Visitor session length can reveal a lot about your website, from its usefulness to its lead generation potential. Keep reading to learn more about visitor session length, including how to boost your visitor session length!

What is visitor session length?

Visitor session length is how much time a user spends on a page.

Average session length measures the average amount of time each user spends per individual viewing session.

“Why does this metric matter?” you may ask. Typically, higher average session length equals a higher likelihood of conversion.

The longer a user spends on your site, the higher their chance is of converting.

Whether conversions for you mean filling out a contact form, requesting a service quote, or making an actual purchase — a higher average session duration is always desirable.

If a visitor spends a long time on your site, that means they value the content you’re offering and are more likely to take the steps you desire.

Here are some simple and effective ways to help boost your website’s average session length:

1.     Improve your website’s design

The overall design and usability of your site are one of the most important things to consider when it comes to session length.

Think about when you go searching the Internet for something you need. Are you going to spend more time on the website that has a clean, easy-to-use layout or the cluttered page with annoying pop-ups and excessive clutter?

Make sure you organize your site in a way that users can find everything they want intuitively. They don’t want to spend more than a few short seconds looking for the content they desire.

Typically, you want to include a simple navigation bar at the top of your page containing links to your other pages. You should also add a company logo in the top left of your page that returns the user to your homepage.

Remember to place the most important information above the fold of your page as well.

This ensures that the user sees the information they were looking for right away. Visitors usually decide to stay or not within seconds of clicking through to a page, so it’s vital to capture their attention immediately.

2.     Include high-quality images and optimize them

Including unique images is an excellent way to bolster a visitor’s time spent on your website.

High-quality images make the user enjoy looking at your page more than if they were staring at a wall of text. Original photos are also one of the best ways to show off your excellent product or service.

For product pages, make sure to include multiple images so potential customers can see the product from all angles.

Once you have created your images and included them in your page, you then need to optimize them (for Google and real users). To achieve this, make sure your images have a relatively high pixel count and density. This ensures a high-quality image that is more pleasing to the eye.

You should also optimize your images by adding image alt text in your page’s HTML code.

The image alt text is a short description that allows for people with impaired vision to know what your images are by hearing or reading the picture’s description. Search engines will also be able to see what the image contains, based on the text.

3.     Make your content clear and concise

Ensure that visitors will stay on your page by making the content user-friendly and impactful.

Include the necessary information in small paragraph “chunks” instead of cramming everything into one wall of text. This will make the content easier to follow and much more digestible for your users.

Highlight the most important sections or critical points of your topic with organized, easily navigated headings. If your content consists of a tutorial or set of directions, make sure to have a uniform heading with the same font and font size for each numbered step.

Being concise doesn’t mean you have to skip out on more specific content.

Just make it easier for the reader to process it by organizing it in subheadings under your primary headings. Visitors will be more likely to read more of your content if it’s held in small, easy-to-understand sections.

4.     Encourage user engagement

There are many ways to get a visitor to stay on a website by getting them engaged in your content beyond just reading and looking at images. Here are a few examples of ways to get your users engaged:

Comment sections

Allow and encourage all your visitors to join in the conversation revolving around your product, service, or industry in general. Comment sections will allow them to feel like they are part of the content you created.

Users can interact with you and other readers that viewed the same page. Comments are an essential section in every blog post, no matter the industry.

You can ask the reader questions in your content to encourage them to leave a comment expressing their opinion or feedback. This is a win-win for you and your users because you get to hear their views, and you will learn more about what potential customers want.

Videos

Videos are great to include on your website, especially for your product or service pages.

Here you can showcase all the great things about your service or product that users can’t get entirely out of just an image. You can do this with product demonstrations or footage of your employees performing your service.

Videos are great not only for increasing the average time spent on your page but also for spreading the word about your business. Videos are easy to share with others, and many people will want to show what they watch to somebody they know that may benefit from it as well.

Customer reviews

It’s an ecommerce staple to include a place for customer submitted reviews on a product or service page.

Including a place for people to read reviews from others and share their feedback is a simple way to get visitors engaged. People will sometimes spend just as much time reading through what other customers have to say as they do viewing the product itself.

5.     Add useful internal links

Internal linking is just including links that take visitors to another page of your website.

If users like the content of the page they are currently on, it’s easy for them to get more content relevant to what they were reading through internal links. If a page covers a variety of topics, a user can click a link in the text to a more in-depth page on the subject if they want to learn more.

Having well-implemented internal links with keyword anchor text also helps with your search engine rankings. Linking to your sites makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site. The keyword anchor text gives you another opportunity to rank for those keywords in organic search.

Do you want to increase your website’s session length?

It’s always important to have your visitors stay on your website, no matter what the purpose of your site is. By following these suggestions, you can increase your website’s average session length and, more importantly, your conversion rate!

If you want to get more tips on improving your website’s performance, contact IndustrialFX today!

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