7 Proven Strategies to Improve User Engagement with Your Content

Most people on a website stay there for less than 30 seconds.

That gives you less than a minute to not only grab their attention but also hold it captive for long enough to interact with your content.

One of the main goals for most people isn’t just that people look at their content, but that people engage with it. So if you want to up user engagement as a webmaster, what do you do?

Read on for some of our best tips to keep your users’ eyes where they belong: on your website!

1. Boost User Engagement By Paying Attention to Comments

Every website gets trolls and people who post stupid comments just to “hear” themselves speak. We don’t mean pay attention to the people who are just trying to get attention.

We mean paying attention to what people are commenting on your site when they are giving you actual constructive criticism.

Do you see several comments a month asking for interviews with experts in the field? Or perhaps you see several comments a month asking for you to write a quiz they can take.

Write down some of the suggestions they give and heed them! They will be useful for you in the long run and will help you retain users.

2. Know That People Don’t Read All of the Web Content On Your Site

So, you might be the next Keats. But that doesn’t typically matter when it comes to websites.

Most often, people don’t even read the entirety of a website. This information was proven by research in 1997 when the web was still in its infancy.

Therefore, you’re going to need to get everything across either at the top of the site or with other information. Bold the most important information. Or post a video that will catch the user’s attention.

Don’t write a novel and genuinely expect them to hang around and read it. It just isn’t plausible.

3. Use Headings and Subheadings

Headings and subheadings are a great way to get users to interact with your content.

We already know they’re scanning the website you put up. So if you organize the information into different paragraphs with headings or subheadings, it will make it easier for people to scan the content effectively.

If they found your information useful, most likely they’ll come back for more.

4. Create a Quiz or a User Forum

One reason people return to sites over and over again is not that their information is the most compelling, but because they have a component that gets them to come back again and again.

For some people, this might be a quiz that they can take and share with their friends. If you regularly post this kind of content, people will come back again and again. This is particularly the case if it is shareable. People will see other’s results on social media and immediately want to know what kind of flower they are or which Friends character describes them best.

A user forum is another great way to keep people coming back to your site. This is especially the case if you, or someone on your team, is there to answer questions.

People will continue to come back to the forum to find the answer to their questions, as well as to read questions other people have asked. It will not only be useful, but it will encourage repeat traffic and user engagement.

5. Don’t Overload Your Audience

Have you ever been to a website that is incredibly busy or loaded so heavily with ads that you can’t really find the information you’re looking for?

These types of sites are all over the place. They may show up in search engines because they might rank well in their SEO, but they also encourage people to click away.

If the information users want is not easy to navigate to, no one will be interested in staying on your site.

Sure, you can ask users if they want to join your mailing list or sign up to other newsletters to notify them of updates to your site, but if you inundate them, they won’t be interested. They’ll just click off and find the information elsewhere.

6. Reveal Information a Little Bit at a Time

What is the most important thing you want people to learn from your website? Ask yourself this and write it down.

That should be the first thing users encounter when they go to your website. The very first thing.

This way, they don’t miss the most important message on your site. They can then scroll down and explore the rest of the site if the main message jives with what they’re interested in.

7. Make Your Content Unique

While this sounds like a no-brainer, you do need to ensure your content is totally unique. That’s not really easy to do with over 1.8 billion websites online. But all of us have our own unique spins to things, as well as a unique voice.

What is it that users can get exclusively on your website?

Highlight that and focus on it when building your site.

Wrapping It Up

While your page views are important, your user engagement tells a better story of how successful you are at creating content. It also tells you how apt users are to stay on your page long enough to purchase something. Both of these things are critical to moving forward and keeping your business growing online.

For more information on digital marketing, check out our blog.