Understanding the Impact of Dwell Time and its Importance to Boost SEO

With a vast number of ranking factors that Google has, though dwell time isn’t listed as one of those ranking factors.

With that being said, often dwell Time is a metric that is not been talked a lot about.

But surely it needs the attention as it plays a crucial role in boosting your Web Page ranking on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

For that, it is equally important for you to understand about the Dwell time and the importance of dwell time.

Here, in this post, we will outline and show you the things to be focused to improve the Dwell time to get the direct effect of higher ranking on Google SERP.

What is Dwell time?

The first and the foremost thing is to understand what exactly is the Dwell Time?

A Dwell time simply signifies whenever you click a web page link from the search results and returned to the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) – The time spent in between from the time you clicked a web page and when you returned to the search results is known as the dwell time.

Having said that, a dwell time ought to be explained in a broader term as there are many aspects to look at it and can be dive deeper with many of the factors.

But before we go through all of that, let’s first take an instance of link building.

For example, when we searched for the term “link building” on Google SERP, we found some great results from the top-notch website like Moz.

So, we clicked on the first result and gone through the link building things, looked out for things and content mentioned on Moz for few minutes, then being obsessed to learn more and more about “Link Building” we clicked back and went back to the SERP and click the back button from the browser – Just to look for more relevant content.

So, the few minutes spent on the Moz site can in turn matter to them a lot.

This simply means that the longer your website visitors stay on your site, the more likely you can assume that they found your content useful which holds them to remain there.

Therefore, it may be right to say that the search engines consider a dwell time as one of their most important ranking factor.

Further, to get even more insightful aspects of the dwell time, we would be explaining that up to you in a guided way.

First, let’s understand the difference between dwell time, Bounce Rate, and Time on Page.

Differences between Dwell time, Bounce Rate, and Time On Page

Dwell Time is the time spent by the visitor after they click the search result and enter your website page till the time they leave your site back to SERP (Search Engine Result Pages)

Bounce Rate is considered in the percentage when a website visitor visit one page on your website then returned to SERP or closed the page from the browser tab. This simply means if visitor enter your website page and suddenly close the page, then that would be considered as a 100% Bounce Rate.

Note: The lower the Bounce Rate the more likely it is to assume that your website visitors are finding your content more useful.

Time On Page: Have you ever noticed the Average Time On Page when you analyze your website visitors traffic on Google Analytics? The Time On Page is when your website visitor spends time on a web-page before navigating either back to the SERP, or on to the other pages of your website or anywhere.

Importance of Dwell Time as a Google Ranking Factor and on SEO

Google Analytics keeps track of things like Average Session Duration, Sessions per page, and Bounce Rate, but not for the dwell time.

Having said that, dwell time is has an importance that can highly influence the SEO as well.

This means the higher the dwell time you have for your website pages the more you can gain the relevancy and content value that can result in a higher ranking on search results.

Factors that Affects Dwell Time on Google SERP (Search Engine Result Pages)

Though considering dwell time as an important metric, there still remains some potential bottleneck in some of the cases.

Simple Queries

To better understand how in some cases the shorter dwell time can be an indication of a good quality, let’s take a scenario of more “accurate kind of informational queries”

For Example

When you search a query “How is the Weather today in Brisbane”, with all of a sudden you get a quick result on the top of the search results from the weather.com site.

Further, you want to know more about the “weather forecast”, so you clicked the website link and entered the site.

Interestingly, the answer was quick to find and within a few seconds, you returned to the SERPs results. In this case, dwell time will be quite lower – possibly less than even 10 seconds.

But that doesn’t mean that it leads to a bad User Experience (UX), instead, you got the information you were looking more quicker.

The same thing goes for certain other examples such as finding a zip code or state abbreviations.

Hence, a few seconds of dwell time doesn’t correlate to a negative experience.

Shopping Queries

Here is another interesting scenario where dwell time isn’t a great thing to distinguish the quality or relevance.

This is when you are looking for some shopping options on search results. Often, you may click on one shopping result on Google, check the price and specification and then you click back and navigate to the other result to find the best price.

Now, such “pogo-sticking” creates a scenario where dwell time isn’t a good relevant to be distinguished for!

Having said that, dwell time still cannot be excluded from the ranking factor because such queries only display the “Shopping results”.

For Example

Here the result you get when you search for “Best Shoes to run on the Beach”

And Here’s the result you get when you search for “Buy Men’s Running Shoes”

Hence, Google can identify the search intent based on the search queries asked and shows the appropriate result smartly!

Effective things to Improve the Dwell Time

Google tends to look at so many metrics in its ranking factors where user engagement metrics like dwell time and Click-Through Rates (Click Through Rates) are among the important ones.

Especially, the metrics like dwell time takes care of the things by itself when you look out for these effective things that can help you out to boost the Dwell Time.

Here’s what you can do!

Create the Quality and In-depth Content

Content plays a significant role in improvising the dwell time, it could be right to say that an in-depth and thorough content can engage more and more visitors where in-turn they may most likely spend more time, probably a couple of minutes and stick around there.

Let’s say for instance, when you are looking for some insightful articles, you may find the top-ranking results with the posts that offer the in-depth and quality content where you can spend more time and find some great values while reading that piece of content.

On the other hand, when you navigate to the 10^th SERP page, then you can easily find out that the content on those results wouldn’t deliver great values than that of the 1^st page results.

Improving Internal Linking Structure of your Website

Although there is page rank and other SEO benefits when you have a good internal linking structure for your website pages, it’s about enhancing the visitor experience.

In short, sprinkling the internal links can work as wonder as ultimately you are directing your visitors to the content that they may be interested in!

Keeping your Content Up-to-Date

You need to understand this point about keeping the content up to date as not all the content can remain evergreen.

So, over time, you need to update your content for your previous articles. One of the reasons behind doing so is that the people find the recently updated articles more trustable.

Doing so can in turn improve the dwell time and boost the CTR (Click Through Rates).

Final Words

There is no such one tactic that fits best can impact the dwell time as there are many as listed above that can help you to enhance dwell time and your overall SEO results.

Creating and publishing the relevant content is one of the most impactful tactics to give the best user experience so that your website visitors can stick longer on your web pages resulting in an improved dwell time.

If you love reading this article, then do share it on the social media networks so more people can gain insights about dwell time after all enhancing dwell time does impact the overall SEO results. Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below, we will make sure to help you out!