In episode #664, Eric and Neil discuss a simple way to increase your time on site. Tune in to hear what you can do to give users a great experience.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: A Stupidly Simple Way to Increase Your Time on Site by 19%
- [00:35] Time on site meaning, time visitors spend on your site.
- [00:41] If you can increase the time spent on your site, Google will see this and up your ranking.
- [00:50] If you have a high time on site, you’re less likely to get hit by the Google Panda Update.
- [00:56] The panda update is all about measuring quality.
- [01:30] If your time on site is low, it’s a negative signal.
- [01:50] You want to deliver a good experience.
- [01:53] Amazon recently came out with a product called Amazon Polly.
- [01:57] Amazon Polly takes your text and converts it into an audio file.
- [02:14] Using this increased Eric and Neil’s dwell time by 19%.
- [02:25] Use the Polly WordPress plugin.
- [02:50] Make sure you add videos to your blog posts!
- [03:04] This has increased Neil’s dwell time.
- [03:25] Embed the videos wherever it makes sense.
- [03:55] Use Pocket on your mobile device: it’s a text-to-speech tool.
- [04:05] It will read articles to you.
- [04:08] That’s it for today!
- [04:12] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post A Stupidly Simple Way to Increase Your Time on Site by 19% | Ep. #664 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to give you a stupidly simple way to increase your time on site by 19%. Before we go into it, time on site could be also known as the dwell time on your site, and it is an SEO factor that matters, so if you can increase the time on site, Google can see that as a signal. That's going to help you out.
What I did was recently-
Neil Patel: Well, first off-
Eric Siu: Go ahead.
Neil Patel: The reason you want to improve your time on site is because if you have a high time on site, you're less likely to get hit by Google Panda update. The Google Panda update is all about content quality. If people are bouncing back, your rankings are going to tank because Google's going to see it as low quality. They don't just look at the word count, the back links, and all that kind of stuff. They also look at how users interact with your content. They have Google Chrome everywhere, so they get data from that. They have Google Analytics. I don't know how much data they collect from Google Analytics or use more so, so you want to make sure that you have a high time on site so you don't get hit with the Google Panda penalty, because it's really hard to get out of it if you ever do get hit.
Eric Siu: It's very simple. Look, it's a signal. Negative ... If your time on site is one second or so, less than one second, that is a negative signal, and Google is ... They have, what, 200+ variables?
Neil Patel: Something crazy like that.
Eric Siu: That they're looking at. They're smart. They have some of the best engineers in the world, and you want to make sure that you're delivering a great experience to people. I think that's the basis for this.
Amazon recently, they came out with something called Amazon Polly, and what Amazon Polly does is it takes the text that you have, and it will basically modify it or convert it into an audio file, and you could put it right at the top of your blog post. Literally, we compared the before and after for adding this, and there's a little play button at the top of our blog post, and our dwell time jumped up by 19%, and then we're looking at ... We're monitoring how people are behaving on the site, using a tool like Hotjar, for example, and then all you need to do ... It's really simple. If you have a WordPress blog, just search Amazon Polly WordPress plugin, and then from there, add it to your site. See how it does for you. It may work. It might not, but, for us, it worked really well, and it continued to stay that way.
Neil Patel: It's really good because a lot of people are using mobile devices these days, so it makes it where they can just listen to your content instead of reading it. It's not the easiest to read a 3-4,000-word blog post-
Eric Siu: Like what you have.
Neil Patel: On a mobile phone.
The other thing you can do, too, to increase your time on site is make sure you add videos to your blog posts. What I do is I take all my YouTube videos about marketing, and I add them to my blog posts that are relevant around those topics, and it's helped increase my time on page for the ones that have video by over 25, 30 seconds. It depends how long the videos are, but we're usually seeing a 25-30% increase or 25-30-second increase by just adding simple videos or one video per blog post.
Eric Siu: Are those at the top, in the middle, and the bottom?
Neil Patel: I embed it wherever it makes sense within the blog post. Wherever it flows, it works well, but, yes, when we put them at the very bottom, it doesn't help as much, of course, when we put it in the middle or closer to the top, but, again, you don't want to just shove in videos if it doesn't make sense because if the user experience is just crap, then you're going to leave a bad taste in people's mouth.
