Study finds that most visitors view only 1 – 2 pages per web site

A recent study published by Onestat.com found that almost 55% of all internet users who visit a web site view 1 -2 pages per visit and 16.56% view 2 – 3 pages per visit. That’s almost 75% of visitors who are leaving your site after viewing 3 pages or less.

A recent Clickz.com article addressed this issue and cited a WebSideStory’s StatMarket study that reported that:

74% of visitors reach sites by direct navigation (type the URL) or bookmarks.

16%of visitors reach sites via links from other sites.

11% of visitors reach sites via search engines.

The question is then, what types of information do you need to put on your website to get visitors coming back? If the vast majority of surfers leave your site after visiting 1-3 pages, what does that mean? Perhaps, that you’ve enticed them to make a second or third click, only for them to be disappointed that the information you are providing is not what they are looking for. And then they click away and you’ve lost them.

When looking at search engine stats, 550 million searches are performed each day. As the article describes

Typical behavior is to search a phrase, click on a search results link, view the page, and decide whether it’s worth investigating. If not, click back and go on to the next link in the results. Obviously, the first view of the landing page is incredibly important. If the visitor clicks back, no other site pages are viewed — a classic one-page visit.

That means that search engine marketing is critical to your website’s success. If you’ve managed to get a high ranking for a term that has little to do with your website’s content, you’re going to be getting lots of those one-page visits. However, if you spend the time to create a search engine marketing plan and optimize your website, you drastically improve the odds that your site matches your visitors’ criteria.

Once you get visitors to your site, you need a navigation structure that allows visitors to clearly navigate to the information they need.

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