Keeping Users On Your Site Longer

After exploring some of the most well-known web metrics used today, I found myself fascinated by time of visitor on site. This statistic is measured by looking at time stamps, such as when the visitor arrives on the site and when he/she arrives on a new page, either within your site or on a new site completely. Many web marketers want users to spend as much time on their site as possible. And it only makes sense, right?

Benefits of keeping users on a site are plentiful:

- Visitors are learning more about your company, brand and its offerings
- Increases likelihood that they are converting, either through a web form or transaction
- High activity and time spent strengthens your search engine rankings
- Visitors are paying attention to you and not a competitor

So we know it’s important to keep users busy on your site. But how do we do that? There are a number of ways that web content and web design professionals can work together to help boost the length of time that visitors spend on a website. Here are some effective strategies:

- Optimize the site – In this age of broadband bandwidth and 3G and 4G on mobile, no one wants to wait for a site to load. If your site is not optimized to load efficiently, people will immediately bounce. On the contrary, fast load times with easy to navigate site structure will keep users on the site longer and will increase the likelihood of them returning.

- Add videos - Not only does video make content more engaging, but since visitors have to take time to consume the video’s information (usually 2-4 minutes is ideal), it increases duration of time on site. There is an additional benefit of the video posting as well, people tend to understand how to do a particular thing quickly and they tend to visit your blog for any sort of tutorials.

- Make it visually appealing – Sites that have high quality imagery and more simple designs and layouts are typically more ascetically pleasing. Navigation also becomes much more efficient. According to blogger Eric Bailey, a person’s eyes have to be caught before their mind can get involved, and whether webmasters like it or not, visual appeal is one quick, effective way to separate from the competition.

- Write better and longer – Blogs are a great way to attract visitors to a website through fresh, unique content. It also makes your site appear in more search results. By making these posts longer, with rich content, visitors will find value and stay within your site’s walls. Also make sure other site copy is informational with strong language to not deter visitors.

- Internal linking - Internal linking is an important aspect related to average time on site. If there are keywords and tabs that send users to other pages deep within the site, users will continue to find value. People tend to read the posts related to some particular posts and if you attach a link to some of the important words in the blog post, people will click on them.

What’s important to remember is that all brands and categories are different. There is no ideal length of time on site benchmark that brands should be meeting. Brands should instead find the time spent for the majority of converted visitors and then look to that as the goal. Conversely, this metric should not be analyzed by itself. Other metrics could reveal that too much time on site is actually negatively affecting a brand. For example, users might be getting frustrated or lost. Time on site should always be examined with other metrics in mind to truly determine if users are satisfied with their site visit.