It goes without saying that the longer web users stay on your website, the better it is for many reasons:

• There is a higher likelihood the traffic finishing with a conversion
• The longer web users are on a website, the more useful they will generally find the website and its content
• There is increased chances of social shares, comments and more, which all will benefit the website, its SEO and traffic generation
• Web user are more likely to come back to a website they spent a lot of time on, than one they haven’t

With this in mind, here are some tips you can make the most of to keep visitors on your website for longer.

 

Write Meta Descriptions for Better Targeting

Naturally, content is crawled by search robots which proactively create descriptions to display on search engine results, to best summarize what the content is about. However, although the self-generated descriptions do a good job, it is generally better to create your own descriptions as a meta description. This is because the content creator will always know best what the content is about. Therefore, the description they can provide should always be more contextual and relatable to the content, making the article more targeted on search engines.

 

Have a Good Website Design

If it is easy for web users to browse around your website, even if they accidentally stumbled across your website, they are much more likely to stay on your website if they can navigate around it with ease. Elements of a good website design include:

• Expansive navigation menu that can expand when hovering the mouse over it
• A search bar at the top of the page (bonus points for a search bar that shows results live)
• Categories embedded into the navigation menu, or the most popular categories to the side in the sidebar
• A number of high quality content articles to click onto, be it most popular or most commented etc.

 

Reduce the Website Loading Time

The longer web users have to wait for a page to load, the more impatient they will become and the higher the chance they will click away. Therefore, it is a constant objective of every website owner to reduce the loading time of their website. This is one of the reasons why AMP pages work so well, since the loading time is near instantaneous.

 

Make Your Content Scannable

Even if you make an in depth article that is thousands of words of quality, first impressions to web users will put them off committing to reading it all. This is generally why people like to see variation in font types and sizes in articles, since it allows them to scan the content to read the areas that they want to. You can do this by using different size headings, italics/bold, lists and adding images throughout.

 

Add a CTA at the End of Content

Once web users get to the end of the content, if there is nothing keeping them on the web page, they will click off it. This is where you can lure web users to staying onto your website with a call to action. Related posts, commenting or another internal link will all work to keeping web users on your website.