How to reduce bounce rate and increase average session duration

[Pavan]

Hello Everyone
Mine is a coupons website, can you guys help me out how to reduce bounce rate and increase my avg session duration of the page.

[goodroi]

These metrics do not really have a direct impact on Google SEO. These signals can be a clue if your page is valuable to users which will make it easier to rank in Google but they are not direct influencers.

You also can't blindly follow these numbers, context greatly matters. For example, if the page focuses on something very simple like a metric conversion calculator, then a high bounce rate and low session duration are good. It shows your page quickly satisfied users & provides value.

If you really want to play around with bounce rate & duration, you can create artificial barriers. For example, those magazine articles that are presented in slideshow format, forcing the users to view multiple pages and waste time finding & clicking the next button. You run the risk of making visitors angry and losing return traffic & link partners.

[NickMNS]

I agree with the gist of what Goodroi explains.

If you really want to play around with bounce rate & duration, you can create artificial barriers.

If you want to artificially inflate the metric why bother the user, simply ad a Javascript script that triggers an event in Google Analytics after some set time. As soon as the event is triggered the page will no longer be counted as a bounce, and since it isn't a bounce the session duration will be counted, at least until the event is triggered. The key will be to find how long users keep the window open and set the timer to that. A short timer, will ensure the lowest bounce rate, but result in a shorter session duration. You could also ad multiple events and timers, say every 10 seconds, this will maximize the possible session duration. As a side effect you would get a real picture of how longs users are staying on your page even if there is only a single page view.

Again as pointed out by Goodroi, this is all pointless in terms of SEO given that these metrics can easily be manipulated.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

How to reduce bounce rate and increase average session duration

Make interesting pages, easy and clear to navigate. If people have interested, and the page is pleasant to read/navigate/use, they'll stay longer.

[DutchieXL]

I made a website for someone but it had a high bounce rate.
What I did to get this down is place buttons on every page that direct to the previous and next page.
I can see that the bounce rate dropped as the visitors use these buttons.
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[edited by: not2easy at 12:50 pm (utc) on Jan 31, 2021]
[edit reason] Please see ToS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[JorgeV]

Hello,

@DutchieXL, you can't post the link to this site.

But thank you for the tips, it's good idea (where applicable).