Much of the practice of search marketing is centered around getting people to your website. Having a diverse collection of links pointing to your site and ranking well in search engine results should increase the number of people visiting your pages. But what happens once those visitors arrive at your website. Are they staying? Do they read your articles or just scan your pages? Are they contacting you?
Keeping users engaged on your website has two main benefits. First, the longer they are on your site, the more likely they are to convert. If people looking for information on legal services find a wealth of it on your pages, they are more apt to trust you and contact you. And the more engaged visitors become with your content, the more likely they are to remember you and recommend your site to others. You may not even be aware of it, but you could be creating little mini brand ambassadors by simply posting good content.
Your bounce rate and time on site statistics can only tell you so much, and they do not reveal how people interact with the content on your pages. You may also want to know things like how far down the page they scroll, whether they click off pages or navigate away via an on-site link, or whether certain authors are more popular than others.
Enhance your statistics with Event Tracking
Google Analytics allows you to use Event Tracking to create events, or actions, and then record how many users engage in your chosen actions. For example, you could make scrolling halfway through an article an event and reaching the bottom of the page a separate event. You can also time how long it takes visitors to complete an action, which helps determine if they are just scrolling quickly to the bottom of the page or actually reading your content.
Other events include visits to a certain category or to posts written by a certain author. You can also track actions like how many times a .pdf file is downloaded or how often forms submissions are started and abandoned. If you offer every newsletter as a download, you will be able to tell which newsletters are the most popular and focus more on those subjects. If you are having difficulty with conversion, data on which forms users are abandoning could be used to refine them for greater completion rates.
If you use WordPress, the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Yoast can help you create and track events easily through your admin panel. It is the most popular, most comprehensive and easiest to use analytics plugins available. Events can also be added via jQuery, with the help of a web developer.
Successful websites keep visitors interested long enough for them to call you or fill out a form. Great websites keep people coming back to look for more helpful content and encourage them to share with others. The the more actions you are able to track, the better you will understand what content users see as valuable and what they tend to skip. This allows you to tweak your site accordingly. Lowering your bounce rate and increasing time on site should also help with your search ranking, sending you more new visitors - visitors you can grab with your engaging site.