Conversions through user engagement

11/03/10 posted by Liz Niland

News flash: Success in the search engines isn’t the be all and end all for determining the effectiveness of your online presence. Although ranking highly in Google against your chosen keywords is definitely part of making it big on the net, another very important measure you must consider is “conversion”. Particularly if you want to make a positive return on your investments (ROI).

Whether you’re selling shoes, providing news or advertising the products featured in your physical shop front, converting your website traffic into tangible cash is a task that doesn’t always come as easily as many people expect. Representatives from Google this week spoke on this very issue in relation to the woes many online news providers are currently experiencing.

While the debate still rages about the positives and pitfalls of hiding content behind paywalls, Google have suggested that the key to a strong ROI is user engagement. And think about it - unless your website is purely e-commerce where conversions can be counted as the total number of items sold - you ideally want to keep users on your website for as long as you can, impressing them all the way to the “Contact Us” form.

Although adding regular doses of relevant unique content to your website is a surefire way to back your SEO efforts, it’s also a winning method for engaging users with your website. Don’t underestimate the benefits of a glowing review and link to your website shared by an impressed user on a site like Facebook or Twitter. Having a website that users want to share and regularly revisit requires a lot of investment - not just of money, but of time and brainpower. Returning to our newspaper example, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian noted that “the average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day".

We can think of those 70 second breaks as the times when someone quickly clicks to your website to see what you offer, check a price or grab your phone number or physical address details. To move towards full user engagement, expand your business base and turn all those little clicks into big conversions, you need to begin thinking of ways to attract users to your site more regularly. Features such as a scattering of regularly updated images, a blog relevant to your industry or prospective clients, and videos of testimonials or how-to tutorials can all keep users returning to your site, lingering for longer, and returning to do business with you again and again.