← Simple SEO and Marketing, Business Growth, Organic Marketing, Copywriting, Online Business, Blogging, Content Creation
Simple SEO and Marketing, Business Growth, Organic Marketing, Copywriting, Online Business, Blogging, Content Creation
Ep 210// 8 Creative Ways to Boost Average Time on Page for Better SEO
00:17:18
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All right, y'all.
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So today we are going to chat about an SEO factor that not everybody thinks about when they are talking about getting more traffic to their website. And that is the average time on page. And if you're like, what the what faith? I don't even know what that means, then make sure that you listen in and take notes because I'm going to break it all down in very simple, normal, human terms. But in implementing these strategies can really help to boost your back end SEO efforts and help put all of your content marketing work to better use so that you can work smarter, not harder. And get the traffic that's going to get you the leads and the sales that you want and need for your business. Are you ready? Let's jump in. Hey there fellow entrepreneur.
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Welcome to simple SEO and marketing.
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Do you want to grow your business.
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With sustainable traffic sources? Have you heard about the power of search engine optimization? And you want to take advantage of it to get more traffic, more eyeballs on your business. But when it comes down to it, does SEO feel complicated and hard to implement? Are you tired of wondering what in the heck to do with your website to get more traffic and more leads knocking on your door? What if I could tell you that there was a simple, proven system for using SEO, blogging and copywriting to get leads from your website and not just any leads. Hi, converting lead. Hey, I'm Faith Hannon, wife, mama, copywriter, SEO strategist and barrel racer. And for the last eight years, I've been figuring out what works and what doesn't work in the world of online marketing to get organic traffic. And now I'm here to share all the things I'm learning in the trenches of SEO, copywriting and content marketing. How does 300%, 500% or even 12,000% more, more traffic in a year sound? What could your business do with that kind of traffic increase? How many more people could you help? So listen in and prepare to take note. I'm about to drop simple, actionable SEO marketing and copywriting tips, all with a heavy dose of Jesus loving encouragement. Let's get you more traffic and more leads so you can help more people with your God given gifts.
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So when we're thinking about SEO and improving our websites so that we can get more website traffic and more leads from that traffic, and ultimately more sales from that traffic. Sometimes it's really easy to forget the little things and get caught up in the big shiny, you know, ooh, this new tactic, this new thing. But I'm gonna help you rein it in today because we're gonna talk about how to increase dwell time or time on page for your website. So quick definition time. If you don't have my SEO terms cheat sheet, make sure you grab that. But here's a quick definition, okay? So the different. There's some differences in terms, but we're going to use them interchangeably for the purposes of this podcast. Okay. So dwell time means the total time from when somebody clicks on a search engine result, like type something into Google, sees the result, they click on your page. Dwell time means the time that they stay on a page before returning back to Google or Bing or whatever search engine that they're using. Okay. Time on page means the time that somebody spends on a specific page until they go someplace else. Okay. So the measuring for these metrics has changed over the time, over time it's kind of irrelevant to this discussion. And then bounce rate means like when somebody comes to your website and then they leave your website without taking any action. Like now we need to remember that Google's whole purpose, right? A search engines whole purpose is to get the right information in front of the right people, right? To categorize information and get it in front of the right people. And so Google and other search engines reward sites when the information appears to be the right information for that person. So what happens when somebody comes to your website or they search in Google or Bing or whatever and they see your blog post or your static website page and they click on it and then they click back to Google quickly. What that tells Google is, oh snap, this is not what they are looking for. Maybe this isn't valuable content or maybe there's errors and it's a poor user experience. And so one of the things that we can do within our website for relatively not very much work is to very strategically try to increase our average time on page. Now this is a metric that you can get inside of your Google Analytics in literally two seconds. Okay. You can just go into the search bar up there in your Google Analytics, Google Analytics and type in average time on page in whatever month you're looking up data for. And I actually do recommend tracking that because I want you to be able to see if your efforts are working or not. Okay? But today I want to talk about some really simple things that are pretty darn creative that you can do to help increase the average time on page. Okay. And rather than split hairs between dwell time and time on page and bounce rate, like we're just going to talk about how to help somebody stay on your website longer once they find you. Okay? Now here are eight tips, eight creative tips to help increase your average time on page.
