The importance of an interactive website

By Scott Hackett

Founder

When experiencing a business for the first time, would you want them to be friendly and inviting or expressionless and hostile? That can be the difference between an interactive website and a non-interactive one. Your website is the face of your business and first impressions count, if visitors don’t like the experience, they have on your website they won’t come back. 

In this increasingly digital world, it’s not enough to put some content on your website and hope that it’s enough to entice visitors to buy from you. Having an interactive website is extremely important, and in this article, we’ll be explaining why. 

An interactive website is one that communicates and encourages interaction with users. By interaction, we mean more than just giving visitors the ability to click and scroll, although these are important too. Providing users with content that is entertaining, collaborative, informative, and engaging is the key objective of an interactive website. 

An interactive and responsive web design will not only display the attractive content you create, but it will also compel visitors to connect with the website. It’s essentially the difference between talking at someone and starting a conversation. The website does this by asking visitors to take simple or more complex actions to continue the website experience. These actions might include: 

• Pressing play on a video 
• Skipping an ad 
• Sharing 

• Voting 
• Playing a game 
• Entering their location 
• Using a basic tool (e.g., a budget calculator) 
• Answering a question 

• Selecting something 
• Commenting 

 Through actions like these, users can learn about your business and what you do, and the information collected from these interactions can influence a more meaningful experience for the visitor. 

Increase dwell time on your website 

When you add more interactive features to your website like a video, the visitor might watch the video and get more familiar with your business and brand, and as a result the time they are spending on your site will increase (dwell time). The impact of this is it tells Google that users are visiting your website and finding what they are looking for, which is a sign of high-quality content. 

So, Google might in turn rank your website higher for a specific keyword or potentially multiple keywords. Also, the bounce rate (the amount of people leaving your website after only a short time spent on there) will be minimised. The more interactive elements you have to keep users engaged with you, the longer they will stay on the site and the better results you will likely have. 

Better conversion rate 

As a business, one of the main goals of having a website is to help your visitors convert into a paying customer. Having an interactive site is an integral part of this. For example, if a local business offers driving experiences and puts a video on their website demonstrating the unique features of the experience and showing previous customers taking part, it will not only increase the time spent on the website, but also increase social proof. 

Highlighting what you’re selling to users in an interactive way helps make you more memorable and make them more likely to convert. Also, it could possibly increase future sales through positive reviews and word of mouth spreading if customers have had a good experience with you. 

Improve user experience 

The user experience is extremely important, both from a search engine point of view and encouraging potential customers to make a purchase with you. Visitors that see value in their experience and what you’re offering them are more likely to come back again. This opens up a whole new range of opportunities for them to explore your products and services in more detail after winning them over with the initial impression. 

From the perspective of SEO, extending your average session duration and reducing bounce rates is a good indicator to search engines that your website has quality, useful content. The experience you provide should always have the user in mind, how your website is going to fulfil their needs and offer them value, by doing this you can secure brand loyalty from your visitors and customers. 

Scope for personalisation 

As we’ve seen, website interactions can be measured, which is very beneficial to businesses and marketers. Seeing what users are clicking, when, where, and how can help you learn about them and apply these learnings to creating a better website experience.  

There could be ways to make an even more tailored experienced for each visitor, people like to feel special and that their individual needs are being catered for. An interactive design for your website can help with that and ultimately this will drive sales. With more detailed data you could: 

• Direct them to exactly what they’re looking for 
• Produce more relevant content 
• Show them offers they can’t refuse 
• Increase interactions for more investment in your brand 
• Offer a customised, personal experience 

Earn higher quality natural backlinks for SEO 

When you have a useful, interesting, and bespoke website design that’s successful at engaging visitors, more people will want to link to your website from their own, which can be invaluable. Not only can they direct traffic to your site when people click on the link, but also Google recognises links from other websites as a vote of confidence for your site. 

Natural backlinks are a well-known ranking factor with Google’s algorithm using their presence to help with their determination of where your website should rank in the search results. Building backlinks is a key part of successful SEO and the more of them you can win naturally by being a high-quality website, the less time, money, and effort you will need to spend overall. 

Conclusion 

Having an interactive website is essential to the success of your digital marketing strategy. The benefits above are all important to growing your online presence and customer base as well as working your way up Google rankings. 

A bespoke web design from an experienced and knowledgeable agency like Deliver can help you achieve your goals for marketing and business development. Our team can offer website design Wirral that is unique to you and your business to reflect who you are as a brand as well as being built in a way that it will efficiently attract and convert traffic.