should you make an effort to increase it in your SEO strategy?

If you’re here, you’re probably familiar with SEO techniques and the most common Content Marketing metrics , right? So let’s get down to business, today we’re going to talk about dwell time. What exactly does this metric mean?

For starters, it is a metric that is studied alongside others to determine the quality of a site based on the time people spend on it . It reflects how much a user who arrived at it as a result of a search engine query liked your site .

If your dwell time is low , specific changes may be needed to increase that number.

Dwell time affects search engine optimization (SEO), and that’s what we’re going to understand now.

In this post we will talk about:

What is Dwell time?

Imagine you finished shop searching Google for the best landing page examples, clicked on our post, read the sections you wanted, and then returned to the SERPs three minutes and 55 seconds later .

That’s the time spent on our page, considering this specific situation. But let’s dig a little deeper into the definition of this metric:

Dwell time is the amount of time that passes from the moment a searcher clicks on a search result until the moment they return to the SERP.

In theory, a high dwell time is great for you because it means people are enjoying your content.

Are Dwell time and Bounce Rate the same thing? should-you-make

Bounce rate and dwell time have things types of consulting kits in common, but they are certainly not the same thing.

Bounce rate is the number of visitors who visit a page on a website and leave without clicking . They may spend a long time on the site, even hours, but if they leave without clicking, it is considered a bounce.

On the other hand, Dwell time is a measure of time . Someone who spends a lot of time on a site generates a good dwell time, even if they don’t click on anything.

Another important difference is that while dwell time is measured by the SERP , bounce rate is measured by users who come from other websites as well.

What is the difference between Dwell time and time on page? should-you-make

Time on page measures the amount of time benin businesses directory a user stays on a page before leaving. It’s that simple.

This metric isn’t just about search engine traffic, either. It measures the time spent when the surfer is coming from somewhere else. This information is useful for uncovering patterns in your web traffic as a whole.

Dwell time vs. bounce rate vs. time on page should-you-make

As you can see, these three metrics reflect the quality of your page. Having the right numbers can give you a lot of valuable information about the user experience on your site.

And if you want to complement the results provided by these indicators, you can use event tracking methods that help you understand, in a reliable way, how readers spend their time on your page.

You can see how your visitors interact — not just how long they kept your page open in their browser — by giving you data on how far down the page readers scrolled, whether they played videos or clicked buttons, or whether they moved on to another page on your website.

If you don’t track events, this metric will include browsers who simply had the page open and then went on to do something else.

Why is Dwell Time Important for SEO? should-you-make

There are many reasons why this metric is important for SEO. For starters, it demonstrates the quality of a site and can tell us a lot about whether users are finding what they are looking for on it.

A low organic dwell time could mean that they leave disappointed. It could also mean that the web design is not very effective.

When someone returns to the search engine, it’s because they want to see better results. Basically, your SEO strategy brought people to your site, but the content wasn’t what they expected. So you need to make adjustments.

Maybe you’ll improve your content so it aligns with user intent. Maybe you’ll reconsider your keywords to better match search trends.

Search engines could be using dwell time in their algorithm – there is nothing to confirm or deny that – they could detect a low dwell time and assume that for a specific keyword your site is simply not the best choice and deserves a lower ranking.

How to measure your Dwell time? should-you-make

If you’re using Google Analytics , you can set up metrics to estimate your dwell time. In your Analytics account, go to “Behavior” and click on ” Site Content .” Then, go to ” Landing Pages ” and ” New Segment .”

Click on “ Organic Traffic ” and “ Apply ” so that you only get views coming in through search engines. The metric you want is called “ Average Session Duration .” It’s not dwell time, but it’s as close as you can get.

If your dwell time is high, you may be giving people what they expect when they click through to your site from the SERP. If it’s low, you probably need to do some testing and tweaking to increase the rate.

You can also run your own tests by timing the amount of time you spend on sites run by your competitors. This can help you see what trends lead you to click and what content keeps you engaged the longest.

Calculate your own dwell time and record the data. You can then think about what factors influenced the length of the dwell times.