8 actionable strategies to improve website engagement

A website can have all the bells and whistles necessary to engage users and still fail to capture their attention or meet their needs.  

It’s not enough to add all the website elements you think users want. To drive real engagement, you need to understand what actually interests your users, monitor how they interact with your site—and benchmark your efforts against tried and tested website engagement strategies.

This guide explores 8 website engagement techniques that'll help you create a product experience (PX) your users love. We’ll give you tips on the best tools to use, and how to measure success along the way, so you can boost website engagement, user loyalty, and revenue.

8 website engagement strategies to improve the user experience 

You can monitor website engagement by measuring specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you how successful your site is at captivating and retaining visitors. 

But understanding how users interact with your site and identifying engagement blockers is what truly helps you better meet your users’ needs and improve their customer experience (CX). Plus, since you’re using a customer-first approach to benchmark your website engagement efforts, you save time and resources when making decisions that add to the user experience (UX). 

Let's take a look at some of these techniques, including how to implement them and the website engagement tools you can use to measure success.

1. Identify and understand your target audience

First, identify which audience your product is best suited for and understand their wants, needs, and pain points. Taking the time to pinpoint your ideal audience helps you create a personalized experience that speaks directly to user problems so they can easily find value in your product solution. 

One way to do this is by analyzing various sources of information and weaving them into a user persona to identify and understand your target audience. Here’s how: 

1. Conduct market research to better understand your product’s unique selling point (USP) and industry trends. Compare how your product stacks up against competitors, and the type of customers it attracts and appeals to. 

2. Interview and survey customers. Ask them questions about how they use your product, what problems it helps solve, and what they’d like to see more of.

3. Identify patterns in user behavior with behavior analytics software, and combine insights from social media profiles, website traffic, and hashtag use.

4. Gather your insights to develop your ideal customer profile (ICP) based on trends in your ideal customer's buying behaviors, pain points, characteristics, and demographics, including job title and geographic location.

5. Segment your customers into the user persona that fits them best to make sure you’re creating an engaging experience for each customer type. For example, you could create a self-service onboarding experience that helps each user persona find their way around your product. Add customized pro tips that add value to their individual experience and engage them from the start.

A user persona template defining personas and their main goals and objectives

2. Create compelling content 

Now that you've identified and taken the time to understand your target audience, it's time to create compelling content that meets users’ needs, adds value to their experience, and educates them on key topics.

Crafting useful content that resonates with your audience helps drive organic traffic to your website by ranking for user queries and keywords. It also builds user trust by establishing your brand as a thought leader in your industry. 

Here’s how to create content that engages your audience

• First, determine what type of content to create based on your user needs and preferred content form. Pick anything from educational videos, blog posts, podcasts, or webinars. 

• Then, define the search intent of your user and the piece of content—make sure you’re directly speaking to their pain point, and offer actionable insights to help alleviate it.

• If you're writing a blog post, use headlines to help summarize your article’s main points, so visitors can quickly scan it and still gain value.

• Create and publish your content regularly. Use content management systems to publish on a schedule, and stick to it. 

• Reference industry or subject matter experts where possible to drive credibility and topical authority.

Craft personalized content that aligns with your customer journey, including previous searches and interactions with your brand, to engage your audience. You can

• Use AI algorithms to recommend relevant content and products based on buying behavior. For example, an ecommerce company might send a follow-up email to a user who recently abandoned their cart—proposing similar products, or content like user testimonials and case studies that might help them make a decision. 

• Personalize your user onboarding experience with guides, blog posts, videos, and tooltips specific to their onboarding stage and product needs. And make sure you’re engaging users with multimedia content that varies from stage to stage to create an exciting learning experience. 

• Tailor content based on previous user interactions and browsing behavior. For example, after receiving signups for its webinar on digital transformation, a SaaS company could send a follow-up email with related content. Sending a blog on ‘What is digital transformation’ or ‘How to automate your business’ helps engage and nurture users before the webinar. 

3. Streamline your user experience  

Part of improving website engagement is making sure your site's performance is up to par with your customer's needs by enabling them to easily solve their problems. Your users need to easily navigate your website, find what they’re looking for, and perform tasks that add value and help them achieve their goals. 

