What is Dwell Time?
Dwell time is basically how long people are spending on your site. You can go to Google analytics and see how long people are spending on each and every page of yours so that you can optimise your content for better SEO.
Not only the time that people are spending on your page, the time that people are engaging like scrolling and clicking is dwell time.
Why Dwell Time Matters in SEO?
The visitors who visits your page exit your website for many reasons like these:
- Site may be spammy
- Misleading content
- content containing many grammatical errors
- Slow page loading speed
- If the website is not mobile-friendly
- A lot of pop-up windows
Dwell time can be used to understand the amount of time a specific web page caters to visitors’ interest. It plays the role of an indicator of quality and relevance of your page content. The more time visitors spend on your web page before returning to SERPs, the greater the value your page delivers to the online users.
For websites that are content-oriented, more dwell time means your page content grabs the online user’s search intent. This is an important insight as optimised content is one of the most valuable ranking signals that search engines consider. It supports producing quality backlinks, building thought leadership brands and, more essentially, enhancing search rankings.
Is Dwell Time a Google Ranking Signal?
Google has not yet confirmed that dwell time is a ranking signal as of writing. Even so, this doesn’t mean that you should disregard it in your SEO efforts. Dwell time benefits as a user engagement metric that supports search engines understanding a website’s page significance and usefulness.
Getting to know how to calculate dwell time and leverage this data can help enhance your SEO strategies and provide improved user experience for your page visitors.
How to Improve Dwell Time
There is no miracle when it comes to improving dwell time of your website. Anyhow, there are several practices that you can pick to attract more visitors to your web page. Try following this simple guide on to improve dwell time:
Make Quality Content
The Internet is filled with content so nothing can beat it but quality content is a handful. Creating right, appropriate content which solves users’ query without confusing them is important.
It is better not to use bigger words and long sentences. Make use of simple words and short paragraphs as we are not in the age of reading as most of us just scan the content and try to find the answers easily. If appropriate, try to create pageless scrolling.
Know the Search Intent
Understanding why your target audience carries out an online search and what details they require is important in developing a robust content optimization strategy. The first thing to do is to perform an in-depth audience analysis and extensive keyword research. By doing this it will help you target the appropriate keywords and create content that covers suitable topics and addresses user queries.
Add Video(s)
We are going through a generation where videos are dominating the internet. So adding appropriate videos to the web page is always a good option. It is better to use short videos as people don’t really prefer long videos.
Maximise Internal Linking
These links help in building authority, facilitate website navigation and increase page interaction. Increasing the use of internal links, however, does not mean spamming your web pages with unnecessary links. This way is not encouraged as this can get you penalised. The key is to find the most necessary and appropriate pages on your website and strategically use anchor texts.
Boost your website speed
If it takes more than 2 seconds to load, 47% of users leave your website. So, work on increasing your website speed. Avoid unessential factors that are drop down the speed.
Improve overall user experience
Reduce the amount of pop-up windows. Try giving sufficient whitespace between lines. Paragraphs should be shorter. Never bury the answers deep down. Stop including auto-roll videos when a visitor visits your website. Ask yourself how much you like the web page as a user after designing your web page. Make it mobile friendly.
Wrapping up
The improvement you do to boost your dwell time will not just enhance your dwell time but also the whole user experience. You are not doing it for search engine ranking but also for better conversions.
