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As a small business owner, you invest a lot of time and money into getting people onto your website. You also spend a lot of time and money on your website – design, development, and maintenance. But do you know how to keep people on your website once they arrive?
How do you know if people are staying on your website?
You can find out your engagement rate and bounce rate in Google Analytics. When you choose the “Pages and Screens” report, the engagement rate will already be included. You’ll need to customize the report to include the bounce rate. (You can find directions for doing that here.)
It’s important to track both metrics.
The engagement rate tells you the percentage of visits to your website that involved some form of meaningful engagement. The bounce rate tells you the percentage of people who arrived and left without doing anything.
If someone visits your website, does a quick scroll on your home page, and leaves without clicking a button or visiting another page, they are not considered engaged. Therefore, they bounced.
The opposite is true of an engaged visitor. They spend three minutes visiting five pages on your website, and they click to download a free guide.
Obviously, you want more visitors to be engaged and fewer to bounce.
A bounce rate at or under 50% is considered decent, but of course it depends on your industry, the type of page they’re on (blog posts can have high bounce rates), and the content on the page.
How to keep people on your website
Technical considerations
Your website needs to load quickly, and it needs to be mobile-friendly. Pull up your website right now on your desktop. Then do it on your smartphone.
Does it appear within a second on each device?
And when you’re using it on your smartphone:
- Is the text easy to read as you scroll down the page, or do you need to zoom in to read anything?
- Do photos appear “normal” or are they warped in appearance?
- Can you easily navigate from one page to another?
If the answer is no to any of them, please get on the phone with your website developer right now and tell them you need a mobile-friendly site.
In the US, half of all website visitors come from a smartphone or tablet. If your website isn’t easy to read and navigate from a mobile device, you better believe people will bounce quickly.
How to hook people on your home page
Not everyone who arrives at your website will land on your home page first. They might arrive on a blog post you shared on LinkedIn or promo page you shared via email. Inevitably, though, they will go to your home page to get a fuller picture of your company.
To make a solid impression:
Use short, bold headlines to organize your content
People don’t read, they skim. Start with a headline right at the top of the page that quickly explains what you do. Organize everything else on the page under a subhead:
- Our services
- Meet our team
- What our clients say
- Schedule a demo
- Recent projects
I highly encourage you to be creative and clever with your subheads. Think: “Meet our award-winning designers” or “Schedule a demo that will change your life”. It’s much more interesting, and interesting content is what keeps people on your website.
Make it crystal clear how you help people
No one cares what you do. They only care how you can help them.
At the top of your home page, right below the main headline and “hero image”, you need to quickly explain how you help people.
As my friend Maggy likes to remind her clients, you need to add a “so that” statement, which gets to the heart of what your clients really need/want.
I help small businesses generate more leads SO THAT they can make more money.
Our team streamlines backend operations for event venues SO THAT they can focus on customer service.
We coach executive leaders SO THAT they can become even more effective and successful.
Don’t forget to be specific! For the love of god, please don’t write something like, “We enable communications for more streamlined messaging.”
I just wrote that and I don’t even know what it means.
Create trailheads to services
Your home page provides an overview of how you help people. Make it easy for them to find the specific help they need.
It’s a best practice to summarize each service offering on your home page and include a call-to-action button that will take people to that service page where they can find more information.
For example:
Email marketing
Stay top-of-mind, nurture leads, send promotions, and drive sales using the marketing channel with the highest ROI.
<Learn More button>
Include social proof and stats to quickly gain credibility
Marketing is all about building relationships and trust. If you want to build trust quickly, you can show how awesome you are in a few ways:
Testimonials and reviews: Everyone reads reviews before making purchasing decisions. That goes for your clients. Include testimonials and/or Google reviews on your home page and throughout your site.
Case studies: If you offer a service that’s more abstract, case studies can help clients better understand what working with you could look like.
Take my friend Brad, who creates systems and strategies that help small businesses scale. A few short stories can demonstrate what that entails in real life.
ROI or other stats: Data doesn’t lie, and it can be very impressive (at least to me). For example, let’s say you can quantify the number of hours you save clients by automating repetitive, manual tasks. Share that!
In fact, share anything that shows the ROI of your services.
How to hook people on a service landing page
Follow the advice above – but with some tweaks:
Every service page should start with a headline that captures the overarching benefit of that service. Use subheads to organize the content, such as:
- What you get (deliverables)
- How it works (process)
- A testimonial or three that is tied to that service
- The cost (if you dare)
Remember how I said no one cares what you do. They also don’t care HOW you do it. You can explain a bit, but does a prospect really want to know how the sausage is made? Nope.
Finally, end with a strong call-to-action that is specific to the page.
For example:
Want to learn more about how our blog copywriting service can help you get found and generate leads?
Your website is your home base online – don’t neglect it
When people hear about you, what do they do? They look you up online – your website and your socials. Make sure it’s giving the best first impression of all time so they want to hang around.
Related: Why College Football Players Are Ideal Clients for Financial Advisors