Content is King. Content is the main reason visitors visit your website. That is why it is important to present truly quality content that is full of the information they are looking for. There are several metrics that can be used to understand how good a website's content is, such as page views, returning visitors, keyword performance, and referrals.
However, there is one other metric that website owners tend to ignore, namely the length of time visitors spend on the website. The time visitors spend on the website is an indicator of how well the content and website are bringing in relevant visitors. When visitors spend more time on the website, it can be assumed that they are reading, learning, or enjoying the content.
The longer visitors spend on the website is a surefire way to tell if the content and website as a whole are valuable. The longer visitors spend on the website indicates that the website and content are beneficial. You can't just bring in a lot of visitors but then they quickly leave the website. If so, there is something wrong with the website and this needs attention.
How do you keep visitors coming to your blog site?
Well, before studying and implementing ways to increase blog visitors in this article, there are things you must understand further as a reader. That is understanding what makes beta readers on your blog. If you don't understand this, then it will be difficult to implement ways to increase visitors on your blog.
In one of the question and answer platforms, several readers said that there are several factors that make them beta reading a blog. In fact, there are readers who will continue to "hang out" on the blog even though it has long writings of up to thousands of words. What are the things that make blog visitors stay?
- A relevant blog niche, a reader will definitely stay on your blog for a long time, one of the reasons is because your content meets the needs and interests of the reader. Most internet users will surf search engines to get certain information, whether it is educational or news.
- Easy-to-understand sentences, not all blog readers have the same field as you. Most readers may work or understand your blog field very well. But some readers may be lay people who need information who will not understand the technical language you use.
- Enjoyable to read, writing a long blog is a good thing. And it would be better if you arrange each paragraph very well so that the reader's eyes are comfortable to see the long writing. Articles with long paragraphs up to summer-lines will make the reader's eyes tired quickly and lazy to read.
12 Key Strategies to Increase Average Engagement Time
The longer the time spent by visitors on the website, the smaller the bounce rate, the better Google's assessment of quality and the higher the conversion rate. Conversion here can be in any form such as buying goods, using services offered, clicking on ads, filling out subscription forms and so on.
However, it takes effort so that visitors can stay on the website for a long time. There are several ways or strategies that can be done so that visitors can stay on the website for a long time.
1. Create quality content and full of information
Content is the main reason visitors visit a website. Here, content is an important factor. This is not only for new content that is created, you also need to update old content to improve quality and so that the information presented remains relevant for now. Changing old content ensures that the content remains up-to-date and suitable for consumption. Visitors will leave the website quickly if the content they read is outdated.
2. Use a good website design
Website design here concerns the visual appearance. Website design gives the first impression to visitors. The human brain processes visual information first. Within seconds, visitors then decide whether to stay on the website or not. Therefore, it is important to use a good overall website design.
Make visitors focus on things that are considered important. Avoid installing excessive widgets or using animated backgrounds. Excessive widget installation or use of animations can be distracting. Remove or discard widgets or animations that are less important to make it look simpler. Display important things at the top to get focus and provide more benefits, including for tablet or smartphone versions.
3. Use website credibility indicators
Growing trust in visitors is very important. You can do this by showing website credibility indicators such as testimonials, social followers and the About page. The number of testimonials and followers is a strong credibility indicator that the content and website as a whole are good and quality, while the About page can show who you are and why they should trust you.
4. Use internal links
When you read an article, you often find internal links in the article. Internal links are a great way or strategy for visitors to stay longer on the website. When the article has been read, visitors can explore other related articles by clicking on the internal links offered.
You can place internal links in the article, in the sidebar or in other places that are the focus of visitors. Internal links can be created manually or using extensions. If you are an AdSense publisher and your website or blog has met the eligibility requirements related to traffic and unique content, you can use Native Matched Content ads, a Google AdSense tool to promote articles from your website or blog.
5. Open external links in a new browser window or tab
Internal links are one way to further improve the quality of website or blog content. In addition to internal links, you can also use external links to link to relevant articles outside your website or blog. External links can provide additional information to visitors and also allow Google to better understand the topic of your website or blog content.
When you use external links, make sure that the external website page is opened in a new window or tab from the web browser used. If not, your website page is closed and replaced with the external website page. This is the same as sending traffic obtained to an external website. Visitors will then move from your website page to the external website page.
