Your website is one of the single most important tools your business has. It’s the destination that all your marketing channels are driving back to, and like a brick-and-mortar business, when someone lands on your website, they expect to find what they’re looking for, be that simply browsing (information-gathering) or making a purchase (conversion). And like your brick-and-mortar business, we don’t want masses of tire kickers – we want higher quality visitors that will engage with the site and progress on their customer journey. It’s quality over quantity, and it’s totally achievable with the right strategy in place.
Optimisation: Setting your website up for better engagement
No, we haven’t put the cart before the horse by talking about optimisation first – this element lives in every part of your website, from design to build to populating, and leveraging. The road to quality website traffic begins with strategic website optimisation. The words and links you use on your website, the structure, the quality of images, and the backend metadata all come together to tell Google how relevant your website is to potential visitors. Get your target audience and website optimisation right, and you’re rewarded with quality website visitors. We’ve seen a 106% increase in engagement time by focusing on this during our recent website rebuild. Was it simple? No – there’s a lot of technical and creative work involved. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Content: Build customer knowledge, build quality content
You can create content all day, but if it’s not targeted to your ideal customer, it’s just a waste of time. We can’t overstate the importance of high-quality, relevant content, be it written, audio, or visual. Before building content, build your customer knowledge. Once you know your customer, you can optimise content for them – engaging headlines, quality images, keywords and search terms, and calls-to-action. Quality content attracts quality visitors. For example, we began creating specific content for LinkedIn, knowing this is where our target market spends their time. This has resulted in a 79% increase in LinkedIn referrals to our website. Combine this with the increased engagement time above, and we know we’re reaching the right people, and they’re, in turn, reaching us. Is it hard? No. Is it beneficial? Absolutely.
Measurement: Using key metrics to measure quality
The best way to measure the quality of your website visitors is through GA4 (if you don’t have this, call us immediately – this is not a drill). Google Analytics 4 holds all of your website traffic data and is an absolute goldmine for insights. So, which metrics do we use to measure quality?
Engagement time
This measures the active time visitors spend on your website. By tracking their interactions and excluding periods of inactivity, we can see how interested they are in the content they’re viewing. We’ve seen a 344% increase in website views with a 106% increase in engagement time between our old and new websites, which tells us quality visitors are finding quality content.
Events per session
This measures the average number of actions users take during a visit. Events of importance can be customised, and can indicate engagement levels through actions like clicks, downloads, form submissions, scroll time etc. Events per session have increased by 100% since our website rebuild, with a 42% increase per user. Paired with behaviour data, we’re seeing higher quality of visitors making desired interactions.
Traffic sources
These show you where your visitors are coming from and include direct, organic, social, referrals, and paid. Understanding these sources helps ensure you’re making the right content for the right customers on the right platforms to attract high-quality visitors for better engagement and conversions. For example, we saw a 79% increase in traffic from LinkedIn by producing platform- and customer-specific content and driving quality visitors back to a highly-optimised website.
The quality-over-quantity investment
Your website is the core of your business’s online presence. Focus on attracting meaningful visitors through SEO and targeted content, and keep stock through GA4 metrics. Our own success with increased engagement proves the value of quality over quantity. Invest in website optimisation and relevant, engaging content – you’ll be glad you did.
Talk to one of the Energise team today about optimising your digital marketing to attract quality, not quantity.
