What are Dwell Time and its impact on SEO?

DotNek Software Development 19 minute(s) read

Last updated: Jan 13, 2021

This definition is used with a little difference in the SEO world. Dwell time is essential to make your website quality better. In this way, you can improve your user experience; it increases your ranking on the search engine. SEO experts can improve the dwell time of the website by using some strategies. Since the dwell time is highly important because it is measured on time between arriving and returning to the search results, it makes sense to offer users several additional actions. Therefore, it is a more reliable indicator of page relevance and its quality.

What does Dwell Time mean?

The amount of time between the time a user has clicked the website and returns to the Google search engine page is called Dwell Time . The users click the website and return if they do not get content of their interest, and some return back after they finish their reading. The longer the retention time, the more likely the user is to reach the goal they are searching for, and the more valuable the site is to Google. The shorter the retention time, the more meaningful it is, which is your website doesn't contain valuable content. According to an internet research, 3 minutes and 10 seconds, is the average time that a user spends on a valuable page. Dwell Time is also used to rank a site on the search engine page.

Is dwell time a ranking signal?

For the Google algorithm , dwell time is a ranking signal. It is worth noting that Google Analytics track metrics like session duration and bounce rate, but not dwell time. Session duration means multiple articles and pages but dwells time focuses on a piece of content. However, dwell time influences your search ranking indirectly. It describes Google whether the web page offers value to users.

How long is dwell time?

The majority of the officials look for a median ration dwell time of 1:2. It means that roughly half of the service members can deploy in a second. The time off from the deployment is the dwell time.

A common mistake:

Most of the time, despite the huge difference between Dwell Time and Bounce Rate, these two are confused, but by knowing the exact meaning of each, we can avoid this mistake and use each of these two words at the right time.

What does Bounce Rate mean?

Bounce rate and dwell time are similar, but these are not the same thing. A bounce occurs when someone visits a page and hits back without clicking any other button on the page. The ratio of the number of these users to the total number of users who have entered the page, is called the Bounce Rate. High bounce rate is not a good sign and causes a negative rating.

Click-through rate in comparison with Dwell Time:

Some may confuse the click-through rate with Dwell Time, while a site's click-through rate is the ratio of the number of times users click on your site on the search page to the total number of people who have seen that SERP , so Dwell Time is completely different.

Does Dwell time affect timing?

It does not affect ignition timing. Its later points open the later spark retards, and comes the timing. A long dwell time describes Google that your website has gotten a lot of value from the result. Google will boost your ranking if lots of other people spend a long time on those web pages.

Dwell Time Impact on SEO:

Dwell Time should be taken seriously in order to increase the site ranking in Google search engine and other search engines. When a user spends a lot of time on a site, it shows the quality content of that and Google receives these frequencies. The main goal of search engines is user satisfaction that the high retention time on a website is in line with that goal, and it has positive effects on SEO . However, there is no exact information of which parameters does Google take into consideration while ranking websites in the search results page, but according to the sites with a high ranking, and the techniques which they use to increase ranking, these factors that we are going to mention, can be achieved.

Can an SEO expert improve dwell time?

Yes, it is possible with some simple tactics to increase the dwell time of the website. By producing better content, it becomes easy and simple to increase the dwell time. If the user experience is higher, your users will spend more time on your website since it will load quickly, and interesting content can attract visitors to stay on the web page. It does not matter what type of website or content you are producing, whether it is videos, infographics, or blog posts. It must be informative, entertaining, surprising, unique, funny, well-designed, and conversational.

Dwell Time Increase Strategies:

Attractive site content:

When the user enters your website by clicking on the related link in the search results page, if he/she encounters attractive content in which all his/her needs have been met, there is no need to leave the website and research one more time in order to get the answers. In fact, the content of a site should be useful, credible and relevant.

Availability of the site on smartphones:

Nowadays, the most accessible device is smartphone, which is a part of every human being's life, and it is much more accessible than a laptop. As a result, your site should also have access to them, you can use the Google Search Console to find out if your page is optimized to run from mobile devices, especially smartphones.

High page loading speed:

Speed ​​is one of the user's points of interest, and it is one of the factors that persuades the user to stay on the site for a longer time.

Use internal link:

While the user is reading and reviewing the website, it is possible to keep him/her on the website as much as possible through internal linking, in this case Dwell Time will increase.

Interaction with users:

By creating tests, questions and answers, the user can be more attracted to the website, and while doing this, he/she gets a better experience in searching within your website. You can also get benefit from the user's comments for quality improvement.

Long form site content:

The longer the content of the site, the more time the user spends reading it, and devotes more time to the site. Also, when the content is a long form one, you should be careful about the use of keywords because using them excessively, causes a negative ranking. You shouldn't prolong the text with irrelevant and useless topics, you must publish quality content and increase user's retention time simultaneously.

Using videos:

In some websites, it has been observed that by uploading a video, they have increased the user's retention time. Sometimes, the user has caused other people to enter the website by sharing that video.

Use logical and strong interlinking

It is one of the most important factors that can help to increase your dwell time. The use of internal linking is good to maximize SEO . Your site may suffer low ranking in the search engine without a logical and strong internal linking strategy. In this way, you can keep your visitors busy on your site by offering them informative and attractive content.

Last word:

Despite all this, there are still some disagreements about whether dwell Time is a metric for ranking a site in the Google search engine. In the Google algorithm , dwell time does not directly matter, but it can indirectly improve your search engine ranking. Yes, you need to choose an effective strategy to grab the visitors' attention to your site. This criterion is directly related to user satisfaction, and user satisfaction has always been the first and last goal of Google algorithms. The period of time that a user spends on your website depends on what your content is about and what your field of work includes and their relevance to your content, there are thousands of other reasons that all determine whether a dwell Time is good or bad.