6. Use images that are related to good visuals
Images are one type of website content that is commonly used. It has been mentioned earlier that the human brain processes visual information first. Visitors will momentarily observe, try to capture the meaning contained in the included image and then connect it to the text content being read. Therefore, it is important to include images that are truly related and have good visual quality.
7. Improve readability
Have you ever opened a website page whose text content is a bit difficult to read? The font color used does not contrast much with the background color of the website so it is difficult to read. You may have to strain your eyes a little to be able to read it. This is certainly annoying. It is very possible that visitors will leave the website page faster without having to finish reading the entire content.
Improving readability can include many things, such as using or choosing a font that is easy to read, using a font size that is not too small, dividing long text into several paragraphs, making more appropriate margin and padding settings and so on. The point is to make it easier for visitors to consume your content without being confused by this and that.
8. Add an invitation to comment
Every website or blog generally has a comment system. The comment system can be a tool for interaction between the author and the visitor. Visitors can leave comments containing questions, additional information, thanks, praise, corrections or criticism. When visitors add comments, the time spent on the website can be longer because visitors do not immediately leave the website after reading the content.
An invitation to comment is one of the call-to-action techniques. You can add words or phrases in the form of specific questions, requests for input, invitations to discuss and so on at the end of the article that encourage visitors to provide comments related to the topic. In addition to spending more time on the website, comments are also a source of visitor traffic when they return to check the answers to the comments given.
9. Optimize the website for mobile devices
Make sure that the website has been optimized for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, both for responsiveness and loading time. A non-responsive template design will make the content look small on the mobile version so that it is difficult to read and slow page loading times will make visitors frustrated waiting. When this happens, visitors will immediately leave the website that is not optimized for mobile devices.
10. Monitor and fix 404 errors
What do visitors do when they open a page that no longer exists or a 404 error (HTTP 404 or 404 Not Found), visitors of course immediately close the tap or browser window for that page. At that moment, you lose visitors. To ensure visitors stay on your website, 404 errors need to be resolved by, for example, creating a custom 404 error page or redirecting.
11. Website Speed Optimization
Who likes to wait~ eaaak. Including waiting for a blog to load, right? In fact, 53 percent of people will leave a blog that takes more than three seconds to load. Yep, three seconds!
To find out how fast your blog loads, you can use a tool like Google Page Speed Insight. There you will find out how fast and the factors that slow down your blog loading.
Well, to speed up blog loading, there are several powerful ways that you need to apply:
- Image Optimization – Too many image uploads can slow down website loading. Especially if they are large. For that, make sure the image has been compressed first. Compress the image as much as possible to under 100kb.
- Delete unused plugins – Installing too many plugins can slow down blog loading. We recommend that you delete plugins that are no longer active and that are not too important.
- Limit the number of posts on the blog's main page – Set the number of posts displayed on the main page to speed up loading by clicking Settings> Reading. Then enter the number of posts in Blog pages show at most and click Save.
- Update WordPress – Updating WordPress can actually improve blog performance. For that, make sure you always update to the latest version.
- Use Quality Web Hosting Server - The quality of the server used can greatly affect the performance of the blog. Make sure you choose web hosting with LiteSpeed web server which is believed to be the fastest server.
12. Make sure the Blog is Mobile Friendly
Maybe you are now reading this article via your cellphone. Well .. because now most of everything is done via mobile devices. Evidently, 52 percent of website traffic comes from cellphones.
You can check first how responsive the blog is using the Mobile-Friendly Test site from Google. There you can get information and issues encountered when loading the page.
Therefore, if you want to maximize traffic potential, you need to create a mobile friendly blog. If you use WordPress CMS, there are hundreds of mobile friendly templates available to create a responsive blog. It doesn't stop there, you can also do how to increase blog visitors with Google AMP. So, the performance of your blog content on mobile is lighter.
Conclusion
You need to monitor your website regularly to ensure that any 404 errors that appear are resolved as soon as possible. You can use Google Search Console to monitor or find all 404 errors on your website via Crawl > Crawl Errors. If your website is built with a CMS like WordPress, you can use the Redirection plugin, while the Joomla CMS has its own Redirect feature that can be used directly.
Well, those are some ways to increase blog visitors that you can try. It seems quite a lot, but actually if it has been implemented the steps are not too many and complicated. Most of the methods above can be done by anyone. However, when it comes to blog speed and performance, it depends on the hosting you use. So, don't choose the wrong hosting.