There has been a lot of discussion at Cartoozo HQ recently. The discussions have centred on the best ways to keep your visitors returning to your website. After a great brainstorming session, we’ve come up with a few ideas we thought it would be good to share. As you will know, the whole aim of SEO is to increase visibility amongst target groups of potential customers. But search engines are not just looking for the right keywords and indexing on websites. Today, they are also looking for natural traffic. That’s not just hits on the main homepage. You want users looking at a number of pages. It is also about the length of stay on a website and the level of interaction a user has with a website. So how this be achieved? It’s a well-known fact that a website owner has seconds to attract a visitor before losing them again. Keeping visitors for longer periods and encouraging them to return involves a different set of tactics. Here are some simple ones you can do yourself: Make sure your SEO, marketing and all your content is attracting the right audience! Websites that attract the wrong people will have high hit rates but they will also have high bounce rates too. It’s an area of business we regularly help our clients with. It’s about effective branding and updating content so that it is relevant and interesting to the correct demographic. We have professional writers who understand this, and are able to create content for clients that is exactly what their target audience is looking for. You can do this yourself, or you can hire a professional like one of our writers. But the goal should always be to give your customers what they are looking for, not what you think they will like. Answer your customers’ questions. Your customers will have a definite set of questions they need answers to whenever they visit your website. Regardless of the industry you are in, their questions will all be centred on the following queries, and we have put them in the general order that they will be asking them too:

• Do I like the look of this website and is it easy to use?
• Am I in the right place?
• Whose website is this?
• Do they have what I am looking for?
• Is this a reputable website and company?
• What are these people like?
• How much does this cost?

Now take a long hard look at your website and try to answer these questions from a customer’s point of view. This will give you immediate insight into how effective your website is at retaining interest and providing answers.