Monitor the Time In Page on your website

We all want to know what is going on with our website. In fact, not just our website, with everything in our life, and that is fine as it is what makes us human.

It is natural to be curious about the amount of time a visitor or visitors spend on your page and thanks to Google Analytics, it has been made possible.

Time on the page is one of the most important SEO factors along with the bounce rate.

How Google Analytics does this is by measuring the difference between the time stamps of hits.

Put simply, it measures the difference in the time it took you to click on a new link, i.e. visit another web page within the same website.

What this means is if the visitor happens to be a ‘bounce’ (doesn’t visit another web page), Google Analytics doesn’t calculate the time they spent on your page.

However, this might not tell you the accurate time all visitors spent on your page due to many reasons.

For instance, a visitor could spend 1 hour on your page, switching between tabs or minimizing the page to work on something else, but as long as such as person doesn’t visit another web page, Google doesn’t factor them in when calculating your website’s time in page.

Despite this, Google Analytics still does an amazing job of telling you to some extent the average time a visitor who isn’t a bounce spends on your page.

You can check our article on how to engage your audience for tips and suggestions to increase the average time on page of your users.

Why Is It Important?

People usually don’t spend too much time on things they aren’t interested in or things that don’t appeal to them.

This means that if your average time on page is low, your posts aren’t captivating or informative enough for the users.

Having knowledge of this would make you think of ways to better your website. You get to figure out what you are doing wrong that isn’t making those users stay long.

Top 5 SEO Tools to help you to increase the time on page:

• Screaming Frog's SEO Spider (Paid + Free): Search marketers will totally fall in love with this tool as it is basically built around SEO and crawls websites in order to identify basic issues related to SEO.
• Google Search Console (Free): Google Search Console has a special feature which is referred to as Site Performance that offers you stats on how your website performs. You can get to view things like average load time, actual loading time, improvement tips and more.
• Woorank (Paid+Free): Offers you premium analysis which marketers can use to identify optimization and enhancement possibilities as it considers SEO initiatives performance including that of social media as well as usability and more
• HubSpot's Website Grader (Free): helps businesses to discover SEO opportunities and the new version of Website Grader is extremely fantastic.
• Moz's Pro Tools (Paid): A comprehensive tool that can help to enhance the search ranking of your brand as it comes with research tools which give you resources for identifying SEO opportunities, coming up with reports, growth tracking, and more.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to increase the average time in page in every post of your blog

• MonsterInsights (Free): WordPress users would find this plugin very useful as it is user-friendly and lets you carry out connections between WordPress sites and Google Analytics
• Google Analytics by MonsterInsights (Free): users of Google Analytics can do well to explore this plugin. Currently has over 11 million downloads with very amazing feature list.
• GA Google Analytics (Free): enhances the operation of google analytics for WordPress sites. Comes with amazing features and is super fast.
• Slimstat Analytics (Paid): WordPress Analytics plugin that you will totally love as you can now track users that are registered and customers that are returning while being able to monitor your JavaScript events as well as the text Intrusions with analysis for your email campaigns.
• CAOS | Host Google Analytics Locally (Paid): CAOS gives you Analytics hosting permission locally while updating it through Cron-schedule automatically.

Once this has been figured out and corrected, your website starts drawing in more visitors, and this would improve your SEO rankings.

Did you know? When a user’s time session runs out (usually after 30 minutes of inactivity), Google doesn’t calculate it with your time in page

Expert’s suggestion: From time on page perspective in Google Analytics, the clock is running (until the session timeout at 30 mins default). – Yehoshua Coren (http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2015/02/real-time-page-google-analytics.html)