3 Steps to Increase Your Page Views per Visit

You’ve worked hard and prepared a big meal for your guests. There’s a full spread, including snacks, appetizers, salads, meats, veggies, and desserts. But it all goes to waste, and the only thing that’s eaten is a bowl of pretzels. What happened?

The same thing’s happening when your content site’s Visitors only touch one or two pages during a browsing session. 

You think to yourself: Look at all this content, I have pages that cater to topics my audience wants, I have different types of content like video, white papers, and light reading, I have guided navigation and search, and still, they come in they hit one or two pages and leave, what gives?

There’s one metric that you can look at that can help you understand user engagement and how to generate multipage sessions: Pages per visit.

For a content site, your pages per visit metric is a good indicator of the quality of your content, navigation structure, and overall user experience (Patel, n.d.). It’s also interconnected with the visitor characterization metric of visit duration and the engagement metric of bounce rate. (Bateman, n.d.) When taken together with these metrics, you can learn about how to improve your content, optimize your site, and increase your page views per visit.

Just think about it, instead of all that work going to waste, you can create an experience where your guests happily graze from one page to another. It’s a clear indicator that your serving up good content. But to reach that goal it takes a site navigation structure and in-site search that works, at speeds that satisfy users need for instant information (Bateman).

So if you're looking to increase your page views per visit, focus on these three areas:

1. Content: High quality, evergreen content
2. SEO: Produce a lot of content, link to other high-traffic sites, use keywords in your writing 
3. Site Optimization: Make sure your site's fast, your pages are well designed, and you provide recommended content

A Short Note on Goals

Your ideal page views per visit depends on the goals you have for your site. Since you’re in the content game, it’s safe to assume that you want your visitors to browse, download, and share your content. These actions enhance the equity of your content site and brand, because people are getting what they came for, and page views per visit is one indicator that you’re on the right track.

Two or three pages per visit may work for some, while eight to ten may be the right number for others. Do you want people to share your content so you can generate more traffic and thus ad revenue? Do you want people to book you for speaking engagements? Do you want people to sign up for premium content? Think in terms of what you want people to do on your site, then structure it in a way that leads people to take that action and “convert”….before they bounce.

One way to better understand if people are doing what you want them to do on your site is to align your page views per visit, bounce rate, and repeat visitor metrics. Are repeat visitors browsing more pages during their sessions? At what point do they bounce from your site? Do they bounce before they take an action that you consider a conversion? If you’re wondering why, you could find an answer by posting a one question exit survey before they close the browser.

Content That Keeps 'Em Clicking

So what are some of the content and site design moves you can make to maximize conversions and multipage browsing sessions? 

Think of your site strategically and look at elements related to content, user experience and guided navigation. SEO and Content expert Neil Patel recommends creating great content that’s optimized for search and evergreen, while also having a site that’s blazing fast, and strategically promotes content (Patel).

As with all things content, quality is critically important. Smart, well-written, error-free work is the minimum standard. Relevant, supporting graphics and well-produced video also have a positive impact but once you have those in place, what's next? 

Search and Content Optimization

The next step is making certain you have a sound SEO strategy. One basic tactic is writing with the keywords you need to drive traffic  in mind. Then, create content known as "evergreen", it's content that has a long shelf-life and isn't dependent on news trends. Think about your editorial calendar, and write about problems that matter to your customer. Think about what keeps your customer awake at night, then identify those needs and select topics that address tthem. A strategic approach to how you create content is also helpful, as filling the content pipe can be a challenging task. Create “hero content” that’s easier to break apart and reuse, repurpose, and reconfigure so you can fill the void consistently (Didner, 2015).

Site speed can also have an impact on page views per visit. Site speed can be improved by simple tactics like minimizing the size of images and graphics. Downscaling images can quickly take 20Mb site pages down to less than 2Mb. Google has a useful tool called PageSpeed Insights that you can use to figure out what’s slowing down your pages. You might be surprised at what you find, and how simple tasks like downscaling can improve user engagement and conversions. Patel cites that slower sites see a 11% fewer page views, and for big players like Amazon and Walmart, every second of improvement can yield 1-2% improvement in conversions (Patel).

Finally, think in terms of strategic promotion of the content that’s on your site and how it can drive more pageviews. Guide your users with a sidebar that promotes related content, link to old content within your articles, and elevate fresh content though both sidebars and recommendations.

Once you make these changes keep an eye on your pages per visit metric and ensure that it’s moving closer to the goal you’ve set. To monitor it, you can set a goal within your Google Analytics report, here’s a template you can place in your advanced dashboards. Soon you’ll find that your sites’ guests are leaving full and satisfied, and your site’s not full of unwanted, leftover content.

References

Bateman, S. (n.d.). Pages per visit overlooked and vitally important. Promise Media. [Blog]. Retrieved on October 19, 2018 from https://www.promisemedia.com/content-development/pages-per-visit-overlooked-and-vitally-important

Didner, P. (2015). Global content marketing. McGraw Hill Education: New York, New York.

Patel, N. (n.d.). How to increase your pageviews by visitor. NeilPatel.com. [Blog]. Retrieved on October 18, 2018 from https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-increase-your-pageviews-per-visitor/