Dwell time is one of those indicators that you can read about in articles, social media and hear about at industry conferences. Unfortunately, even within the community SEO This concept often remains misunderstood. What is dwell time? Is it a ranking factor? And if so, how can you influence it? Google takes more than 200 factors into account when ranking. Determining which ones matter can be difficult. Read on to find out if dwell time is one of them.
What is dwell time?
Let us begin by explaining what dwell time actually is. It will be helpful in this case to break the expression down into its first parts. Obviously, "time" means "time". 'Dwell', on the other hand, means 'to stop', 'to dwell on something', 'to ponder'. The definition of dwell time thus says that it is the amount of time a person spends browsing a website after clicking a result on the SERP and before returning to the results page.
You yourself probably do it often - dwell time is that brief moment when you evaluate a page. Either it has provided you with the answer you were expecting, or visiting it was such an obvious mistake that you immediately click the back button. The value of this indicator to the search engine is obvious - the the more time a user spends consuming the content of a site, the more likely it is that the site meets their needs.
What does dwell time look like in practice? Here's an example. Let's say you are looking for Italian restaurants in Wroclaw. You click on the first organic search result. You look at the restaurant website that appears, browse the menu and decide you want to keep looking. You return to the SERP (search engine results page) three minutes later. This is the dwell time of the site you visited.
Dwell time versus bounce rate - what's the difference?
The bounce rate is a parameter that shows what percentage of people leave a website as soon as it is opened, without going to the sub-pages within the domain. Even if some - say bouncers - entered the site from the SERP, this does not mean that they went back there. They may have closed the site or gone directly to another page. And the key differentiator of dwell time is precisely that it always starts and ends on the search results page.
Attention: dwell time is not a 'publicly' available indicator that can be measured by a tool. Only search engines have access to it. There is no formula for calculating it, but you can get an idea of how your website is performing in terms of dwell time with the "Average session duration" in the Google Analytics (behaviour -> site content -> landing pages -> add segment -> organic traffic -> average session duration).
What will the information you find there give you? As with any other metric - they will allow you to see what is working and what is not. Let's say one sub-page stands out with a four-minute session duration, while others have less than two minutes. Take a look at that page. Analyse how it differs and how you can use this knowledge to improve the performance of the other sub-pages.
Is dwell time a Google ranking factor?
Although it is widely believed by experts (particularly in the West) that dwell time plays a role in Google's rankings, the Mountain View giant does not explicitly address this issue. Google has never released any official statement on whether or how dwell time affects rankings, but there have been hints that it is taken into account when ranking. For example, at one conference Nick Frost, head of Google Brain, said:
Google is now integrating machine learning into [the process of figuring out what the relationship between a search and the best page for that search is]. So then training models on when someone clicks on a page and stays on that page, when they go back, or when they are trying to figure out exactly that relationship.1
Most SEO specialists took this statement as a clear indication of the importance of dwell time in gaining high positions in Google.
How to improve dwell time?
In order to positively influence dwell time and improve the site, it is first of all necessary to audit it. It will tell you what errors need to be eliminated, what can be optimised and how to increase the value of the site in the eyes of the user.
A positive visitor experience should become a priority. In practice, this means that you should, among other things:
- make content easier to scan by formatting it with headings, subheadings, bullet points, lists and short paragraphs
- speed up the page loading speed (ideally it should be under 3 seconds)
- make it easier for users to navigate the site by creating clear menus and using, for example, crumb navigation
- create a mobile-friendly website. You can test your website in this respect here
Increasing dwell time will also benefit from embedding video files on the page. Supplementing written content with videos is a great way to keep users engaged. In addition, a video usually lasts at least a minute or two, automatically keeping visitors on the site if they watch the entire piece.
Read also: Tutorials - discover the power of tutorials
Take care of the high quality of the site and don't worry about dwell time
Basically, dwell time is an indicator you should know about. However, as you work on your site's position in search results, you are probably already taking all the right steps to improve it. Many of the elements that increase dwell time are part of basic on-page SEO. You have problems adapting your site to mobile devices - you need to fix that. The site is slow to load - you need to address this. Remember, too, that climbing the Google rankings takes not only time, but skill. That's why it's worth entrusting this task to specialists, such as the SEOSki agency.
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