How to engage your audience

You will agree with me that in life, the people who tend to be the ‘life of the party’, those who everybody always wants to talk to, are those people who know how to strike up a conversation and keep it going. This principle also extends to the world of web pages and SEO.

You will have to admit that what brings people to your website is the type of content you put up on the website. A web page with lackluster and uninspired articles or contents would definitely chase readers away. This is why it is important to conjure up top-notch contents that are exciting and interesting to your visitors.

Now, while exciting and interesting articles would attract visitors to your website, the real question here is would it keep them coming back? And would it make them visit other web pages? More often than not, the answer to both questions would be “No”. This is where the engagement of your audience comes into play. Only when you are able to conjure up contents that will engage your audience would you be able to boldly and confidently say yes to both those questions.

Why Do You Need To Engage Your Audience?

As a website owner looking to improve their website’s search engine rankings, one sure way to do this is to make sure your visitors spend as much time as possible on your website. One way to do this is to whip up your contents in an interesting way that engages your visitors and get them to visit your other web pages via the provision of internal links. The main aim is here to increase the average time in page of your visitors and to reduce your web page’s bounce rate.

This looks like a wonderful time to remind us that a ‘bounce’ is a visitor who visited a web page on your website and desisted from visiting other web pages. Also, time in page is the time a visitor spent on a web page before visiting another web page on that same website. What this means is that if a visitor spends 5 hours on a web page and exists his browser without visiting another web page, it is as if he wasn’t there at all.

Nobody wants a content lecturing them. Sure, they might be insightful and helpful, but once they (visitors) have been able to get the required info they need, that is the end of their interaction with that website. A content put in an engaging and exciting way, on the other hand, would encourage the visitors to want to visit other web pages of yours.

How To Engage Your Audience in your website

There are various techniques that can be used to engage your audience, capture their attention, and keep them on your website for a longer duration of time. These techniques include the usage of dynamic content such as images, image galleries, and videos. It is important that these contents have been optimized and are equally interesting and engaging.

Creating long content on articles also helps to engage users, but you must always follow a content strategy when writing that content.

Another technique is the usage of slides. A very effective slide approach is the usage of before and after slides where you put two pictures of the same thing side by side albeit with slight differences. Putting picture a picture of you five days ago when you had full hair beside a picture of you today after getting a haircut. It is the same person yes, but with some slight differences.

Using info boxes and info graphics too has been said to also be effective as far as audience engagement is concerned.

Why Is It Important?

As mentioned earlier, engaging your audience with your contents would help improve your SEO rankings by drawing traffic to your web page. It also increases your web page’s average time in page and helps reduce your website’s bounce rate.

By engaging your audience, you are also putting them at ease, and in addition to making them enjoy your contents, it would build trust as they get this sense of you talking directly to them rather than lecturing to thousands of people.

Top 5 SEO Tools for helping you to create GREAT content:

• Social Mention (Paid): This tool provides you with social media search as well as social media analysis in Real-Time. Simply Key in search terms to see what is being shared currently.
• Social Crawlytics (Paid): Social Crawlytics gives users the ability to carry out competitive research as you get to see the most shared content of your competition and it comes with other fantastic features.
• Google Trends (Free): Get to know what the trends are on Google results with the ability to see the search popularity of keywords.
• Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools (Free): looking for top-rated SEO online marketers? Look no further than Ninja as they offer premium online tools free of charge.
• SharedCount (Paid): looking to track how content is being shared across social channels? SharedCount is definitely the tool you need with very fantastic features for convenience.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to engage your audience

• Gravity Forms (Free): this is a very popular plugin that gives you the ability to create quick and easy WordPress forms. When it comes to forms, Gravity Forms is your go-to plugin, and you can create other forms as well as customized content and styles with the ability to upload files too.
• Quform – WordPress Form Builder (Paid): QuForm builds forms with simple drag-and-drop features and gives you the ability to make as many forms of you want with about 15 form elements to select. You can save your entries on WordPress, and you have the option of exporting your data. Enable Ajax, make use of Captcha, animations, etc.
• Disqus Comment System (Free): Disqus currently is being used by more than 200,000 websites and is growing in popularity. It gets your WordPress comment system replaced with comments from Disqus. With this plugin, you can connect to a large community and track comments from commentators.
• Advanced Custom Fields Plugin (Free): This plugin lets you select from a wide range of field types and allows you to manage Customized data collection seamlessly. Carry out surveys and get the data that you need without any hassle.
• HelloBar (Paid): above your site, this plugin places a bar that will help in product promotion, special posting, all email list building. All on your website.

Did you know? Informal way of writing is a tactic of engaging your audience. This is because you are using the relaxed tone you use when you are ‘goofing’ around with your friends and readers tend to relate more to this than the formal style of writing.

Expert’s suggestion: “But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.” – Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/audience)