A high click-thru rate sounds like a good thing. After all, at least you have gotten people to look at your site and you are building brand recognition. However, if you find that visitors click through and then often just continue on their way, it can be frustrating and keep you from growing as a business. Luckily, it is possible to encourage visitors to hang around and learn more about your company. We’ve put together a list of five psychological techniques that will keep more of your visitors browsing your page–instead of moving along to a competitor.
- Utilize Story Content – While most service-related pages will have plenty of information and calls to action, taking a narrative stance can really engage website visitors. Perhaps you can tell something personal about yourself or your staff that fits in with your ultimate marketing goal–or maybe you begin with a testimonial. The idea is to get visitors to feel like they want to know more because you’ve set up a story that needs a conclusion.
- Build Curiosity – Start with a title that really hooks your visitors and open your content with a strong introduction. You want every visitor who comes to your page to feel the desire to know more about your company and the services it offers. You may want to take a different stance than your competitors, use shocking statistics or spin your content in a completely different direction. Anything that makes YOU stand out from every other site out there will encourage visitors to keep reading and learning why your site is different.
- Appeal to Emotions – Emotions can include anything from happiness to fear to empathy. When you write content that makes your visitors FEEL something, instead of just remaining neutral, you’ll find visitors hang around longer. However, be careful not to engage the WRONG emotion. While a pest control company may want their visitors to fear the “what ifs” of letting a pest problem fester, an interior designer wouldn’t want his or her customers to feel that same emotion.
- Ask Questions – When page visitors feel like they are involved and engaged in the content, they will be much more likely to hang around. This is a technique that is useful, but you don’t want to overuse it. Consider starting your content with a question just to get visitors thinking and perhaps they will want to find out the answer or discover if their thoughts line up with yours.
- Use Numbered Lists – Numbered lists (or listicles, if you like) are a great way to keep visitors reading until the very end. Since there is a set number of items they know they will encounter, it encourages readers to stick around until they reach the conclusion. While it is not always possible, keeping the number in the three to seven range will give you the most effective results while you avoid bogging down the reader.
As you can see, there are techniques you can use when building your page or adding content that will naturally keep visitors hanging around and perhaps even encourage them to click through and ask for more information.