Eric Siu: I recommend, if some of you are skeptical about this stuff, maybe go to Neil's site, for example. Try it out. Go to my site. Try it out, too, or, if you like reading a lot, if you have a lot of blog posts saved, use Pocket on your mobile device, and they have a text-to-speech, basically, a feature there. It's TTS. You just hit it, and then you can 2X, you can 3X, whatever you want, and just listen to an article. I actually find myself doing that more and more frequently.
That is it for today, and if you enjoyed this, go check out our marketing tools to grow your business. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to give you a stupidly simple way to increase your time on site by 19%. Before we go into it, time on site could be also known as the dwell time on your site, and it is an SEO factor that matters, so if you can increase the time on site, Google can see that as a signal. That's going to help you out.
What I did was recently-
Neil Patel: Well, first off-
Eric Siu: Go ahead.
Neil Patel: The reason you want to improve your time on site is because if you have a high time on site, you're less likely to get hit by Google Panda update. The Google Panda update is all about content quality. If people are bouncing back, your rankings are going to tank because Google's going to see it as low quality. They don't just look at the word count, the back links, and all that kind of stuff. They also look at how users interact with your content. They have Google Chrome everywhere, so they get data from that. They have Google Analytics. I don't know how much data they collect from Google Analytics or use more so, so you want to make sure that you have a high time on site so you don't get hit with the Google Panda penalty, because it's really hard to get out of it if you ever do get hit.
Eric Siu: It's very simple. Look, it's a signal. Negative ... If your time on site is one second or so, less than one second, that is a negative signal, and Google is ... They have, what, 200+ variables?
Neil Patel: Something crazy like that.
Eric Siu: That they're looking at. They're smart. They have some of the best engineers in the world, and you want to make sure that you're delivering a great experience to people. I think that's the basis for this.
Amazon recently, they came out with something called Amazon Polly, and what Amazon Polly does is it takes the text that you have, and it will basically modify it or convert it into an audio file, and you could put it right at the top of your blog post. Literally, we compared the before and after for adding this, and there's a little play button at the top of our blog post, and our dwell time jumped up by 19%, and then we're looking at ... We're monitoring how people are behaving on the site, using a tool like Hotjar, for example, and then all you need to do ... It's really simple. If you have a WordPress blog, just search Amazon Polly WordPress plugin, and then from there, add it to your site. See how it does for you. It may work. It might not, but, for us, it worked really well, and it continued to stay that way.
Neil Patel: It's really good because a lot of people are using mobile devices these days, so it makes it where they can just listen to your content instead of reading it. It's not the easiest to read a 3-4,000-word blog post-
Eric Siu: Like what you have.
Neil Patel: On a mobile phone.
The other thing you can do, too, to increase your time on site is make sure you add videos to your blog posts. What I do is I take all my YouTube videos about marketing, and I add them to my blog posts that are relevant around those topics, and it's helped increase my time on page for the ones that have video by over 25, 30 seconds. It depends how long the videos are, but we're usually seeing a 25-30% increase or 25-30-second increase by just adding simple videos or one video per blog post.
Eric Siu: Are those at the top, in the middle, and the bottom?
Neil Patel: I embed it wherever it makes sense within the blog post. Wherever it flows, it works well, but, yes, when we put them at the very bottom, it doesn't help as much, of course, when we put it in the middle or closer to the top, but, again, you don't want to just shove in videos if it doesn't make sense because if the user experience is just crap, then you're going to leave a bad taste in people's mouth.
Eric Siu: I recommend, if some of you are skeptical about this stuff, maybe go to Neil's site, for example. Try it out. Go to my site. Try it out, too, or, if you like reading a lot, if you have a lot of blog posts saved, use Pocket on your mobile device, and they have a text-to-speech, basically, a feature there. It's TTS. You just hit it, and then you can 2X, you can 3X, whatever you want, and just listen to an article. I actually find myself doing that more and more frequently.
That is it for today, and if you enjoyed this, go check out our marketing tools to grow your business. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
