If you follow the instructions in this post, you’ll learn more than you expected to, including my surprise when I found out something I didn’t know that kept people reading through my blog posts. (Hint: I do it in this one.)
You want more traffic, but you also want to keep readers on your website as long as possible. The longer they stay, the more chance there is that they’ll subscribe or buy.
But engagement is worth more than that. The search engines look at how long your visitors stay and rank you accordingly in search results. That’s because they think viewers will want to go to websites that others spend more time on. So the longer your visitors stay, the more traffic you’ll get.
What can you do to keep people on your website?
Of course, you should make your content useful and interesting. But people skim through posts pretty quickly. Here are 3 things you can do to keep people longer on your website:
- Include internal links to other pages on your website
- Include videos
- The surprise I didn’t know about until I finished writing this post!
1. How internal links help your traffic
When you link to other blog posts or pages on your website, visitors who click through stay on your website longer. As I mentioned above, the search engines like this and reward you by ranking you higher in searches.
Secret tip: You can multiply this effect by linking to your most popular posts. This works because these pages have content that people are searching for and are interested in, so people are more likely to click on links to them.
In my post, “Increase your website traffic with this simple technique,” I explain how to discover which pages get the most traffic. (And, as you see, I’m adding an internal link.) That page is also one of my posts that have the longest view time. Why? It has a video. (Read on.)
Watch this video to learn how to increase traffic by finding posts with the longest time spent on them.
2. How videos help your traffic
Videos help your traffic because people like videos and are likely to watch them — keeping them on that page longer. You can see the effect of videos by looking at your stats, as you saw in the video.
3. Surprise bonus technique! I learned a lot by this exercise
But I was surprised at some of the results. Sometimes, I couldn’t figure out why a post held the attention of visitors. But I learned an important technique — a post with several numbered sections keeps visitors on my post longer. (That’s why I’m numbering the items in this post!)
I never would have learned that without analyzing my Google Analytics stats.
Note: When you look at your stats, you’ll get irrelevant pages, such as log-in pages, sales pages, and delivery pages (where you deliver a product). If people paid for a report, they’ll spend more time on that page reading it. People spend more time on a sales page to read it and decide if they want to buy.
Look at your stats and let me know what you learned by leaving a comment because it will help others! And share this post using the Share buttons below for the same reason.