How to Ensure That Visitors Are Instantly Engaged with Your Site

There are multiple ways to measure how successful your website is at turning visitors into customers of your business.

But regardless of whether your goals include driving sales, capturing new leads, or getting people to interact with the content you’ve worked hard to produce and publish, there’s one thing for sure: you must ensure that visitors are instantly engaged with your site. After all, users form first impressions about websites in less than two-tenths of a second, deciding whether to interact with your brand in a blink of an eye.

Now, many hacks could get you closer to your objectives. For instance, you could invest time, funds, and energy into designing a stunning site. Or you could dedicate a sizable portion of your marketing budget to producing valuable and unique content and hope that web visitors find it appealing to interact with.

However, to guarantee that all your hard work doesn’t go to waste, there’s one thing you must do: you need to focus sufficient energy on boosting user engagement metrics. These can include anything from conversions, page views, time on page, bounce rates, pages per session, onsite social interactions, scroll depth — which indicates content consumption — and, of course, the number of returning visitors to your website.

But how do you ensure that web visitors instantly engage with your site? The following seven strategies are fantastic ways to appeal to your target audience’s sensibilities that don’t require you to redesign your business website completely.

Offer Instant Access to Your Site’s Core Function

One of the absolute best ways to grab web visitors’ attention, encourage them to interact with your website, and maximize the chances of their visit ending in a conversion (or at least a positive first impression about your brand) is to make the value you offer immediately recognizable.

You can effectively encourage audience engagement by placing value propositions, compelling visuals, and calls to action in the first screenful of your homepage. On your website homepage, the way to do this will be to position your site’s core function or present the main benefit you offer above the scroll line. After all, this is where, according to research, people spend 57% of their page-viewing time.

For instance, something as simple as actively highlighting your site’s primary function — like the hero section on The Career Test homepage — can help your prospects easily recognize the benefits they will enjoy by investing in your brand’s solutions. Plus, enhancing the design with social proof elements will further increase the chances of user engagement.

Of course, to additionally boost engagement rates on your site, you need to account for the fact that not all web visitors will land on your homepage.

With this in mind, every one of your pages must be optimized for user intent, showing potential customers that your business is fully committed to helping them solve their pain points, regardless of what those pain points are.

For some brands, doing this will mean writing better headings for content pages. For others, it will involve making ecommerce collection pages more organized. And for some, it will allow visitors to use attractive site functions — like, for example, on this UnscrambleX landing page — without having to search for the “tools” section of the website.

Prioritize Page Load Speed

Another surefire way to maximize web visitor engagement (or at least to prevent high bounce rates) is to invest in page load speed optimization.

According to web user behavior research, people hate interacting with slow websites. One particular survey discovered that approximately 50% of online shoppers:

• Expect ecommerce sites to load in 3 seconds or less.
• Abandon their carts due to slow page load times. And;
• Walk away with a negative impression of businesses whose sites need to be optimized for speed.

Knowing this data, it’s only natural that prioritizing page load speed should be at the top of your to-do list when attempting to boost website engagement. In addition to using tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights and implementing the presented tips, you can also optimize code and images, as well as remove unnecessary elements to provide web visitors with a fast and streamlined browsing experience that’s guaranteed to boost their willingness to interact with your site and brand.

Place Video Content Links Above the Scroll Line

We’ve already discussed the impact of positioning web page elements above the fold. However, it’s also worth mentioning that web users naturally gravitate toward some content formats more readily than others.

More precisely, research shows that for the past few years, people have shown a strong preference for video content.

Wyzowl’s latest Video Marketing Statistics report reveals that:

• 91% of consumers want to see more videos from brands.
• 96% use this format for product research. And;
• 79%-89% of people make buying decisions based on video content.

So, if you want to engage web visitors and guarantee that they have a high chance of hearing what you have to say, it’s a good idea to present video content in the high-impact areas of your website, like the hero section.

Of course, there are many ways to do this. On the one hand, you can make short explainer videos the centerpiece of your landing pages, improving the likelihood of potential customers understanding the value offered by your products/services.

This is what businesses like Smartsheet do, aiming to awaken their prospects’ interest with a short video, then providing in-depth information below the fold for leads who have a real chance of turning into customers.

On the other hand, if your business mainly relies on content for converting customers, it might be a good idea to transform some of your written blog posts into easy-to-consume videos. And, of course, remember to promote the format on relevant pages, as done on the MarketBeat homepage, where the top right corner of the hero section is reserved for the brand’s latest educational content aiming to help prospects make better investing decisions.

