Columbus Ohio web design firm s sows goldfish reading sign

The average attention span of a web user is 8 seconds. A goldfish's attention span is 9 seconds.

We're not making this up: you can read about it here.

Since the average visit to a website is about 20 seconds, we're always reading how to to keep people interested in what you (or we) have to say on our websites.

And that 20 seconds can be a lot less if you don't have something interesting to say in the first sentence or two. Research shows the average amount of time someone spends on a webpage is 4 seconds if they cant find what they want in that time.

Other amazing statistics about web users (who may or may not also be goldfish) are:

Average time on page may not be accurate

One of our gold rings of website use is the average page visit. The theory is, the longer someone stays on your website, the more engaged they are. And the more engaged someone is, the more Google thinks you have a good website, which is worthy of ranking better.

But the measurement might be skewed because it's an average of metrics, which are themselves averages of other metrics, which are themselves averages of other metrics, and so it goes on. You can read more about the conundrums of Google Analytics here.

Let's look at there Google statistics for our website, and why it is confusing.

On line one, there were 114 times that someone keyed in the URL of our website, sevell.com. However, Google Analytics shows over 50% of those visitors came and left from the same page.

What confuses us, is if someone took the time to visit our site, and theoretically, wanted to go there since they keyed in our URL, why would half of them "bounce," meaning they were there for 10 seconds or less?

This goes to show not all statistics are clear cut.Columbus Ohio web design firm's Googlge Analytics screen shot

And this is why SEO is an art as much as a science.

If you want to learn more about this, and how our real-life experience can work for your website, contact us today.