Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Website Design Tips	July 23, 2007

More Revenue, Same Customers

Capture more frequent visitors to your website

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

Designing a good website is not easy.

Many interconnecting elements have to be correctly executed to achieve profitability.

Even when your website is created, how can you know if it wouldn't benefit from a tweak here or there?

One good indicator is how many repeat visitors you generate.

If your website is loaded with fresh content, easy to use, easy to read and generally a pleasurable experience, then you're going to generate repeat visitors.

Those repeat visitors do wonderful things for your website, like increasing sellable advertising inventory and enriching your online community.

But if your website has meager content offerings, is confusing, has poor navigation or is rarely updated, it's likely that no visitors will return.

Repeat visitor metrics come standard with most web analytics software, so you should already be aware of yours.

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One way to help boost your repeat visitor count is to ensure that your website has good "content webification."

That means offering users content in more ways than text on a screen.

Users today can watch videos, play games or listen to audio on many of their favorite topics, and websites that post new content in these platforms frequently get higher repeat visitor counts.

Be careful with content webification, though. You want to avoid adopting every new web gimmick that comes out.

If you're publishing information on tax legislation changes, your audience is probably not going to want updates on their mobile device, or to play a tax code game.

But they may want to listen to audio chapters of the updates if they don't like to read.

The key is to avoid using technology because it seems cool. Selectively use technology that will enhance your customer's experience with your products and turn them into frequent website visitors.

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Another key to increasing repeat visitor counts has more to do with not driving away visitors than attracting them.

Your website should be easy to understand.

If your repeat visitor counts are dismal, it could be because your website's labeling and language is confusing.

Your forum, for example, should be called "Forum," or maybe "Discussion Board," but not "Soapboxes" or "The Grapevine."

How many first time visitors to a website will know what "Soapboxes" means?

People don't visit a website because its areas are cleverly named. They visit a website because it's loaded with valuable content.

The longer it takes users to find what they're looking for on your website, the more likely they are to leave your website for a competitor.

So name the areas of your website clearly and give the visitors what they want as fast as possible and they will be more likely to return.