September 11, 2020
When used correctly, SEO is a powerful tool that can drive traffic to your site, boost search engine rankings, build brand awareness, and ultimately, increase sales and revenue. Utilising strategies to improve your SEO can be an effective way to drive growth within your company and achieve your strategic business objectives.
That being said, your SEO strategies will only be effective if you manage to capture your users’ attention quickly. Even though the idea that an average person’s attention span is just 8 seconds has been debunked, it is true that users are less willing to wait around for appealing content. 38% of people will leave a website if the content is unattractive, and it takes just 5 seconds for them to form an opinion about a site overall (according to sweor), meaning that you don’t have long to win users over.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the top ways to capture users’ attention with SEO in 2020.
Create engaging content
Quality content is key when it comes to capturing your customer’s attention and boosting your search engine rankings. It is no longer enough to simply publish blogs and post the odd status on social media. Your content should be tailored to your intended audience and written in a way that users will find engaging and interesting. For instance, make sure that any blog posts have a well-written introduction that will hook your readers and keep them interested. You should also focus on writing in a way that is natural and friendly. You can capture your users’ attention with content by asking questions, requesting feedback from your customers, and ensuring that your content brings value to the reader.
We also have a number of posts on our blog to help you create valuable content:
- Coming up with engaging content ideas
- Creating great content for SEO
- Building your content marketing strategy
Understand your audience
For your content marketing strategy to be successful, you must have a clear understanding of your intended audience. You should conduct thorough audience research to determine who your audience is and how they behave online. It is also important to learn about their marketing preferences – for example, do your customers prefer to read blog posts or watch video content?
Having this insight will allow you to tailor your content and connect with your target customers more effectively. This information can also be used to optimise your website and make your pages more user-friendly and appealing. Overall, understanding your audience will help you learn how to keep your users’ attention using content and SEO.
Focus on your website speed
Website speed is fundamental to SEO and it will be virtually impossible to improve your search engine rankings if you have poor loading speeds. Marketing studies show that web pages that take five seconds to load have a 35% bounce rate. Research has also found that a massive 79% of consumers won’t return to a company if they experience poor website performance. Think about it – there are hundreds of companies online offering similar products and services. With so much choice available, users are less likely to accept issues like slow page loading times. People will simply leave your site and search for an answer to their query elsewhere.
With that in mind, you must optimise your web pages and focus on increasing usability. Some suggestions to help you improve your page load speed include enabling compression, reducing redirects, and improving the service response time.
Remove potential distractions
Your page loading speed is important, but you must also place a special focus on your website design and remove potential distractions. If a user lands on your site and becomes distracted or frustrated by things like pop-ups and redirects, then you are likely to experience a high bounce rate. This will harm your search engine rankings and damage your SEO efforts. You can conduct a website audit to identify any issues with your site that may frustrate your users. On that note, here are some tips to improve your website design:
- Minimise the number of advertisements and banners displayed on your website.
- Break up large blocks of text with headings, images, and other visual media.
- Repair any broken images or links and reduce the number os pop-ups.
- Make your site easy to navigate and reduce your site’s click depth.
The internet has opened up endless opportunities for businesses to boost sales and revenue through online channels. However, it has also increased competition and your site is likely to become lost online if you have poor SEO. Short attention spans are a particular challenge when it comes to SEO and you must create engaging content that will attract your users and keep them interested. Try implementing the above suggestions to capture your users’ attention and maximise the results of your SEO and digital marketing.
