Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
part of google's ranking is based on how long a visitor stays at your site. if they click off the first page after five seconds then google is going to think your site is rubbish.
but... how many of use free site-search engines? like google's own offering, or atomz's.
if someone searches for something on the first page they view (which 30-40% of visitors are supposed to do), then they will immediately be taken away from your site to view the search results! and, more often than not, i am guessing that they won't come back because of all the relevant ads that appear at the top of the search results page.
that is going to skew your site stats towards one page view per person.
Average around 3.
It depends also much on the question. Some questions completely answered on one page creates maybe only 1,2 page views per visitor.
Some questions where I have maybe 50 or pages of content about the theme, the average visitor has 6 page views.
So what sort of site has less than 2 average?
Its hard for me to compare that because I average 11 page views and 20-25% of the users bookmarking pages on my site.
For example, genex.com is the corporate site for an ad agency that has a bunch of high profile clients (I have no affiliation with them). It ranks horribly in alexa and has a very low number of pages per user (1.4 for the past 3 months, 1.0 for the past week). Yet, for what it is, it's a well-done site that's pretty innovative in its excution - they make Flash feel and act like HTML - the Flash movie resizes itself so no scroll bars are needed in the Flash movie and the back button on the browser works within the Flash movie. And you can't argue with their client list... But it's a brochure-ware site, not a content site, and it's more about giving the user a feel for who they are than anything else.
On the other end of the page view per session spectrum, we have one site we designed a long time ago for a photographer that basically shows various collections of images. Each image is a different page, so the user can load a whole bunch of pages pretty quickly as they browse the site. Average page views average 17-18 for that site.
If we had done the same site with Flash there would only be one page load per user session. If we had done it so images within a category were loaded with Javascript then we might be looking at many fewer page views per session. So a lot depends on the content and architecture of the site.
It just seems to me that page views per session has gotten equated with quality. That's not always the case. Users should get to what they're looking for quickly, which means fewer page views in many cases. While page views may be relevant in the scope of ad impressions, to me it says nothing about the quality of the site...
So what sort of site has less than 2 [pages per visit] average?
The real answer, as jay5r indicates, is that it totally depends on the nature of the site and what the individual user is trying to accomplish. There aren't many useful one-size-fits-all metrics that can be identified.
You have a good point, I guess there would be a difference between an eccomerce site versus a news site.
Example, person looks up a news article, the search engine serves up the story, the person reads the one page and is gone.
Another example, a person wants to buy a product, they do a search for product A, find it, add to their cart and goes through a multiple page process filling out information.
That makes sense, I guess it would really depend on the type of site.
Example, person looks up a news article, the search engine serves up the story, the person reads the one page and is gone.Another example, a person wants to buy a product, they do a search for product A, find it, add to their cart and goes through a multiple page process filling out information.
On the other hand a commercial site without a shopping cart: A specific product group on a well indexed single page with a java- script driven sum-calculation and all necessary form fields at the bottom. "veni vidi merca" so to speak.
We made quite interesting figures with such a page before/during the football-world-cup, and it even passed the WCAI-guidelines-test, because there was a <noscript> link </noscript> to the java-script-free similar section inside the ordinary shop.
Some sites have rich, unique content that encourages users to spend a lot of time reading and browsing.
Other sites provide useful facts, relevant / helpful / interesting links, or other "quick" bits that result in the user stopping by and then going on their way.
As you can gather then, time-on-site and page-views-per-site are not necessarily going to correlate strongly with a user's perception of that site's value.
So to tackle the initial question... if you feel that your current site search works well for your users, great! No need to change it. And certainly don't worry about "losing" your users via outbound links. If your site thoughtfully helps them find what they were looking for, then odds are they'll be back anyway and perhaps even recommend your site to others.
Sure. The key issue tracking user behaviour seems to me, whether the user goes back to the other window with the google searchresults and clicks the next link, or performs a similar new search. If he doesn't, the site last visited must have been good.
About a year ago, I have begun to add some content with quite a number of outbound links at the bottom of some of the very few product-group-specific pages I designed since then. I don't actually expect any visitor to scroll down that far, and really read that stuff, or to ever click on any of the links. I neither expect any search engine to evaluate this part very much, because it is really quite "out of sight" though truely visible, no tricks.
The main intention was to add some stuff related to the broader content, so that it might be easier for search engines to identify the semantic bubble, in which the page is embedeed. I guess pure product specifications and prices are quite "boring", even for spiders;)
I had a long discussion with some friends about "diluting page-rank" and that sort of stuff. However, these three or four pages rank quite well for the keywords targeted at. And I wouldn't even regard that "grey hat"; some of the text blocks are rather intended as funny, though my wife says I sometimes have quite a strange sort of humour. It was fun for me to write these parts, similar to the way google employees are supposed to spend 10 % of their time to play around.
And there is another anecdote around "losing visitors:" For quite some time now we rank fairly well on "imprinting widgets" in our niche. Last week we got an order, which had to be cancelled, because one of the printing machines of my supplier broke down. I found that quite embarrassing, and send an excuse-email to my (new) customer, recommending a link to my strongest "competitor" on the web and another alternative link to a large company.
First I got a big mail-thanks from that customer, saying we'd forever be his first choice on similar occasions for the future. Two days later I got a telephone call from that "competitor". The guy said he was absolutely positively surprised, and offered me some means of cooperation and market share, because the imprinting techniques he and my supplier use don't overlap 100%.I'd always be welcome to send him those customers, the needs of whom I couldn't fulfill so far. And of course I'd get paid for that cooperation.
We now both occupy the first spots on almost all relevant search-terms. And we cooperate, for the benefits of our customers. I guess, it will take a very long time, until someone else will manage to get in between there.
If you "love" your visitor, you don't care, if he or she leaves your site on any leak. Concentrate of the needs of your visitor, all else will follow. It's so easy.