Here are 4 ways to streamline your website's user experience.

Improve your website's speed

A key component of streamlining your user experience and increasing organic traffic to your site is improving your website speed. Your site should load in 3 seconds or less to rank on Google—so make sure this is one of your first optimizations. 

Here's how to optimize website speed

• Track your website loading time with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Contentsquare to determine your website speed

• Compress images and files to smaller than 150 KB, including CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files

• Use website analytics tools to give you actionable suggestions on improving website speed

Keep your website’s UI and UX design simple

The way you design your website should reflect your users’ needs, how they search and browse online, and how they interact with content. A poor website user interface (UI) and UX design can be distracting to your users or make it hard for them to complete an action, preventing them from achieving what they’ve set out to do. 

Base your design goals on displaying important website elements, like calls to action (CTAs), to your users in a way that makes sense for them and lets them easily interact with your products.  

Here’s how to simplify your site’s UI and UX design

• Keep your navigation, layout, checkout pages, and drop-down menus straightforward and easy to find

• Make categorization intuitive and ensure your most important links are accessible from your main navigation bar

• Use Contentsquare (hi, there👋) Session Replay to watch how real users browse your website and see if your customer journey is effortless. Use these insights to optimize your website design and enhance your customer experience. 

Enable an interactive product experience 

To compete in a saturated market, businesses need to look for dynamic ways to convey how their product meets the needs of their audience and serve visitors before they become customers.

Here’s how to create an interactive experience on your website

• Offer customers virtual demonstrations that showcase your product's value. For example, a SaaS startup might include interviews of product power users to display its ease of use and establish credibility. 

• Create an interactive product catalog that shows customers how your product looks or performs in real life. For example, an ecommerce company might display clips of models wearing their products and clothing to inspire visitors to make a purchase. 

• Create an immersive user onboarding experience with product guides, tooltips, learning centers, or video tutorials. Guide your users through product adoption with dynamic pop-ups and content that takes your users deeper into your product’s features.

Contentsquare provides customers with comprehensive user guides that enhance product value and boost user adoption

Improve internal linking structures

An intuitive website experience guides site visitors from one page to another with a predefined purpose. An internal linking strategy helps ensure your users keep engaging with key site pages and experiences by inspiring them to keep clicking. 

Include a page section with links like ‘Products you may like’, ‘Because you read…’, or ‘People also bought' to compel visitors to keep exploring and adding more items to their cart based on similar user behavior. 

This approach works even better for ecommerce businesses that use AI to track customer behavior, such as what they browse or buy. AI can suggest personalized products based on this behavior, making the shopping experience more relevant and engaging. By showing users items they're likely to be interested in, AI-powered recommendations increase the chances they'll keep shopping or make a purchase.

When improving your internal linking structure, make sure

• All your links have a descriptive, hyper-relevant anchor text (the text that’s visible and clickable to visitors), so users know exactly what they’re clicking on

• Link placement is separate from your main navigation view, and integrated throughout key moments and pages—like checkout, product, and landing pages—in the customer journey 

Pro tip: use session recordings or replays to see how users explore and experience your website. See where they click, and what they engage with to tailor your product experience to real user needs and sessions. 

For example, a SaaS company might watch recordings to see how users navigate and interact with their website, and then use these insights to improve their product onboarding media kit.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay capability gives you access to key user insights as they navigate your website or digital product

4. Improve mobile responsiveness 

A responsive website experience that adapts to multiple devices ensures you’re not alienating smartphone or tablet users. 

Increasing your mobile responsiveness also helps your website rank on search engines, and makes it more accessible to users no matter where they're located. This improves their experience with your brand and their ability to engage with your products and content. 

Here’s how to optimize mobile responsiveness for your website

• Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test or Contentsquare’s mobile experience capability to determine if your website offers a responsive mobile experience

• Minimize the number of steps it takes a mobile user to complete an action by removing unnecessary information or content

• Make CTAs, buttons, and menus less text-heavy, and resize buttons to match the screen size

• Place your most important information above the fold (or before the point where your user starts scrolling)

• Include a user feedback widget to ask your users about their mobile experience, and what elements you could improve

Contentsquare’s Feedback widgets let you gather valuable user feedback throughout the onboarding process

5. Add strategic CTAs 

Placing strategic CTA buttons at different points in the buyer’s journey helps users better navigate your website and follow a logical route through your sales funnel. But CTAs don’t work if they’re only focused on your desire to sell, and not on the customer journey and experience. 

