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When you have an online business, you definitely want every visitor to stay on your website longer. In other words, you want that ‘session duration‘ to be higher. But is longer always better? Not really!
If they stay on your website longer just because they can’t seem to find what they’ve been looking for, it’s never going to work for your business. You need to optimize your website so that they stay on your site longer because they enjoy the experience, and that’s when they’ll keep coming back to read more stuff.
Session duration may not be a ranking factor, but it can have an indirect impact on SEO. That’s mainly because enhancing session duration can help engage users, reduce bounce rates, and lead to higher conversion rates.
These metrics affect the user experience, an important Google ranking factor. But how do you keep visitors to the website engaged longer? Well, there are SEO strategies to help you achieve that.
What is the Session Duration?
For a website to be successful, prolonged user engagement is important for search engine optimization and ranking. Basically, the session duration offers insights into how much time a customer spent on your page as well as what their pattern was.
You can calculate and monitor session duration by taking advantage of an SEO competitive research tool. The tool can help you identify what keeps users on your site longer and what your competitors do to gain better engagement. Since you can have information on your competitor’s paid and organic traffic, including top keywords, data, ranking changes, etc., it’s better to tweak your SEO strategies to get better results.
However, you can also learn more about the usage behavior using Google Analytics. It takes into account the time when a person first visited and the last act they did on the page before leaving, and that’s how they measure average session duration. If a user first visited the page at 12:00 PM and left the page at 12:20 PM, then Google Analytics will track the time stamps and record a 20-minute session. However, make sure to pay attention to factors that cannot be collected by the default analytics tracking code.
How user experience affects SEO is that Google takes into consideration the amount of time a user spends on the page, and a longer session means the content was relevant and engaging, which means it was an organic lead.
Websites with lengthier session durations get good rankings because Google considers it quality content that it wants other users to access when they search relevant keywords.
Key Factors that Influence Session Duration
If you’re interested in increasing session duration, you first need to educate yourself about all the factors that have a direct impact on it. Here are some key factors to consider:
- Quality of Content. The quality, significance, and creativity of the content are important reasons that determine how much time a user spends on the website;
- User Experience and Page View. Session duration is prolonged if the website is easy to navigate and the customer can easily browse through the website because it is user-friendly and offers what they are looking for;
- Page Load Time. If the page takes too long to load, a visitor simply abandons the website, which reduces session time significantly. Average session duration can increase exponentially if the load time is fast, and the bounce rate will decrease;
- Mobile FriendlinessMany people visit their favorite pages and websites on their mobile phones and even tablets, which means the interface for the apps and mobile view needs to be equally interactive, with good quality navigation to keep the visitors on the website longer;
- Internal Links. When a customer visits a website, if there are links that reroute them to other parts of the website based on their interest, it is considered a good user experience as they can spend more time, thus increasing the average session duration.
Actionable Strategies to Boost Session Duration
Once clear about what affects session duration, you can tweak your SEO strategies to boost engagement. Here’s what you can do in this regard:
#1 Create Engaging Content for User Interaction
An efficient and organic way to increase average session duration is to create engagement with the users. In order to create written or visual content, companies must know their audience, competition, and expected outcomes from visitors in order to create space for a longer session duration.
Catchphrases in headings, trending topics, relevant visuals, and interactive content are all ways to generate engaging content. Understand that if the content that pops up for the users is relevant to their requirements or interests, it improves user experience and generates a longer web page view.
#2 Offer Relevant Information for Improved User Experience
Understanding the purpose of visitors on a website is essential to creating informative content, visually appealing layouts, and overall UI/UX that offer visitors more than what they came for.
For example, if someone has searched for ‘how to renovate my living room with minimum budget,’ the search should show blogs with tips and guides on rearranging as well as some visuals of appealing living rooms.
#3 Take Advantage of Multimedia Elements
Content now means more than good text; there can be relevant and engaging videos and pictures or perhaps diagrams and infographics that keep a user engaged.
Videos can automatically increase the average session duration as people may spend time watching the video.
#4 Work on Your Content Strategy
Quality of content means good work done; however, content strategy means understanding the mindset of the audience, realizing what would catch their eye, and creating a plan to make that happen.
This is one of the most convenient ways to stay up-to-date with websites. You can do it using various research tools that help analyze user data and their behavior.
#5 Focus on Improving the Navigation Structure
The session duration can be increased by offering an interactive web page view that responds to visitors’ requirements.
Intuitive navigation plays a big role in reducing the average website bounce rate, as it helps find relevant information more conveniently. An example of this is a restaurant’s website with its entire menu easily available for customers to peruse.
