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Want To Increase Average Time & Page Views Per Visit?

In connection to how I lowered my bounce rate on my blog, I also increased the number of pageviews, pages per visit as well as the average time on site.

Increased Pageviews and Pages per Visit

So how was it done? One of which was by use of the “Yet Another Related Posts” WordPress plugin. By using that plugin, my blog’s post gets linked to about 5 others posts. However, that’s not all there is to it – in the blog post itself, I manually linked words to different parts of my blog. This helps increase the pages per visit because when I link to something of related interest in the blog, visitors can find out more about what’s on my blog.

Even if you have regular visitors to your blog, it’s a good idea to embellish them with a link so that they don’t have to go and find the link for themselves. This helps them to refresh their memory on good stuff that’s on your blog as well as bringing new attention to the good posts that you’ve made before.

By doing so, this naturally increased the pages per visit and the pageviews for the blog.

How To Increase The Average Time On Site

The easiest and fastest way to do so is by using multimedia (video, audio, flash, et cetera) and graphics. With the use of graphics, you quickly capture your readers attention. And once you’ve done so, you want to engage the visitor to read what you’ve got to offer. There are many ways to do this – such as using recent comments, most popular post (which is a plugin itself – not working for me though, some coding error I’ve yet to discover), et cetera.

The one factor that really lowered my bounce rate and increased the average time on site other than the internal linking, was the use of audio and video – it has been claimed that it’s proven to increase stick rate on a site, I tested it and the claim is true.

I use a flash Mp3 player and have it displayed as very first thing after the title so that my visitors can instinctively click on it to hear me. Previously, I had been using Odiogo – an auto text-to-voice reader plugin which worked pretty well but didn’t really help with my stick rate.

Once I changed to using a real, human voice to read it, the stick rate dramatically increased. This also works with using any video that’s embedded into the blog. It’s best to use more than 1 video so that your visitors can have a little more to watch – take note that most of the time, your visitors may only watch the very first video.

With regards to the videos, I mostly use YouTube videos. Most people tend to embed videos and then leave it be – however, if you want to keep the videos on track – in YouTube, where you can get the embed code… click on the icon beside it and uncheck the “Include related videos” checkbox.

By doing so, the code will generate the video to be shown on where you embed but it doesn’t show related videos which can be potential leaks of your video when it finishes.

I haven’t tested as to whether using the related videos will help with the stick rate but if you really want to show something that’s related, why not embed that other related video as well? By giving too many choices, it might prove to be harmful instead and you will lose what your blog post was targeting to address.

Tagged with: blog

Filed under: Blogging

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