Making your Website Sticky
So you managed to attract some visitor to your website … what are they going to do when they get there?
Sure, they’ll look at a few pages, maybe even call you (you’re open for business at 9pm at night aren’t you?), but these days, actively engaging your website visitors is not only a wise thing to do, it’s what your potential customers expect.
Having them hang around on your website for a little longer has a number of benefits:
- It’s widely believed that the search engines monitor the length of time the average users stays on a site and the number of pages that they view. If you use Google Analytics, that information is certainly available to Google.
- Given that Google’s function is to present the browser with the most relevant set of results for any search query; it would make a lot of sense for them to view positively websites that the average visitor stays on for some time v websites where people leave immediately, because they have not found what they were looking for. If that’s not part of the search engine algorithm (how they rank web pages) right now, it will be at some point in the future.
So how do you get your visitors to stick around? (hence the term, “sticky website”)
One way is to ask them to take a short survey. This is beneficial in a number of ways:
- It gets a potential customer interacting with your business
- You can collect information and tweak what you offer to suit
- You might actually lean that your customers want something you don’t currently provide, but could
- You may find that you’re doing something that puts people off doing business with you
There are a number of hosted services that allow you to create surveys and upload them to your website. Whilst this makes the process a little easier for you (or your webmaster) the downside is that you’ll have to pay monthly fees or tolerate advertising on your survey forms.
