I was looking at my sites stats earlier on today and was trying to look at where my sites are succeeding and where some are coming up short, I was drawn to my page views stat and noticed that on sites such as this one I am getting around an average of 3-4 page views per visit. I thought that this was slightly low, so I did some research.
My research led me to a page by onestat.com where they have actually done research into page views per visit, there results actually showed that page views of around 3-4 is quite reasonable. There research came up with the following results:
The average number of pageviews per visit worldwide:
1-2 pageviews – 62.12%
2-3 pageviews – 12.77%
3-4 pageviews – 6.76%
4-5 pageviews – 7.72%
6-7 pageviews – 2.20%
7-8 pageviews – 2.03%
8-9 pageviews – 1.82%
9-10 pageviews – 0.56%
> 10 pageviews – 4.02%
This research is of course very general, you may have a site that obtains above an average of 2 page views per visit, but we will accept that this is the average.
This of course is not good news for use bloggers and website owners, as we obviously would like our visitors to visit all of our pages and look at all of our content, undoubtedly it is unlikely that you will be able to get your visitors to read all your content, but there are a few things that you can do to increase page views on your blog.
A good place to start in your quest to increase page views on your blog is to make sure that your navigation is easily accessible and easy to understand. Dont confuse your visitors with fancy navigation menus, keep things simple to help them find the content that they are looking for.
You next step should be to make it easier for users to find posts related to what they are looking for, this can be done in two ways.
The first is to link to your related content, inside of your post, for example have a look at my Encrypting Passwords in PHP Login Script post you will notice that I have linked to my PHP Login Script Tutorial inside the post, this helps my visitor find related posts.
The second way you can help your visitors find related posts, is to add a list of related posts at the bottom on the of your blog posts, informing your visitor that they can find more information by following the links.
So, you should now be finding that your sites visitors have more access to your content. The next step you can take is to break your long posts into several shorter post, this will increase your sites page views, it will also make your site more readable as most people do not like to read through a large amount of text, by breaking the post into several pages you are making the content look more appealing to read, and draws the visitor in.
So, if you are using the steps mentioned above you should now have a site that is easy to navigate, with related content that is easy to find and also easy to read. This should help to increase your site/blogs page views but there is still more that can be done to get those few extra page views out of your visitors.
The next tip is to use excerpts instead of full posts on your front page and also in your feed. This means that users receiving your content via your feed will have to visit your site to view the full post, instead of reading it in their feed reader, it also means that once they are on your site the internal site linking that you have done in your posts in the earlier steps will take effect dragging the visitor into your site.
The final tip is: Use Your Stats! – You should be looking for the pages that have a high exit rate and look to improve them, maybe by improving the content on those pages, or by adding more links. Use your stats to find out which pages your visitors are landing on when they enter your site, and which pages they exit your site on, these are the pages that you should be looking to optimize in order to increase page views on your blog.
Remember, increased page views can lead to more feed subscribers and an increased readership on your blog, this increased readership should then lead to more links and trackbacks, these increase links and trackbacks should lead to more visitors, the spiral starts all over again.
I have no doubt that there are other ways in which you can improve your sites page views and I would love to hear your experiences, with the above tips and any tips that you have.
