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What is Engagement Rate? Definition and How to Increase It

Last updated: Sep 06, 2022

https://cmlabs.co/en-gb/seo-terms/engagement-rate

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What is Engagement Rate?

Engagement rate is a metric to measure the audience interactions on your website. You can find this metric if you use Google Analytics 4. The metric was created to replace the bounce rate metric in the Universal Analytics version.

In Google Analytics, the way to measure the percentages of audience engagement is to divide the number of engaged sessions with the total sessions, then the result times with 100%. Therefore, if you have 100 engaged sessions and 1000 total sessions, your engagement rate is 10%.

Factors that Affect Engagement Rate

To know how engaging your content is, you can see it from the scroll depth your audiences reach on your website. Other than that, you can also see the average time the visitors spend on a page, the number of bounce rates, numbers of shares, and the conversion number that needs to be done on the website.

You must recognize the factors that can affect the percentages of audience engagement on your website. By knowing each one of them, you can identify the problems and solutions needed to increase it.

The Importance of Engagement Rate on SEO

It is important to make your audiences engaged with your content, so your website has an optimal SEO performance. By recognizing the need to do it, you can measure how good your website’s user experience is.

Through the number of audience engagement, you may know how many audiences are involved in the purchasing process on your website. This can be a tool to measure the effectiveness of the campaign that you are currently doing.

How to Increase Engagement Rate

There are many ways you can do to make your audiences engaged with the content on your website. Here is how to do it:

Page Speed Optimization

Website visitors tend to leave the website right away if the loading process takes a long time. Slow website speed can affect the numbers of visitors that only come without doing any further interactions. It can make the bounce rate increase over time.

To increase the percentages of audience engagement, you can use small sized pictures, apply caching, remove the unnecessary plugins on WordPress, and use the fast hosting service.

Do Mobile Friendly Test

Today, more people visit websites by using smartphones than notebooks or computers. Hence, it is important for sites to display the proper display for mobile devices. It can increase the number of visitors who actively engage with your sites over time.

To make your site mobile-friendly, you can apply the responsive theme, use a simple menu, use fonts that are easy to read, reduce the number of pop-ups on your website, and utilize AMP.

Produce User-Friendly Content

The high rate of audience engagement on your site can indicate that your content provides what they need. In this case, you must produce content that is relevant with your niche as well as beneficial for your readers.

In order to produce such content, you must know your audiences first. That is why you must know what buyer persona is to help you conduct audience research thoroughly.

Choose the Proper Time to Publish Content

User-friendly content will be useless if you do not publish it at the right time. You must pay attention to the time of the publication, especially when it concerns trendy or seasonal content.

Use tools like Google Trends to see the graphs of growing trends on certain topics and monitor which one is currently talked about on the internet.

Use Call to Action Effectively

Call-to-Action (CTA) can be a solution to engage your audiences better. CTA can be used to bring audiences to read other content on your website. It can lead them to fill forms or even purchase products.

To make an effective CTA, make sure to put it in a place that can easily be seen by audiences. CTA should also have a good copywriting that can attract audiences to do certain actions per the instructions.

Share Content to Social Media

If your audiences love your content, they will happily share it to their friends or colleagues who need it. Make sure that your website provides the sharing feature since it can help you increase the engagement rate.

Build Interaction with Users

Building interaction with users on your website should be done, so they feel like they are involved. To do that, you can lead the audiences with content that leads them to discuss the comment section.