Digital Insights
SHARES

How to Keep Visitors from Leaving Your Website

By

Published: October 15, 2014

Once visitors arrive at your site, they should be guided to a carefully designed conversion funnel which will gently lead them along the path to becoming a revenue-producing customer. Depending on your product niche and your marketing goals, a successful conversion could take the form of requesting a free report, subscribing to a newsletter, scheduling a free consultation, or even making an online purchase.

Aside from having an effective visitor conversion funnel in place, you want to make sure that you’re not sabotaging your marketing efforts by creating obstacles that may inadvertently be driving potential customers away.

Don’t Make Visitors Wait for Your Site to Load
Internet users are basically impatient, and if your website is taking too long to load, many visitors will simply move on to the next site displayed on the search results page. According to a study conducted by Kissmetrics, 47 percent of computer users expect a web page to load within 2 seconds, and 40 percent will exit a website that takes longer than 3 seconds. What’s more, each 1 second delay in loading will lower conversions by 7 percent.

You can improve your site’s loading speed and increase visitor satisfaction by

  • Minimizing the amount of code and scripts that are running on your site.
  • Using web-friendly images on your site and steering clear of dynamically resizing your large image files.
  • Making sure that your web hosting server is up the task. While shared hosting is a perfectly acceptable option for many small business websites, never sacrifice a happy visitor experience for the sake of low-cost hosting as your website grows.

Provide Meaningful and Relevant Content
provide quality and relevant contentGood content that answers questions and helps solve problems is the primary reason visitors have taken the trouble to visit your website and you don’t’ want them to leave disappointed. In addition to regularly providing new content, be sure to update your existing content with fresh perspectives and the latest changes and innovations in your field.

Use accurate and descriptive Meta description and page titles when optimizing your web pages. This will help give visitors a clear idea of what they can expect to find on your site and increase visitor satisfaction and conversions.

Don’t Make Visitors Wade Through Your Clutter
Home page clutter is one of the biggest reasons why visitors are leaving your site before you can tell your story and get them engaged with your company. Make sure that your sales message is getting through and is truly informing and not confusing your visitors.

Remember that a confused mind never buys. It all boils down to understanding basic human behavior: the more things to look at and options to choose from, the less likely we are to choose anything. That’s when visitors start looking for an easy out by leaving your website.

Decide on the most important points that you want your visitors to absorb and present your case clearly and convincingly. Don’t dilute the impact of your core message by crowding it out with competing content that will only serve to confuse. Save other ideas and products for another page or for another time.

Never make visitors guess as to what you want them to do next. Create a compelling offer that directly relates to your message, and present it as a clear-cut call to action.

Comments

logged in to post a comment.