How Dwell Time Affects Your SEO?

How Dwell Time Affects Your SEO? Does Dwell time affect your SEO? Find out how search engines use Dwell time and what that impact is on your SEO efforts.

Dwell time is one of those metrics that may impact your site’s SEO. It refers to the time that a visitor spends looking at any website or webpage after clicking on the link available while searching the SERP results. It is one of the most critical ranking factors that every marketer should be paying attention to.

Dwell time is a good indicator that will help you understand how much engagement your content creates. If a visitor spends more time on your website, then your site will have more dwell time. However, it is not the only factor that affects your SEO. Other metrics, such as bounce rate and average time-on-page, are some of the other parameters that may change your overall SEO practices.

It is essential to understand that dwell time is neither the bounce rate nor the average time a user spent on the page.

What is dwell time?

Duane Forrester introduced us to the concept of Dwell time. He was a senior project manager at Bing at that time. In a blog post written by him on Bing in 2011, Duane talked about the concept of dwell time. He was the first person to talk about it, and now the whole digital world is talking about it.

He defined dwell time as the average time a visitor spends before returning to SERPs. 

Let’s understand this with an example.

Suppose I’m looking for “Best SEO Company in Delhi,” and I type that into the google search engine. After a few seconds, I’ll get some results, and I’m most likely to click on the results that interest me the most. Let’s say I opened one of the links and it took me about 3 minutes to complete reading that page. After finishing the article and the website content, I’ll return to SERPs. The period between these two clicks is dwell time. In this case, it is three minutes.

It is crucial to understand that longer dwell times are better for online business growth. The more a visitor stays on a web page, the more they are to read and engage with the website page content. It is a signal and a good indicator that a website page content strategy is working correctly, and it is appealing to the website’s intended audience.

Does “Dwell Time” effect your SEO? 

Now let’s understand how this dwell time may affect your SEO rankings. Firstly, it is essential to comprehend that dwell time is not a tool that can be measured. However, you can track it and analyze the engagement with the help of Google Analytics.

It is clear now that more dwell time implies higher engagement. 

Classification of Dwell Time: 

1. Thirty seconds or less – If a visitor stays only for 30 seconds or less, it means that the content was not up to the mark, and he/she was not satisfied with the content.
2. One-Two minute – The user found the material to be useful but not super informative.
3. Fifteen minutes – The content is super-useful, and the user is satisfied.

If the dwell time is less, it means that the content was not engaging, and it may affect your rankings negatively.

How do you improve “Dwell Time” for SEO? 

• Add attractive images and media files like infographics. Also, compress the images for faster load time.
• Use video in the place of text content. Or use a video along with text content. If the visitor watches the entire video, it will increase your dwell time.
• Focus on content. Deliver quality content.
• Use the right keywords in the right way.
• The key to improving dwell time is to improve your website content by building good quality content in a unique way, which is easy-to-read and understandable for the website audience.
• Improve page loading speed on mobile devices.
• Increase the load time of webpages

You can quickly improve dwell time by restructuring the webpage and making it visually appealing to the target audience. Make sure that the page is easy to navigate.

For example, if a website is running too many ads on a webpage, it could signal a spam site. The users are unable to get the information they were looking for, and they might close the page.

How to make the users spend more time on your website?

Usually, a low dwell time means – visitors are not finding what they are searching for on any website. The following are some of the factors that may affect low dwell time. Improve these aspects and make your users spend more time on your site.

1.  Mobile-friendliness– It is essential to have a mobile-friendly website because most of the users are smartphone users who browse on their phones only.
2.  Proper use of title tags and descriptions– The title tags and explanations are intended to represent the website content on a given webpage accurately. A visitor is most likely to click on the link the title and description appeals to him/her. Therefore, you should write the correct title tag and meta descriptions. Make it short and crispy.
3. Page loads faster– Use Google’s page speed tool and measure the page load time of your website. Ensure that your site loads more quickly. Otherwise, there are chances that the user may directly close it.

Is “Dwell Time” equal to higher search rankings?

Based on the above discussion, we can say that dwell time can be equated to higher search rankings. It indicates the engagement and helps you evaluate the quality of your content. High dwell time will provide valuable insight as compared to low dwell time into what type of content is working for the website target audience. Don’t ignore this metric. Use it in your strategy to improve your rankings on Google.

Conclusion:

Dwell time has a significant role to play in SEO and Google’s rankings. If you are an SEO professional, you must have understood the importance of dwell time. It is an important metric that gives valuable and exciting insights into the type of content you’ve written. Dwell time is a better indicator than the bounce rate. The bounce rate provides no information about the level of engagement, and there are various reasons for the bounce. However, dwell time is a clear sign that the visitor is or is not satisfied with the content.

Focus on improving the overall user experience and make sure you deliver some useful content on your site. Make sure the navigation is more accessible. To enhance your dwell time:

• Make sure that web page content easy to find. So that it is the first thing an internet visitor sees when they reach your page. It will also enhance the user experience.
• Content is the key, and quality is needed. Post quality content on your website to keep the visitors engaged. It will help you get good results.
• Make a website mobile friendly because the number of searches is from mobile devices rather than desktop devices, which boosts the site to high rank automatically.

We believe that it is clear how significant this concept of dwell time is in SEO. It is such a vital ranking factor, and every marketer or digital marketer should study it to understand their site better.

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by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company