How to Increase Pages Per Visit and Dwell Time | How to Decrease Bounce Rate | Conversion Rate Optimization
No two websites are the same; yet there are aspects every brand should convey through their website such as value, a message, the product or service on offer, and a call-to-action (CTA).
And, it’s important to factor in that these key signals will change and adapt with time depending on search trends, consumer behaviors, and search engine optimization (SEO) requirements.
As we enter 2022, there are six specific ways you can design your website while knowing how to increase pages per visit and dwell time for each customer landing on your website. These factors will also use techniques of how to decrease bounce rate and deliver conversion rate optimization.
1. Nail the first impression
The first thing your website should do is captivate and speak to your customer and allow them to engage with your brand. An unclear or dull website or a website without any CTAs can lead consumers to a dead end, thus increasing your bounce rate; which, is a key factor in conversion as 88% of customers say they research a company’s website before spend their money.
When you understand your target audience, complete competitor research, inform the customer, and integrate professional-grade content to manage the first impression, your online presence will be on its way to conversion rate optimization in 2022.
In the meantime, we’ve gathered some examples of websites that nail the first impression so you can take inspiration for how to increase pages per visit, dwell time, and conversion. After all, 57% of internet users mention not wanting to recommend sites to others that are poorly designed for mobile.
- Dollar Shave Club
- Keurig
- Goliath Entertainment
- Discord
- Magic Theatre studio
- Mint
- Alice Lee
- Moment House
- Skillshare
2. Maintain consistency across the entire website (and onto other online platforms)
75% of consumers say they’ll make judgments about a website’s consistent branding or website design. Meaning, your website needs to dependably match and adhere to a branding strategy in order to maintain a customer’s attention while telling a narrative that helps the overall conversion rate optimization of the website.
To do this, you can begin with standardizing the branding to enable the same strategic logo, color scheme, values, goals, and rhetoric to be seen on each page so the brand is not lost in the experience.
This is a particularly important to keep an eye on when any deals, offers, or new services/products come onto the scene which may require new graphic design imagery, photography, copy pages, pop-ups, and social media campaigns.
Therefore, one of the biggest secrets kept by the businesses who know how to increase pages per visit and dwell time is to manufacture a brand book or style guide that can be distributed across all necessary personnel in the company.
3. Clear and concise CTAs
Let’s dive straight into looking at a successful brand website: Discord. The moment you go to their website, you are met with a clean interface, a concise explanation of the site, and two CTAs (one for Mac OSX users and the other for Windows users). There’s no need to scroll down and there’s no need to look further or decipher the jungle of a unique website, making Discord a company that knows how to decrease bounce rate.
With this, Discord is met with upwards of an astounding 300 million users as of 2021. Since launching in 2015, they’ve driven user engagement to build over $120 million in revenue by the end of 2020 across four billion minutes of communication each day.
According to Hick’s Law, the more choices a customer has, the less likely they are to spend money with your brand or perform the overall goal. Hence, a clear CTA at the start of the user journey is imperative for conversion rate optimization atop having website consistency and a first impression to succeed.
4. House reviews and testimonials
Ignite has looked into the need for a website to have reviews and testimonials. They’ve found 73% of consumers will trust a brand more when they are transparent with reviews, allowing conversion rate optimization trends to increase by 270%.
It was also found that customers will read an average of 10 testimonials on a website prior to placing an order for a product or service. Even then, the reviews most read and valued are those written within the last 2 weeks.
With this rich data, it’s vital to understand how to decrease bounce rate trends and increase conversion rate will involve implementing reviews from current clients to convince your buyers to complete their travel through the order funnel.
As 91% of online consumers aged 18-34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, it’s important to have them in an accessible place. For example, a key feature for how to decrease bounce rate trends is to have some reviews or testimonials on your home page followed by a CTA button to take users straight to a landing page dedicated to positive and recent reviews.