#6 Work on A Mobile Friendly Version
In the current digital space, every web page should have a mobile-friendly version that offers easy-to-navigate, up-to-date information. Stats show that 58.67% of the total online traffic in 2023 was through mobiles, which offered a higher conversion rate.
Therefore, it makes sense to have a responsive website with compressed images, visible buttons, simplified menus, etc., for a seamless mobile experience.
Optimize Loading Page Time
As slow-loading pages frustrate visitors, you can’t afford to take that risk. Google has confirmed that the bounce rate increases by 32% when the load time for your mobile site goes from 1 sec to 3 sec. To tackle the issue, you can try various techniques. For instance:
- Reduce the size of the image or video without compromising the resolution;
- Regularly clean the cache memory of the CMS so that Content Delivery Networks can provide optimum speed;
- Work on better coding to allow for flexibility in case changes are required;
- Club files together to reduce the requests for HTTP;
- Regular maintenance of servers and TTFB (server response time) of 200ms is the ideal response time.
#7 Make the Right Use of Internal Links
Another way to evaluate session duration is bounce rate analysis where experts can study how long is the average engagement. These engagements will be high if the content is rich and offers easy navigation to relevant parts of the website through Internal linking.
The linking strategy should follow a clear structure that anticipates the visitor’s needs and requirements with a link that takes them to the required page. The webpage should have engaging content, which should be visually appealing and easy to load.
Time on page SEO is where the business owners need to create strategies and engaging content. This leads to visitors spending substantial time on the website, resulting in better sales and return on investment.
Importance of Monitoring and Evaluating Session Duration
You can understand the user behavior as well as current trends by deploying some tools to conduct bounce rate analysis and enhance the session duration.
To get data-driven insights, the very first thing you can do is set up your Google Analytics account. Here’s what you can do:
1. Sign up for the GA4 – Google Analytics 4 Account.
2. Find and select the required report, such as ‘Website Traffic Trends’.
3. Click the edit option and metrics as per your requirement, such as session duration.
However, you must understand what performance indicators to evaluate here. Here are a few to start:
- Average Session Duration: The average amount of time a visitor spends on your website indicates the efficacy of the content. Different platforms have different parameters to measure; however, a session duration of 2-3 minutes is good;
- Average Website Bounce Rate: When users leave quickly without staying on the page too long, that’s called bounce rate. If the page time is frequently less, either the content is not interesting enough, or perhaps there is an issue with the overall user experience;
- Web Page View Per Session: The number of times a user views a page during each session is also an indicator of the success of the business and its content.
#8 Behavior Analysis to Identify Reasons for a High Bounce Rate
When the bounce rate is way higher than you want, it’s important to check the analytics and identify the cause. The classic funnel analysis can shed light on which stage of the user experience they leave due to any issue or lack of interest.
Similarly, monitoring the journey that a user takes on a page can help determine the weak areas as well as the strong areas of the user experience. Don’t forget to check heatmaps, as they can show where your visitor clicked, scrolled, or even hovered. This helps identify the strong engagement points and how well the page navigation is optimized.
FAQs
If you have any questions left, make sure to keep scrolling to find the answer to some common queries:
Q1. What Is the Difference Between Session Duration and Other Factors, Such as Bounce Rate?
The entire page time of a user on your site, where they navigate to all links, features, and sub-pages, is included in a session duration. However, the visitors on a website who leave without navigating past the first click are the ones who are tracked by the bounce rate.
Finally, how many pages a person visits during one session is known as Pages per Session; the greater the number of pages, the better the user experience.
Q2. Can Session Duration Analysis be Done With A/B Testing?
Yes, A/B testing can identify the areas of improvement for prolonging session duration. Many visual aspects can be explored such as better visuals, more direct content, page layout to test the feedback, and so on.
Even features such as internal linking, live chat, pop-ups, etc. can be explored to identify what clicks with the audience.
Q3. What Benefit Would Session Recordings and Heatmaps Have for Improving Session Duration?
Heatmaps showcase the areas where visitors navigate through the website. You can use this information to determine which areas are drop-off points for users and make content and layout improvements in that section. User recordings can give you an insight into the actual journey a visitor takes on your page.
Conclusion
Session duration is an important metric to track. But, it’s important to understand that there really isn’t an answer regarding ‘what is a good average visit duration for a website’. Each website has its own set of requirements, and as long as those parameters are being met, the session time can increase exponentially.
Still, it makes sense to use the right SEO software to analyze user behavior and monitor whether your content strategy delivers the best results. That’s how you can make informed decisions that help your business grow.
