0800 612 6614 Start a project

How to improve your website’s engagement rate

Your website’s bounce rate used to be one of the key top line metrics tracked in Google Analytics, along with website traffic data. What it allowed you to see at a glance was the percentage of visitors who landed on a page and left without interacting further. The higher the percentage the greater the likelihood your content was not effectively answering your visitor’s questions and / or the design and content were not working to engage your audience.

The introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) however, saw bounce rate disappear as a metric in its own right. Instead, the primary metric used to measure visitor behaviour is engagement rate.

Bounce Rate vs Engagement Rate

In GA4, a session (activity within a given timeframe, starting from when a person first opens one of your web pages) is considered engaged if one of the following happens:

Your engagement rate is therefore the percentage of sessions that meet one of these criteria.

From this you can work out your bounce rate as it’s the inverse of your engagement rate. Bounce Rate = 100% – Engagement Rate

While the bounce rate was a handy metric it could be deceptive, a session was counted as a bounce if a person did not interact – regardless of how long they spent on the page they had landed on. This means they could have landed on the page they wanted, got all the information they needed and left, likely satisfied and with a positive view in mind of your brand. In GA4 however, this would be logged as an engaged session, assuming your content couldn’t be read in under 10 seconds.

So how do you encourage meaningful engagement with your website? Here are several areas worth focusing on.

Enhance Usability

Even if people are leisurely browsing the internet for information, if they can’t see quickly after landing on your website that they’re going to be able to find what they need there then they’re going to go elsewhere.
This is why we encourage people to view their website’s homepage like a signpost. Link to other article on this. People need to be able to land on it and clearly see how they can navigate around the site and access the information, products or services they’re interested in. You very much don’t need to provide all of this information on your homepage, rather signpost how to get to it.

Beyond your homepage, think about other means by which people get around your website – use well-labelled menus, logical page hierarchies, and intuitive layouts. When it comes to usability, always consider not just what can be added but what can be removed to make someone’s experience friction free.

Content: quality over quantity

It’s undeniably important when optimising your website for search that you’re keeping it up to date and refreshing it but producing content for the sake of producing content is not the way to long term success. A better way to look at it is to stop viewing it as ‘content’, but as information.

Information serves a purpose, written thoughtfully it will:

This doesn’t mean you have to commission expensive research, although great if you can, but instead think about the conversations you have with clients when you start working together – if there are common themes and questions then how can you share some of that information on your website. We look at this in more depth in how to develop an SEO strategy.

Look at your contact / enquiry forms – are people regularly asking similar questions and, if so, can you share some of your answers online?

Google’s own guidance on helpful content stresses that websites should prioritise people-first content, written by knowledgeable creators with genuine experience. This can be done as a blog but there are other formats too:

All of this will serve to ensure what’s on your website engages those who arrive there, thereby enhancing your engagement rate.

Improve readability

Readability can be a difficult one when you’re sharing your expertise, particularly if that’s in a technical / specialised field. However, there are always ways to make it easier for your audience to engage with what you’re saying, even if the subject matter is complex.

Tips to keep in mind:

Minimise loading time

Research into website speed by Google’s Web Performance team shows that as page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving increases dramatically. Common causes of slow pages include:

Optimising your site’s performance will not only improve engagement, but also contribute to search engine rankings, as page speed is part of Google’s page experience signals. You can find out ways in which you can optimise your website for speed here.

Internal linking

It’s common to link out to reference points and sources in your articles and case studies, but easy to forget to link to your own content, which is a missed opportunity to keep people on your website.

Internal links help your audience discover related articles, products, or services you offer. As an added bonus they also help search engines understand the structure of your site.

While you can’t ensure people will follow your internal links, by mapping and connecting all the different elements of your website you make it significantly easier for people to delve deeper and learn more about you and what you do, thereby increasing your engagement rate.

Search and filtering

This one largely comes down to the size and complexity of your organisation. If your website is a large one then it can be really helpful to have a search bar, or at the very least a way of filtering content.

Doing so allows people to easily navigate to what they’re looking for and engage with it, without this the risk is people find an alternative rather than wade through pages looking for what they’re after.

Optimise for mobile

It might be obvious as mobiles are such a fact of life these days and have been for many years, but it’s still not uncommon for websites to not be fully optimised for mobile. If yours isn’t then it’s likely you’re missing out on a significant share of traffic and engagement.

A mobile-friendly website should include:

Google also primarily uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it evaluates the mobile version of your website when determining search rankings.

Optimise for all browsers

As above with mobile, it’s important your website is optimised for different browsers as they can render websites differently.
Commonly for example, websites can look different on Chrome to Edge.

Testing across multiple browsers and ensuring your website is fully optimised for each will give all visitors a consistent experience and prevent technical issues from quietly harming engagement.

Clear calls to action

You know what you want people to do on your website, but have you clearly set out what that is and made it easy for them to do so?

It might sound basic but it’s another point which is all too often missed, once someone has read your content – what do they do, or where do they go?

If you want people to take a certain action then let them know and make it easy for them to do so. Have an easy button or link to click which lets them:

No matter whether help in setting up tracking of engagement metrics is what you’re after, or help in giving your website a refresh to boost engagement, the Rubber Duckiee team is able to help, so book in a meeting today.