5. Prioritize customer experiences
When ensuring your customer has a positive experience navigating your website and completing their personal goals, there are three aspects you can control and maintain:
- Maintain fast and amicable communication
Customers may want to chat, and they want to know they’re engaging in a brand that values customer communication.
Since 89% of customers will read businesses responses to reviews and are enticed by the prospect of a ‘chat now’ button which increases websites’ sign-up form retrieval by 31%.
Therefore, in order to effectively decrease the bounce rate of your customers while increasing their engagement with your website toward purchase, you need to provide your customers with the in-demand communication strategies.
Here are examples of fast website communication:
- Answering questions in GMB
- Using Google Posts
- Responding to comments in blogs
- Offering a contact form
- Providing an online chat service
- Responding to reviews
- Simplify and clarify the customer journey
80% of all customers expect their experience with a brand to be representative of the value of the brands’ products or services. Hence, the journey from a website’s homepage to the checkout needs to be quick, clear, and effortless.
Ensuring your website has the right CTAs, channels, and paths to suit your customer, you’ll be reducing the number of leads who fall through the cracks. Doing this is also called mapping.
Using fewer pages for your customer to navigate will be a key technique to decrease bounce rate trends as there are fewer opportunities to turn away. Examples include having emailers, landing pages, newsletters, pop-ups, and banners featuring a CTA directing the customer to the order page of the most popular product or service.
- Optimize your website’s speed and performance
Having a slow-loading website, or even a website with slow-loading images, can negatively impact your customer rate optimization by 20%. The same can be said for how to increase pages per view and dwell time.
In 2022, a top-converting website needs to provide leads with a fast website that doesn’t cause a high bounce rate. Google suggests having a website loading slower than 3 seconds will increase your website’s bounce rate by 31% and anything after a 5-second load time is over a 100% increase in bounce.
Luckily, the search engine also provides some best practices to live by when in need of a high convergence rate:
- Under 3 seconds to load the webpage
- Under 1.3 seconds to load the first byte of data
- Under 50 individual pieces of content per page
- Under 500KB of website weight for mobile optimization
Ways to achieve this include:
- Using a top-performing website host
- Using a content delivery network (CDN)
- Reducing the size of files, such as logos, videos, GIFs, images, etc.
- Use website caching for fewer database requests
- Reducing the number of background plugins
- Writing a one-step customer journey map
- Hold back on too many website fonts and use clean templates
6. Execute competitor and market analysis for sufficient site adjustments
Developing a strategy to conduct market analysis and competitor research will generate key conversion rate optimization as you’re following the trends of both your current and target audiences.
Whether it’s looking at direct and indirect company websites, searching for relevant keywords, analyzing your experience on competitor sites, using third-party applications to crawl a website for performance, or learning how to increase pages per visit and dwell time by polling the target audience. These acts will be contributing to the overall conversion rate optimization strategies that are defining your brand in the industry.
If, through this analysis, you do feel the need to integrate new branding, deals, offers, or other sitewide news, ensure you do so one-at-a-time. Lucidpress released a report stating 23% increased revenue when brands remained consistent rather than continuing to make site-wide alterations.
With the overall goal of learning how to increase pages per visit and dwell time, it’s key to know how to implement new site features in a way that won’t negatively affect the user experience or deplete conversion rate optimization techniques. Here are some tips:
- Check your analytics and note the landing pages
- Check your GSC and note the queries that are feeding particular pages
- Listen to market research and analytics you’ve uncovered
- Keep a reduced and concise customer journey in mind
- Test new variations rigorously before publishing
- Listen to comments and user feedback for how to decrease bounce rates
To ensure your website’s cogs are humming to meet the expectations of your customers and the Google search engine results page (SERP) optimizing strategies, contact Milestone. The team is ready and waiting to help your website perform at a consistent and high rate while focusing on key strategies of how to increase pages per visit and dwell time atop how to decrease bounce rate for your site.
See our related blog on Framework for Effective Website Copy for SEO.
Milestone increases acquisition by enhancing digital experience and increasing content visibility. Contact us at [email protected] or call us at 408-200-2211.
