content. This can bankrupt your business.
As I have learned over three years of freelancing, if you communicate well with your clients, you build trust. And with trust, you can sell anything.
Engage your visitors through the words they read, the pictures they see, the videos they watch.
This can’t be done by a computer. Generated content of any kind is a bad deal. Blog spinners, SEO automation, both spell disaster.
No pictures, blocks of text
A picture is worth a thousand words. Why write four thousand words when you can post four compelling pictures?
Your website should be littered with photographs. If you aren’t good at photography, find yourself a photographer. Stock photos aren’t the best, but they will do better than no photos at all.
Final thoughts
Engaging web visitors doesn’t happen overnight. Google changes slowly. It can take up to three months to engage new visitors with your content.
But that’s the long game. As I said in the beginning, this isn’t a quick scheme, it takes work and dedication. It’s why I failed for so many years.
Don’t give up!