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Okay?
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The number one, number one tip is I feel like one of the most obvious and it's your page load time. Because if it takes a hot minute for all of the stuff on your website, your page to load, somebody's gonna leave, they're just gonna bounce. They're like, I ain't got time for this. This feels like dial up. Peace, deuce. I'm out, right? There's a lot of things that can go into page load time, and I'm not gonna go into that a ton on this podcast. But think things like a small file size for your images, okay? Having tons of ads on a page can help or can actually really hurt your page load time, okay? Having really big file sizes, having a ton of videos, right? Maybe even using like a poor website host, all of those things can negatively impact your page load time. But we're not going to go into that a ton, right? There are so many ways out there to check your page load speed. Page speed Insights, which is pagespeed.web.dev is probably the simplest and one of the ones that I like to use the most. But again, we're not going to spend our whole lives talking about page load time. Today, the number two creative way for you to boost your time on page is your pop up timing and ease of exit. Now, by ease of exit, I mean how easy is it for somebody to get out of that dang pop up? Now, the metrics are clear. Pop ups do increase lead magnet sign up, right? Like it's a thing, it's going to stay a thing. We're not going to get away from popups. I'm not against popups, but if I can't get out of that dang popup without a Harvard degree because your X out button is the same color as the background or it's hard to find or whatever. Like, I'm gone. I do not want to consume your content bad enough to spend my whole life trying to get out of that popup. Okay? And I think that's pretty common. All right? So if your pop up is not easy to exit out of, people are leaving. And I get that that's tricky, right? Like, I have to. I've built my own web, my own websites. I get that sometimes formatting the pop up is tricky. However, it can absolutely kill your time on page. If it's hard to exit the pop up or it is really too soon and a user experience In a, like when a user enters your website, all right, like don't hit them in the face with a pop up right away. Like, let them get a feel for the website and then bring the pop up. Because if we're here to serve people and we're slapping them in the face with a pop up that they can't get out of, that feels kind of shady McShady to me. I don't know about you. All right, the number three way that you can increase your time on page is this, to have a little mini table of contents towards the top of an article. So think about it like this. If you are writing an in depth blog on sourdough and everything somebody needs to know about sourdough, chances of them needing every piece of that content all at once is kind of slim. They might be at the place where they're trying to get their sourdough bread to, you know, rise a little higher or have a better score or whatever like that. And they don't actually need to know how to start their own sourdough starter. So what you can do to serve them better and keep them on the page longer is to hyperlink to the different sections of that blog. So maybe you have like 15 different sections because it's this super in depth complete guide and they can just click to the section that they want. And so what that's going to do, while it feels a little counterintuitive, it's going to help them actually go to the content that they want to consume and consume it instead of just being like, oh snap, this is way too long by. Okay, so a mini table of contents at the top of your blog article is a creative and kind of counterintuitive but great way to increase your average time on page. All right, number four, and this one hurts my little heart sometimes, but number four is to make your content easy to read and a lower reading level than you might think. Now I'm not saying people are all dumb. Not all dumb. God made us brilliant and wonderful in his image. However, the average reading level of Americans is not a 12th grade reading level. Okay? So you might think that you have to speak in a very highly educated college degree way to get somebody to think that you are an expert. And depending on your subject matter you might. Right? If you're writing medical reviews, you do need to sound like a doctor. Please and thank you. But if you are writing about sourdough or finances to somebody who's a baby in dealing with their finances, you need to write at a reading level that they can understand. And you need to blog like you are talking to a human. Now, for somebody that is not a. You're not a writing down processor. You maybe process more verbally then maybe you need to actually talk out your content before you type it out. When you're creating a blog, maybe you're backwards. Maybe you process better by writing than you do by talking, that's fine. But whenever, whatever you're creating needs to be written for a human and sound like a human created it. And this will really help you in so many ways, including your E, E A T for your SEO purposes. But when you can make your content easy to read and at a reading level that actually serves your audience, it helps everybody in the whole picture. Now, Yoast, the free plugin on Yoast, will actually help you with this. And I get dinged all the time, y'all. I. I get