Make your CTAs engaging and strategic, so their placement, content, and buttons encourage users to explore your website without putting them off. For example, instead of telling people to ‘Buy now’, you can motivate them to ‘Learn more’ and link to a related blog post with valuable information, or ‘Subscribe’ to your newsletter.

Here’s how to optimize CTAs for your website

• A/B test your CTA buttons, copy, color scheme, and other variables to determine which version of your CTA converts. Contentsquare lets you integrate experience insights with A/B testing tools (like Optimizely and AB Tasty) and filter A/B test sessions by user type. 

• Write CTA copy that offers your users genuine value and guidance, and isn’t just pushing a hard sell. Then, watch replays of user sessions on your website to check if your CTAs make sense in your user flow—and motivate customers to complete the next step in their journey. 

• Place CTAs in key engagement areas on your pages. Then, use Contentsquare Heatmaps to see where users click, how deeply they scroll, and where they engage to determine if your CTA placement attracts and engages customers.

Contentsquare Heatmaps show you key engagement areas on your website and CTAs, so you know what to improve

6. Optimize website search 

Visitors to your site should be able to easily search itand quickly find what they’re looking for. Help users explore your website with interactive search options that prevent them from manually digging around your website to find what they need—and dropping off when they don’t. 

Simply having a website search bar isn’t enough to engage visitors, especially if it’s difficult to find or use. 

Here are some ways you can optimize your website search functions

• Add auto-complete and faceted search options—like product filters based on type, color, or brand—to predict what users are searching for and make suggestions for related products or services. This way, users can misspell the name of a product and still find it. 

• Turn frequently asked questions into a comprehensive stand-alone FAQ page.

• Use merchandising and AI algorithms to suggest similar products on product pages or product detail pages and maximize sales.

• Ask users with high bounce rates if they can find everything they need, or what could be streamlined, with a user feedback widget.

7. Highlight user testimonials

Including social proof on your website helps potential customers fully understand the value of your product by demonstrating how it’s helped other users solve their problems. 

While social proof is crucial for the decision-making stage of your marketing funnel, it’s also useful throughout the customer journey. And it  can drive users to engage with your website or product at any stage. 

Here’s how you can highlight social proof on your website

• Display user generated content of your product in action on key landing and product pages

• Include customer testimonials on your website and spotlight glowing reviews on relevant product pages. For example, an ecommerce website might include reviews on every product detail page (PDP) to promote user transparency and engagement

• Showcase the results your clients have achieved using your products on your homepage and link to case studies that support your results. For example, a startup might highlight its most popular clients on its homepage to quickly gain credibility and user trust  

• Use Contentsquare Voice of Customer (VoC) to ask power users about their experience with your product and post their responses on your homepage or landing pages

Asking for written feedback through surveys helps you find out how your users feel about your product and whether or not they want to see specific improvements

8. Integrate chatbots or live chat 

Part of driving website engagement and getting users to understand your product is supplying them with the resources they need to ease their frustrations and improve their experience. 

Chatbots or live chat software helps you pre-qualify leads, build rapport with your customers, and consistently provide value by answering their questions or offering additional resources. Use chatbots to connect with your customers on their terms, and engage them with useful tips, information, and possible solutions. 

Here’s a brief list of best practices for integrating chatbots or live chat

• Offer 24/7 support: ensure customers can reach out at any time, even outside of business hours

• Personalize responses: use AI or live agents to tailor conversations based on user behavior and needs

• Pre-qualify leads: use chatbots to ask key questions that help qualify leads before passing them to sales teams

• Collect feedback: use the chat interaction to gather feedback on customer satisfaction and areas for improvement

Power website engagement with user-backed insights 

The way users engage with your website and their level of engagement depends on your ability to align your content, web design, and site elements with their specific customer needs. 

Measure the success of your strategies with user-backed insights to find out what’s working and what’s driving or blocking engagement.

FAQs about website engagement strategies