7 Steps To A Stickier Website

It’s three simple letters that make up SEO, but the reality is that search engine optimization is far from straightforward. It’s takes a brew of equal parts science, art, and algorithm guesswork to make it just right. To make things even more complicated, just when you think you have the perfect mixture, the search engines add new details that send you back to the drawing board.

Further compounding the issue is that there are elements to SEO that aren’t visible right off the bat. Included among those elements is the importance of a sticky website. If you have a website that doesn’t have sticky qualities, your search engine rankings may start to slip. Most businesses simply aren’t aware that their site is about as sticky as greaseproof paper.

What exactly is a “sticky website?”

As the words suggests, a website that is “sticky” is one that has content that will keep the internet user on its pages for an extended period of time. The longer a visitor stays, the stickier the site is considered. It is those types of sites that also bring people back for more.

Stickiness isn’t just important for search engine ranking, it can also be great for your business. The reality is that the longer people hang around on your site, the more likely it is that they will either buy or request more information. The same rules apply with repeat visitors, as they will grow loyal to your business and make your site the only place to go for their purchase needs. The stickiness of your site has a direct impact on your ranking.

How to make your site good and sticky.

Take time to blog, and do it properly. Regular posts are fine, but if they are bland and boring, people just won’t come back for more, no matter how regularly you post. Try to deliver topics that are informative, interesting, and helpful. How-to guides are great, as are tips lists. If you find that visitors have been asking you the same questions over and over, write a blog article that answers those questions.
Make everything on your site shareable. Social media has turned the average internet user into a sharing monster, so take advantage of that. On-click share buttons are a great way to engage your audience, as well as tempting them into sharing your info with their network.
Make space for comments. You can get great feedback by allowing users to comment, and you can also make your site very sticky. People love to see if anyone has responded to a comment they left, which means they will return to your site to see what’s being said. That all adds up to you taking time to replay to comments that are left.
In order to make your site more useful, think about adding some helpful tools in there. For example, if you have a site about dieting, think about including a calorie counter.
One great way to keep visitors right where they are is to promote related posts. If the content on a blog is interesting, it becomes easy to get caught up in reading multiple posts. This happens when there is a “related posts” link set up at the bottom of the page.
Multimedia is another great way to engage visitors and get them to stick around. Polls, videos, and all kinds of interactive little tools are often too much for the average user to ignore. Again, people will stay longer and will come back for more.
Title feeds are another thing that can get visitors excited when they arrive at your site. Seeing that a new blog post has just gone live can make them stay longer than they planned to.