Increase time-on-site and pages-per-visitor

Hi,

I have been looking at one of my competitors and they have rediculously high time-on-site (12 minutes) and pages-per-visitor (9) while the site is very similar to mine. I also notice they have a lot of visitors from Latvia (while it's a Dutch site).

My site does: time-on-site=2:50, pages-per-visitor=3,5

Are there companies in for example Latvia (cheap country) that actually browse your site all day (or automate it) to increase these parameters?

And would that be profitable, as in, does this count as a big indicator for Google to rank your site. I know it's important, but to actually pay people to increase it seems a bit to much, but perhaps it does make a big difference.

Love to hear any points of view!

try optimizely to increase conversion / ctr. i have never used it but i hear it is good and easy to use for A/B testing.

I highly doubt it's a factor in Google rankings.

Because a high pages-per-visitor isn't always a good thing. It can also mean a site has horrible navigation and people are getting lost.

Great content (*informative, useful)
Interesting videos (*Video = bounch rate killer)

Having some kind of hidden resources like for ex: After sharing something, they will get a free useful resource or coupon or whatever like that will increase the visitor presence time. Also, having quality appealing youtube video will help you to rank as well.

I would have really good content on the site and make sure that the posts are pretty long. That means that people want/have to spend time reading the posts.

Paying some people to stay longer on your site is just a bandaid solution, and a very weak one at that. Get to the root cause of the problem (content, offers, etc).

I would be interested in knowing how you found the page views / site time of your competitor? If you used tools, then they can definitely go wrong.

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. I used Alexa's stats. Although they are far from perfect ofcourse. Something is better than nothing.