By Rebecca Barnatt-Smith
As of 2022, there are 5 billion people on the internet. As the number of online users expands exponentially, so does your site’s traffic potential.
Site engagement continues to play a key role in a successful CRO strategy. On the back of a post-pandemic e-commerce boom, conversion rate optimisation has become essential for brands looking to keep their consumer retention rates high amongst competitors.
Prioritising a traffic-boosting strategy is the key to keeping those conversions rolling in. From improving user testing efforts to streamlining your site’s user experience, pooling marketing efforts into a traffic-focused campaign remains an effective way to climb up the organic search string and catch the eye of your consumers.
Read on as we discuss the importance of a site engagement strategy in 2022 and share our best-kept traffic amplifying tactics for an affiliate website bursting with consumer interaction!
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Why Is Site Engagement So Important In 2022?
It’s no secret that Covid-19’s digital shift has accelerated the global move online. With more internet and social media-based users than ever before, it has never been easier to source traffic and never harder to retain it.
On the back of an e-commerce boom, where the online retailing industry grew by a third in just 2020 alone, widescale competition has become an ongoing challenge for a large number of small business owners.
(Image Source: Shopify)
With the e-commerce industry now expected to reach a whopping $7.3 trillion in global sales by 2025, online brands should start prioritising their online engagement strategy if they want to remain visible in Google searches that are packed full of industry or niche competitors.
As consumers become more active, so does Google’s ranking algorithm. If online retailers want to keep their SERP scores high and their conversion rates doubling, they must find new ways to maximise user engagement.
With studies revealing that 95% of all internet searchers engage with just the top five sites in an organic search string, you know it’s time to start prioritising SEO must-haves on your site, such as:
- A fast-loading webpage
- Optimised navigation
- A personalised user experience
Google now takes into account a webpage’s bounce rate and monitors traffic patterns when determining how high your site ranks for a given search query. Therefore, your site engagement strategy should be a focus if you want to improve your conversion rate and keep sales high.
5 Ways To Boost Your Site Engagement For CRO
The average landing page conversion rate is under 3% in 2022. In a battle for conversions, industry giants tend to have the edge over small business owners. Appearing further up the search string with a high level of niche authority, they are twice as likely to see quick conversions and a high level of consumer retention.
For entrepreneurs hungry to compete in the race to boost their CRO, increasing levels of site traffic are likely to provide more leads for conversion potential.
Read on as we divulge five traffic-boosting tips for a site that is bursting with sales leads.
1) Improve Your User Testing Strategy
According to recent insights from Adobe, about 80% of a site’s revenue will originate from just 20% of its leads. The key to improving your CRO is being able to spot these leads with high conversion potential and provide them with a personalised site experience that navigates them to the basket.
In order to offer a personalised experience, you need to know your consumers inside and out. Taking time to optimise your user testing strategy is an essential step all marketers should take when working to improve site engagement and reduce bounce rates.
In fact, utilising consumer data research in a personalisation strategy can double your CRO, improve traffic retention and, most importantly, boost sales by 30%.
There are a number of ways to improve your user testing tactics. From using first-party data analytics for a stronger understanding of your demographic’s values and gratifications to engagement-based testing such as heatmaps that can measure your site’s CTR, the list is endless.
(Image Source: Just In Mind)
Heatmaps, in particular, are a great way to measure site engagement levels for CRO purposes. Quickly providing a visual representation of your click-through data, a colourmap highlights areas of hot engagement and cooler visitor interaction.
Heatmaps can aid business owners in understanding consumer behaviour and can influence future strategy planning to help visitors better engage with site content.
2) Invest In A Good Web Hosting Platform
As internet traffic numbers double, your website must be able to handle large numbers of visitors at once if it is to compete against industry giants. If you want to provide your consumers with a solid user experience, it’s important to invest in a web hosting platform that maintains high levels of engagement.
Did you know that a third of internet users will bounce off of a slow-loading site in less than five seconds? By investing in a private web host, you can make sure that your site is well-optimised for site accessibility and, most importantly, Google’s SEO algorithm.
Every site on the internet is supported by a web host, but those appearing further up in an organic search string are often supported by a platform that is designed to handle a higher bandwidth of users.
While smaller business owners must consider website hosting costs, there are a number of options available depending on the size of a company and the site’s traffic potential. From shared hosting platforms to cloud-based private hosts, web hosting can support sharp increases in site engagement while still protecting company data and boosting a site’s SERP ranking.
3) Streamline Your Navigation UX
If you want your consumers to convert, it’s time to start optimising your UX design. Site navigation is a determining factor in whether a user will engage or bounce with your site.
Successful navigation flows aim to guide the user seamlessly from the homepage to the basket. For a generation of active consumers, it’s important for a navigation system to be a quick solution to their query and cover all basis in a minimalistic, accessible format.
(Image Source: Vengage)
As you can see above, a navigation system should be designed in an upside-down pyramid format, displaying primary information first, before allowing the user to pick a niche category that answers their query second.
In 2022 especially, a site navigation system should also be optimised for mobile devices. With over half of all traffic now attributed to smartphone users, your UX design must be accessible to a number of devices.
In fact, 85% of internet users claim that a mobile site should be prioritised over a desktop counterpart. If you want to see a spike in your cellular conversions, mobile optimisation is a must.
4) Optimise Your Site Content
As you know, a key site engagement booster is your SEO score.
In order to rank highly in a Google search, and receive the most online traffic, your site content should be well optimised for prime ranking potential.
From copywriting to visuals, there are numerous ways to optimise your website content:
- Keyword Optimisation: It’s important to include keywords in your written content if you want to rank well. Inserting targeted keywords into your copy is a quick way to draw traffic to your page. For smaller businesses looking to improve their CTR, why not try adding some lower-scoring, long-tail keywords to the mix, for less competition and higher ranking potential?
- Image Optimisation: While visuals can improve site aesthetics and capture audience attention, they must be optimised for site accessibility. Make sure your image files are compressed in order to keep loading times low, and image alt-text is filled with keywords that Google crawlers can pick up.
5) Sync Your Socials
Last but not least, it’s time to get social. If you want your CRO to boom in 2022, the key to keeping site conversions high is social media.
On the back of TikTok’s global success and Instagram’s ability to send consumers straight from their platform to a branded site, syncing your site with your social campaign paints a quick road to more traffic.
The key here is to start sharing your site-based content across your social platforms. Connect with your demographic and jump on top of social trends with your content for the best results. With over 4.62 billion consumers on social media, sharing links to your site content across a wide range of platforms is guaranteed to rake in more sales and leads than ever before.
Better still, improving your own social media visibility increases brand awareness, in turn building site authority within your niche. As you gain loyal followers, both your conversions and consumer retention rates will climb!
The Future Of Site Engagement
It’s no secret that online traffic numbers are increasing exponentially post-pandemic. With more consumers at hand than ever before, your website needs to be prepared to handle a spike in consumer clicks in 2022.
However, with a whopping 90% of web pages receiving zero organic engagement, it’s never been more important to rank in Google search. If you want your CRO to remain high, it’s time to start working on that site engagement strategy!
From getting to know your target consumer to optimising your site experience in order to improve retention, small business owners must prioritise their traffic-boosting tactics to stave off the ever-growing competition.