What is Dwell Time?
Dwell time is the amount of time that passes between when you click on a website after searching a query in Google, and returning to the search results page after visiting that page. It’s not the same as bounce rate, time on page, or any other metric that is measured by Google. So if you were to search for “local electrician”, click on the 1st link, and spend a minute on that website browsing before returning to the results page, your dwell time would be 1 minute.
How is Dwell Time different from other metrics?
Dwell time is similar to metrics found in Google Analytics like “bounce rate” and “time on page” in that they all measure your activity on the page, or page engagement, but that’s where the similarities end.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that take no further action after landing on a website. It does not measure whether they go back to the search results page afterwards.
Time on page
Time on page measures the time a user spends on a single page before moving on to another page, this could be another internal page, which is measured by another metric, back to the SERPS, or even out to another website.
How does Dwell time affect SEO?
Google has stated that it uses metrics like dwell time to train models they use in development, but they have not clarified if it’s being used in live algorithms to determine rankings. Many of Google’s search team employees have stated that the dwell time metric can be unreliable as it doesn’t measure user satisfaction.
For example;
- If you were to visit a website and find the information you were looking for in under a minute, the delivery of that page for your search query and intent was perfect, but dwell time only sees the time you spent before leaving the site, it doesn’t measure if you are satisfied with the content you’ve read.
How to Improve Dwell time
Whether dwell time affects your SEO rankings or not, it’s a good concept to focus on as a content creator, you should always try and improve the engagement time of your users. This can be done by creating helpful, reliable, people-first content! Google constantly reminds us that this should be your top priority when it comes to improving user satisfaction, and ultimately, your rankings and conversions.
Let’s take a look at a few things we can do to improve your content engagement and a couple of things to avoid;
Take Advantage of Short attention spans
Users have short attention spans, especially now that we are constantly consuming content from various different platforms, so unless you can grab their attention, they’ll head back to the search results. You can do this with formulas like the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) or Challenge-Solution-Invitation (CSI).
Search Intent is Key to good content
When people are searching on Google, they have a specific goal in mind. This can be to find out information about a specific topic or product, this is known as informational intent. It may be to purchase a product or service, which is known as transactional intent. Lastly, it might be to find a specific website that you know you’re looking for, such as “Facebook” or “Amazon”, this is called navigational intent.
Google does a very good job at understanding the intent of your search query, but it’s not always perfect, this is why you might find results that come up that may not be helpful.
Use Clickbate Titles with Caution!
Users will choose which website to click on based on a number of different things, it could be that you recognise a website and “trust” it to provide you with the content as it may have done in the past. It could be due to the high review count and 5-star ratings, commonly known as schema markup. Or it might be because of the Meta title and description.
The Meta title and description are the link titles and descriptions you see of each website as you scroll down the search results page. If you find something in the meta description that matches what you’re looking for, like “Free-callouts” when you’re searching for a plumber, you’re more likely to click through to that page.
If you were to land on that page to find that they actually don’t offer free callouts, you’d go looking elsewhere and possibly never return to that page.
Keep Your Content Fresh and Up-to-date
Things are changing so quickly these days, so writing content and publishing it may provide good results now, but in a year or two you may find it to be out of date. Users will start to find it less attractive and useful than it was, and visit this page less often. So it’s good to revisit old content occasionally to keep it up-to-date and relevant to users.
