The simple secret to get people to stick around on your site

Once you’ve got people to your website, how do you make them stay?

Give a clear, concise answer to a problem or promise right at the beginning.  Don’t dance around it.

This would be the fancy hotel equivalent of offering guests quick, efficient and courteous service.  And really, it’s just plain polite.

That’s what I’ve learned writing for a fantastic site that gets more than 1.5 million visitors a month.  Almost all the readers come to the site through a keyword search, so SEO writing is incredibly important to this client.  But the next metric that they focus on is bounce rate.

Bounce rate = the percentage of people who leave your site right after they get there.

The site I write for has more than 2,000 articles.   The company-wide goal is to reduce bounce rate to 45% or lower.  Since the site depends on ad revenue, the longer people stay on the site, the more the company earns.

What the company has found, through trial and error, is that if you get to the heart of the matter right at the beginning, people will stay to read the rest of the content and even browse around.  It’s amazing to tweak the first few lines and paragraphs here and there and watch bounce rates fall from 75% to 35%.

There’s a lot to be said f or storytelling, for luring people in…sure, you can do that too.  But the straightforward approach works.  Tell them what they need to know.  Then expand.  I’ve seen the results with my own eyes.

How do you keep people on your website?