Offer an Exceptional Mobile Browsing Experience

Most people don’t browse websites on their computers. Statistical data shows that 92.3% of the world’s population uses mobile devices to access the internet (compared to 65.6% of people who access the world wide web via computer). Naturally, this data doesn’t indicate that you should only cater to people browsing on their smartphones. But, it does show that there’s a high likelihood that your target audience will discover your website while using a mobile phone.

Make sure that you offer an equally enjoyable user experience for mobile users. For this reason, you must design your site in a way that caters to small screens. And don’t let the limited-screen real estate prevent you from engaging your audience.

Overall, there are a few basic tricks that will help you deliver a first-class mobile experience:

• Remove clutter distracting web visitors from high-value elements like value propositions and CTAs.
• Make navigation simple and intuitive.
• Avoid intrusive features — like pop-ups — which prevent web visitors from interacting with content.
•  Test the appearance of your website on multiple devices.

For example, looking at the Warby Parker website, you’ll see how effectively the design caters to mobile users. In addition to unambiguous, easily noticeable CTAs (like the “browse eyeglasses” and “browse sunglasses” buttons), the site also features a pared-down navigation menu, along with a few subtle yet noticeable conversion driving elements, like the banner advertising a 15% discount, located at the top of the homepage.

Minimize Distractions to Focus on Key Elements

As you work to ensure that visitors are instantly engaged with your site, you’ll find that decluttering the layout won’t only benefit mobile users. More importantly, restrained layout principles will allow you to promote engagement with easily-noticeable messages and user-oriented UI elements that will attract your audience’s attention.

For example, by doing something as easy as surrounding each element with sufficient white space — as done on the Dionis Skincare homepage — you’ll allow it to stand out from surrounding components, maximizing its efficiency in delivering the intended message.

Of course, remember that negative space doesn’t necessarily have to be white. It can also consist of colored backgrounds or images — like the ones on the Seen homepage — as long as your main conversion elements stand out.

If a minimalistic design isn’t your thing (or doesn’t align with your brand’s visual identity), you can still employ strategies to make critical elements pop.

But, in this case, you’ll have to rely on the principles of the visual hierarchy so that web visitors notice and engage with conversion-promoting messages instead of getting lost in a sea of colorful clutter and missing the unique value your business offers.

Make the Search User Experience Easy and Intuitive

Web users rely heavily on website search functions — especially when shopping online. Research shows that as many as 69% of shoppers go straight to the search bar when landing on a site. Moreover, 80% of people abandon a brand’s website due to poor search UX.

So, to guarantee that your visitors are engaged and have a pleasant browsing experience on your site, pay attention to the search bar.

In addition to making it easy to locate, try to go beyond in making it enjoyable for users to interact with.

For example, if you check out the ShopSolarKits homepage, you’ll see that the search bar takes up plenty of real estate above the navigation menu. Moreover, it also features a few nifty design solutions, such as:

• Showing instant results without input from web visitors.
• Presenting product suggestions in real time.
• Allowing users to sort the displayed product results based on multiple criteria. And;
•  Including quick filters, like price and brand, helping potential buyers get to their destination more quickly and without having to browse through hundreds of irrelevant products.

Hook the Visitor With Provocative Copy

Lastly, as you explore ways to engage website visitors effectively, remember the tremendous impact copywriting can have on attracting and retaining people’s attention.

By finding creative, even provocative ways of showing your audience that you understand their pain points, you can easily convince them you have what it takes to meet their needs. This automatically boosts your chances of getting people to interact with your site and its content. And more importantly, it increases the chances of a web visit resulting in a conversion.

For inspiration on how to use provocative copy in just the right way, you can look at ATH, an ecommerce brand that asks a question that gets people to think. The question “Are you getting enough protein” is just intriguing enough to plant a seed of doubt in the brand’s target audience’s minds and inspire them to act and find out by taking the featured quiz.

Or, for an alternative example, you can check out the Toggl Hire landing page, which hits the nail on the head and invites web visitors to “get proof of competence” before hiring a new employee. Seeing that this is high on most employers’ list of priorities, the copy does an excellent job of compelling prospects to look into what the SaaS product can do and genuinely consider investing in the solution.

Final Thoughts

Creating a highly-immersive website that instantly engages web visitors is something you can only do after a while. After all, achieving the result requires playing around with your website’s design, copy, and UI functionalities. Nonetheless, investing resources in doing these things is a guaranteed win. It will help you deliver an enjoyable, relevant, and trust-inspiring experience and maximize your chances of impressing your leads.

The strategies outlined in this article are all excellent places to start. And the more of them you implement, the better. But, as you work to improve the UX on your site and experiment with engaging elements, remember to keep an eye on your site’s analytics. That way, you can make any necessary changes in real time and ensure you deliver the desired results.