If you want your audience to listen to your marketing messages and convert, start by finding out what they have to say about your products and services through user engagement and testimonials.
You’ll never get far in today’s business environment, which is heavily influenced by online social interactions, if you’re not mindful of user engagement.
When visitors come to your website, you expect them to view your content and take the intended action such as filling forms and clicking your call-to-actions. You want them to engage with your content positively and convert.
Your SEO efforts could be driving floods of organic traffic to your site but if the visitors are not signing up to your email lists or purchasing or taking the intended action, you may not meet your marketing objectives.
That is why user engagement and testimonials are critical factors to consider in your website, landing pages, and other online platforms.
What Exactly is User Engagement?
User engagement is basically the way visitors to your digital properties, such as websites, landing pages, and social profiles, take action as opposed to passive browsing without any form of reaction or engagement with your content. User engagement helps you to determine if your audience finds value in your content, products, or services.
You can measure engagement through a wide range of activities such as downloads, signups, clicks, shares, and comments among others.
Users who are highly engaged with your content are generally more profitable and likely to convert and provide valuable outcomes such as clicks, shares, purchases, subscriptions, signups, and more importantly, provide positive testimonials about your products or services.
The Relationship Between User Engagement and SEO
SEO helps to drive organic traffic to your website while user engagement helps to convert the visitors into leads or buyers.
User engagement also plays a key role in boosting your website’s ranking on search engines. There are several usability factors that have an impact on your SERPs rankings.
For instance, Google search algorithms are known to consider the following user experience factors in search ranking:
- Ease of navigation
- Behavioural metrics such as page views, bounce rate, and the average time visitors spend on your website
- Mobile-friendliness of your site
- Content quality based on the number of times it is shared, liked, or commented
- Accessibility and readability of your content and much more
The more your visitors engage with your content through shares, likes, and comments, the more Google rewards you with better ranking.
After all, search engines are in the business of providing their users with the most valuable, popular, and accurate results.
Importance of User Engagement to Your Business
User engagement is closely linked to profitability. Users who are highly engaged with your content are likely to buy, visit your site again, share information about your products or services with friends, family, and colleagues, or give positive testimonials.
When they respond positively by sharing your content on social media, they boost your SEO and help to drive more traffic to your website, encourage others to check your products and services, and ultimately lead to more conversions.
For example, you can engage with website visitors through chatbots and guide them in their purchasing journey towards conversion. Reviews and testimonials also help to provide social proof and persuade visitors to either make inquiries or buy.
User engagement and testimonials help to determine what your customers and web visitors find valuable in your business. Using chatbots, you can even segment your users and follow their activities to see the kind of actions they follow or the customer’s journey and make the necessary adjustments to ensure that they complete the purchasing process.
New website visitors will also view your brand, products, or services on a more positive light when they see positive reviews and testimonials of what you have to offer.
How to Increase User Engagement and Testimonials on Your Site
Here are a few ways to increase user engagement on your website and boost your site’s SEO and conversions:
1. Make Your Website Load Faster
If you hope to keep your visitors longer on your website and engage with all your web elements while boosting your SEO efforts, make sure your web pages load instantly. Keep in mind that today’s website visitors are spoilt for choice with countless alternatives at hand.
They don’t want to be kept waiting for more than 3 seconds for your web page to load. Sometimes even a 1-second delay in load speed can affect user engagement and conversions.
2. Encourage Visitor Comments and Discussions
Comments and discussions are another form of user engagement also known as active participation.
This type of engagement shows the actions your audience takes as they interact with your content. They provide direct feedback about your brand, products, or services.
To implement this form of engagement you can ask your audience to complete quizzes, take surveys, answer polls, and even interact with chatbots on your website.
3. Social Share Buttons
The idea of social sharing is simple and straightforward. If your visitors like the information on your website, blog, or social page, they’ll hit the sharing button and spread your message to their friends, family, and colleagues.
The simple act of hitting the social share buttons counts as user engagement. So, make sure your site provides clear and easily accessible sharing buttons for all the major social media platforms.
4. Collect Quality Testimonials and Reviews
The importance of testimonials and reviews can never be over-emphasised. Testimonials are important to every type of business. Quality testimonials displayed in a professional style provide the ultimate social proof of your brand’s products and services.
However, getting and displaying high-quality testimonials has always been a headache for most business owners but thankfully there are testimonial tools available today that help you to automate and streamline the whole process saving you time, effort, and money.
The tools automate the process of collecting testimonials from customers, integrating the information into your feedback flow, and display the testimonials in beautiful templates that match your brand colours and themes. Testimonial tools help you to build customer loyalty, increase conversions, and strengthen your brand.
5. Add a Chatbot
Chatbots have introduced the next level of automated customer service. They provide an efficient help desk that not only does the job right but saves you the pressure of maintaining human customer support and sales teams.
With conversational automation, you can track customer sentiments more accurately, improve conversions, and increase user engagement 24/7 even while you sleep.
Smart AI chatbots automate repetitive customer service conversations and help to guide your visitors through the customer journey towards purchase.
Conclusion
User engagement and testimonials help to encourage visitors to take the intended action and increase conversions.
Engagement with your visitors also help to boost your SEO and ranking on search engines. To boost user engagement, consider using automated smart AI chatbots and quality testimonial tools.
Later this month, we are offering these two new services, smart chatbots and review platform management tools, to help our clients generating more user engagements with their customers. Stay tuned for our new services launch!