dinked all the time. They're like, why are you using these words? I get it, it's tricky, but you gotta do it. Bring the reading level down a little bit. Okay, Number five, and this one is huge, is make your content easily scannable. Now, it's not that people don't read every word of anything, but very few people read every word of everything. All right? We scan. We scan content on the Internet to pull out what we're looking for. All right? Make your content easily scannable. Use bullet points, y'all. Praise the Lord. Bullet points are allowed. They are allowed in blogging. Bless the Lord. All right, and also use your H2 and H3 text strategically. Yes. We need to have keywords in our H2 and H3 text. Absolutely. But also use those how they're intended to be used to break up different sections to help people find what they're looking for. Okay, and number six, and this is a big on y'all, is don't try to manipulate or cheat on Searcher Intent. I actually did an entire podcast episode number 202, all about why you should not try to cheat Searcher Intent. So go back and listen to that one. If you're like, I need a little more help there. But here's a synopsis. Searcher Intent is just simply what somebody is hoping to find when they type those words into Google, what's going to solve their problems. And if you're trying to cheat that, because you're like, ooh, this word has three times as many searches per month, and I want to get found more. When somebody clicks on your page with that, maybe a bigger keyword, somebody clicks over to your Page for that, they're just going to click right back, which dings your average time on page and hurt your SEO. So do not try to cheat searcher intent. All right, now number seven, tip number seven is I want you to accept experiment with video. This is not something that we're implementing yet, but I kind of want to experiment with videos embedded within your blog posts. Now you're going to have to make sure that that file sizes are not too large, that everything starts playing at the right time. The page load time is not impacted negatively. But having something to watch or look at or catch your eye visually when somebody comes on a page typically does help time on page, as long as it doesn't negatively impact load time and it actually flows with the content. Okay, and tip number eight is this. Make sure you're linking to other relevant content. I want you to think through where somebody is within their customer journey, within their buying journey when they're coming to this piece of content and link accordingly. Yes, you could have things set up so that they link automatically to different blog posts or promote other blog post, but as a human who is smarter than a fifth grader and smarter than a computer, you, you should know your content well enough to know, oh, I have this post or this post or this post that would flow into that well, which will help your average time on page. Because somebody's going to click over for one blog, read that and then go read another blog and then read that and go read another blog, which ultimately helps your SEO and the entire user experience on your website. So quick recap the eight things, eight creative ways to boost the average time on page for your website are. Number one, page load time. Make sure that is very, very good, y'all. Number two, pop up timing and ease of exit. Don't hit people in the face with a pop up and then make it impossible for them to leave because they gone. Number three, mini table of contents at the top of each article hyperlinked to different sections in the blog. Number four, make your content easy to read and in a reading level that suits your audience, talk like a human. Number five, make it easily scannable. All right, Use bullet points. Use your H2 and H3 and H4 text strategically. Number six, do not try to cheat on searcher intent. Number seven, experiment with video. And number eight, link to other relevant content within that blog. All right y'all, some down and dirty tips for you to just implement ASAP to increase the average time on page for your website and sneakily boost your SEO. All right? If you are needing help with anything SEO or copywriting related, feel free to shoot us an email infoaith hannon.com or check out the links in the description. We love y'all and we'll be back with you next week.
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Thank you so much for listening in today. Hopefully this episode gave you some really tangible tips for better SEO and marketing to get more leads and more sales from your website. If it did, can I ask you a quick favor? Would you please share this episode with a friend and then just take 10 seconds and go leave a written review on Apple Podcasts. That is the very best way to help more Jesus loving entrepreneurs their businesses so that they can help more people with their gifts and make an even bigger impact for the Kingdom of God.
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And guess what?
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We now have a Facebook community where we can learn, hang out and laugh. Go join the Facebook group now.
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It's linked in the show notes and.
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All the other things courses, coaching and copywriting can be found at my website faith hannon.com until next time.
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God bless and I'll talk to you soon.