Bounce rate and customer engagement are among the most important website aspects to monitor. If you’re not familiar with bounce rate, it’s the rate of people that leave your website from the first page on which they entered. The idea is that you want website visitors to stay on your site and visit many pages. Once you employ a variety of SEO tips to get people to your site, how do you make them stay?

There are many ways to encourage people to stay on your website longer. Here are nine tricks and tips to reduce bounce rates and increase customer engagement.

1. Update Your Content Regularly

You must be consistent about adding new content to your website. Create a content plan, and add new content to your website on a regular basis. This will help drive traffic to your website.

2. Make Your Content Readable

Imagine if this article was one big wall of text. No headings. No subheadings. A few paragraphs. You’d take one look at it and wouldn’t want to read it.

Make your content readable and scannable. Use subheadings and small paragraphs that make your content easy to read, and therefore easier to engage with.

3. Target the Right Keywords

Integrate SEO strategies to help your content get found. If people find your content, but it’s not the content they’re looking for, that’ll negatively affect your bounce rate.

4. Tell a Story

Tell stories in your content to make your message resonate with customers. Storytelling is a pivotal way to drive engagement and keep users on your site for longer.

5. New Tabs for External Links

It’s great to have external links in your content. But if that link opens in the same tab and overrides your website, your customer is gone and likely won’t come back. Use the settings in your website dashboard to create links that open new tabs, so it’s effortless for your customers to come back to your content.

6. Add Creative Calls to Action

One of the main ways a customer will engage with your content is via the call to action. In most cases, this might be the only form of engagement your customer will have, so you need to make it count. Does your CTA attract attention, or is it lost on the webpage?

Make your CTA as compelling and as captivating as possible. Every aspect of it matters, so don’t be afraid to try different approaches until you get it right.

7. Make Sure Pages Load Quickly

It’s important that your website loads quickly. If people have to wait more than two seconds for your page to load, they may go elsewhere.

8. Avoid Disruptive Popups

Popups can be a great way to market to your audience and put information front-and-center. However, if your popups are annoying, unwelcome, or take away from your overall user experience, they do more harm than good. To figure out if your popup ads are good or bad, do an A/B test with and without ads and see the results and how they affect your analytics.

9. Consider Your Meta Descriptions

Just like the preview text for an email, make sure your meta descriptions are optimized. If people read them, even briefly, and don’t like what they see, they’re not going to click. Likewise, if they like what they see, but the rest of your content doesn’t match, your bounce rate will decline.

Author Bio: Katherine Rundell writes for an Assignment Writing Service and Essay Help company. She writes about website development and reaching your target audience. She also is a manager of the Best Australian Writers website.