Do you want to increase the average time a user spends on your site? Low session duration increases your bounce rates and kill your conversions. In this article, we will cover 11 hacks to increase visitors’ average time spent on your website.
Why You Need to Make Visitors Stay Longer
The time people spend on your website is a clear indication of how they feel about it. If users are abandoning your site without spending enough time to look at it, then something is wrong that needs to be fixed.
Abandoning visitors increase your bounce rate, which in turn effectively reduces your conversions and ultimately your profits.
You can easily find out the average time a user spends on your website in Google Analytics. It is shown in your reports under Audience » Overview.
A good average for the time-spent metric depends on what kind of content you are offering. If it is a long article, and your average time spent on that page is less than a few seconds, then it needs your attention.
As a site owner, your goal is to make users stay long enough to see what you have to offer.
Here are a few hacks that you can apply to keep visitors longer on your website.
1. Tidy Up Your Design
An average web user spends less than a few seconds on a site before they decide to stay or leave. This is a very short time window, in which you need to convince them to stay. The best way to do that is by cleaning up your site’s design.
Simply look at the above the fold area of your website in mobile and desktop view. Your most important content should go up. Your users should instantly see the useful part of a page when they land on your site.
Keeping your site’s design simple and clutter-free makes it easier for users to look at it. If there are fewer things to look at, then users are more likely to focus and stay longer.
2. Improve Readability of Your Pages
We all have seen websites that are difficult to read. Make all pages on your website easy to read on all devices.
Make your font size large enough for easy reading, but small enough to avoid unnecessary scrolling.
Break large paragraphs into easy-to-read chunks. Break your articles into multiple sections, headings, paragraphs, bulleted lists, and lots of white space.
3. Add High-Quality Images
Images are the most engaging form of content on the web. As human beings, we love to look at images more than reading text. This is why you see most popular websites use fullscreen background images on their landing pages.
The best place to find quality images is ShutterStock. They have thousands of images, vectors, and illustrations that you can use on your website.
You can also find high-quality and royalty-free images on many websites.
4. Optimize and Beautify Your Images
Optimize your images before adding them to your website. Most high-quality images are also hi-resolution images. They are larger in pixels, pixel density, and filesize. Using them as it is will affect your website’s page speed.
Take a look at this guide on how to save images optimized for web.
Use image editing tools like Canva and PiktoChart to create your own graphics. By using these tools, you can create professional-looking graphics for your website.
5. Add Videos for a More Interactive Experience
Users from all over the world watch hundreds of millions of hours of videos on YouTube every day. This single fact is enough to prove how much users love videos.
Videos are one of the most effective, interactive, and engaging forms of content. Adding videos to your pages can boost user engagement and will increase the time users spend on your website.
6. Make Internal Linking a Habit
Make sure that each article or page on your website has plenty of internal links. People will not visit those pages unless you link to them. Make it a habit, and you will see your bounce rate decrease.
Internal linking is also good for your site’s SEO, and you don’t need to purchase any external plugin or tool to do that. Just make sure that you are linking to relevant articles and pages from your own website in your content.
If you are interested in using a plugin that makes internal linking super easy, then check out All in One SEO.
All in One SEO’s Link Assistant feature will automatically generate a link report for your site. You can quickly discover pages that have no internal links (orphan pages) and get relevant linking suggestions.
7. Offer Content Upgrades
Offering users content upgrades is a popular technique used by top bloggers and online marketers. Basically, you offer users a chance to get bonus content by performing an action.
This action could be anything. You can ask users to signup for your mailing list, register for a free account, or fill out a survey.
Content upgrades can effectively boost user engagement, bring back old users, and increase your conversion rates at the same time.
8. Add Comment Worthy Content
Since the early days of blogging, comments have become kind of a standard to judge user engagement. Comments are also the easiest to implement engagement tool on any website. Most website builders come with built-in comments.
The real question is how do you get people to comment on your website? An effective technique is to ask users questions in your content. Simply add your personal opinion and ask users what they think.
Here are 11 ways to get more comments on your blog posts.
9. Add Success Stories
People love stories, and they love success stories even more. Success stories, whether they are yours or someone who inspires you, have a much higher chance of going viral.
The reason is simple, we all like to see how other people have succeeded in their goals. We find these stories inspiring, motivational, and we feel compelled to share these.
Take a look at OptinMonster case studies for some examples of success stories from our users.
10. Show Credibility
Users want to know why they should trust your website. Adding photos of real people on your web pages makes it appear a lot more trustworthy. Add bios and testimonials on your pages.
Linking to your social profiles can also help you establish credibility and build influence. See these 9 ways to leverage social proof and grow your business.
Add trust marks such as secure site signs, BBB ratings, awards, and certifications to your website. It gives your users confidence to share their information or do business on your website.
11. Target Abandoning Users
No matter what you do, users are eventually going to leave your website. But that should not be the end of it. You can still give the users one last chance to convert into subscribers or customers.
Simply use OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® technology to target the users exactly when they are about to leave your site. You can use it to offer a special discount, ask them to subscribe, or take a look at some cool features that they might have missed.
Properly targeting abandoning visitors can increase returning visitors and decrease your site’s bounce rate significantly.
That’s all for now, we hope these hacks helped you keep visitors on your pages longer. You may also want to see our guide on how to use urgency to hack your conversion rates.
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