Dwell Time
TL;DR
Dwell Time represents the time spent by people between the moment they check a page from the search engine results page until they go back to the pages displayed by search engines in response to their query (searched keyword)
What is the Dwell Time?
Dwell Time is the amount of time that a searcher spends in search engine's result pages starting from the search result, clicks on a page, and returns back to the SERPs.
Why Is Dwell Time Important and how to increase it?
Dwell time might be used by search engines to showcase the relevancy of a website for the searcher. The longer time on the site, without going back in the page results, the better.
At the end of the day, dwell time measure if you manage to keep a visitor on the website. No matter if you increase the dwell time to please the algorithms, or to keep visitors longer on the website in order to convert them.
Here’s a short checklist to look at in order to ensure the visitors’ stickiness.
Check the following metrics that can affect the dwell time or time on your page:
- Page speed. If the site is to slow to load, then people will just hit the back button before you know, and check the other results given by the search engine.
- Design. The first page should always display a clean and beautiful message for the reader. If people who searched for a certain topic in the search engine will not see what they were looking for on the website, they clicked in the result, there is a high chance to go back. And sometimes, the info is there, it is not at first glance though. So make sure to have a nicely designed and clean layout and messaging.
- Content. Create actionable and engaging content.
- Ensure proper and strong internal linking, so the visitor can easily jump from a page to another one (Wikipedia is a great example!)
- Make sharing easy: ensure you can create fun shareable content and add the sharing buttons to make it easy to spread the word.
