Get Them Hooked: How to Keep Visitors Scrolling on Your Website

Jonesen TeamIndustry Insights

Did you know that the time users spend on your website can both help and hurt your SEO ranking?

A bounce refers to when users view one page of your website and leave without engaging or visiting other pages. When search engines see a high bounce rate in your website’s analytics, it discredits your site (in terms of SEO relevancy).

However, if users are spending extra time scrolling on your website, clicking on links, and visiting multiple pages, it boosts your SEO ranking and makes your website appear more relevant to search engines.

But how can you accomplish this?

How to Keep Users Scrolling on Your Website

Keeping people engaged on your website is about providing an experience that’s captivating and valuable to your target audience. However, as important as content is, it’s about more than just what you’re posting, it’s also about how you’re posting it. Keep reading for our top tips on keeping users scrolling on your site.

Break Up Your Text

No matter how intelligent you are, your articles shouldn’t come across as an essay or college thesis. Avoid writing big walls of text that can turn-away users looking for easily accessible information. Modern internet users are accustomed to simple and immediate results and your website needs to accommodate that.

Keep paragraphs to a maximum of three or four sentences to make it easier for readers to skim.

Use Multiple Forms of Media

To keep people scrolling, you also need to keep your web pages interesting. Incorporating visual aids such as infographics, graphs, charts, and images can help keep your audience engaged. Additionally, studies show that we process images 60,000 times faster than text, which can lead to a bigger impact amongst your audience.

Highlight the Highlights

Next, keeping fluidity in mind, you need to make your articles and web pages as user friendly as possible. This means using headers and subheaders that will help users navigate the page to find the information they’re searching for. Also, feel free to use bold print, highlights, and more – just don’t overdo it or your site will come off as too busy and distracting.

Offer Value

To keep people scrolling, you also need to provide information that’s just as valuable as it is engaging. What can users gain by staying on your website? While it’s important to be concise, don’t give away the gold at the top of your articles.

Provide valuable information but make people scroll through and engage to get it. However, don’t make them work too hard or they’ll bounce off your site.

Keep Navigation Simple

Make sure users can easily navigate your site by keeping it consistent throughout. The header with navigation buttons should be the same across your whole website and should move down with the screen as users scroll down the page. Additionally, suggest site navigation by offering internal links throughout your articles to make it easy for people to visit other articles, product pages, contact information, and more.

Optimize Your Website

Finally, make sure your website is optimized for multiple devices and various screen sizes. This will help users on any platform (smartphone, laptop, desktop, tablet) navigate your website with ease and keep scrolling to find more information.

This also means making sure your website loads quickly. As noted above, we are a society accustomed to immediate gratification. If your website is slow, don’t expect users to stick around and wait for pages to load.

Looking for More Web Design Help?

If you’re looking to improve your website and keep users scrolling, we can help. Check out some of our services and solutions or contact us today to see what we can do to help you boost online conversions, increase traffic, and thrive.