Is your website’s content engaging or do visitors bounce out of there faster than you can say "Jack Robinson?"
One telling sign that you’re creating quality content is the Average Time on Page. This marketing metric is the average time visitors spend viewing each page on your site and provides quality insight into how well your content is performing.
What’s a good average look like? Well, the truth is it varies by page. Is your page interactive? Does it include video? Does it use targeted keywords?
There are plenty of variables that will determine your unique average. The general rule of thumb - if you are anywhere between 2-3 minutes then you’re doing pretty damn well.
But what if you don’t want good?
What if you want great?
After all, you work hard on your annual marketing plan and know your content is better than the average bear's. Plus, the longer visitors stay and engage with your content, the more likely search engines will see your content as valuable, and give you a boost in its search engine ranking position (SERP).
So you get it. Time on Page matters, but how do you increase it? Luckily for you, we've assembled a short case study on how we took one of our clients to an Average Time on Page of over 4 minutes and sustained.
Read on for 3 ways we increased ThinkNow's
Average Time On Page and kept it there:
1. Have A Content Plan
As the old saying goes, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." And if your annual marketing plan is one of those good intentions, rather than an execution, then listen up!
Regularly posting new content will not only keep your audiences engaged, but also plays a critical role in building your web presence and establishing authority with search engines.
"One of the biggest benefits of consistency with content marketing is improved search engine optimization. If you’re consistently publishing new and relevant content on your website - whether that’s pages, blog posts or landing pages - Google will crawl and index your website more often."
- Matt Hodkinson, Influence Agents
That means sporadically posting whenever inspiration strikes isn't going to cut it. If you are trying to keep your visitors regularly coming back to engage with your website, you need to give them a reason.
Though ThinkNow has had a plethora of well-developed content for some time, they saw consistent growth when they began using the SOAR system to organize and strategically map out their content for the year. Just see what one their co-founders had to say about it:
"Prior to using the SOAR system, we were creating content that we hoped would reach our desired audiences. Now, we have a concrete content calendar and strategy in place that not only helps us reach our ideal clients, but has significantly increased our web performance in under 6 months."
- Mario Carrasco, ThinkNow
By planning their marketing strategies and content in advance, the ThinkNow team was able to hold themselves accountable, regularly deliver fresh content and boost their overall web performance.
2. Create Quality Content
A content plan is only as strong as the pieces it encompasses. To get visitors to stay and engage on your website, you have to deliver content that is valuable. 
A large part of why ThinkNow was able to increase their time on page by over 67% year-over-year was due to the quality of their content. As thought leaders in multicultural market research, they consistently provide in-depth blogs and reports directly targeted toward their audiences' questions and interests. ThinkNow's largest increases in overall web performance came directly from their reports and blog pages.
To move the needle forward, you have to create content that is informative, helpful and worth your audience's time to read/download. Center your blogs, web copy and downloads on your company's specialities and your ideal customer's persistent problems. These pieces shouldn't be so much focused on selling your services, but helping answer your buyer persona's questions.
The more you can hone in on your audience's needs and provide them with useful information, the longer they will stick around to see what you have to say, which, in turn, increases your Average Time on Page.
Hey! Need some help creating powerful content?
Here are 6 REASONS YOUR CONTENT MARKETING ISN'T WORKING.
3. Use A Content Strategy
To improve your Average Time on Page, creating high-quality content and posting consistently are only two pieces of the puzzle. The third, and most important piece, is your strategy.
Great content can't consistently preform
without a solid content strategy.
Don't believe us? Our good friend and digital marketing whiz, Andy Crestodina, can vouch for the importance of content strategy.
While having a well-defined strategy provides structure and purpose, it simultaneously helps establish an online presence, builds authority and drives higher quality traffic to your website.
Before you create your next piece of content,
pause and ask two simple questions:
1. Who is your content for?
2. Why is it worth their time?
This is why defining your ideal buyer personas is so important. By understanding your ideal customers, you gain a deeper perspective of their needs, which will help you develop content that aims to meet them.
Buyer persona development creates a platform for keyword research. Understanding what keywords to target and implement in your content is vital to any content strategy. Establishing authority on these words will help ideal customers find you in the vast and nebulous recesses of the internet.
With the SOAR System, ThinkNow discovered they had 5 unique buyer personas.. When they began optimizing their content around relevant keywords that specifically targeted each one of their personas, they saw an immediate boost in the average time visitor's were spending on their pages.
As they continued to analyze marketing metrics and adjust their strategies, they were able to increase their Average Time on Page to over 4 minutes! 
Results matter. But, a successful journey requires a roadmap. That's exactly why we created the SOAR System - to help busy leaders create a sustainable lead generation system so they can remain confident in the growth of their company without losing focus on their other responsibilities.
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