Improving Dwell Time on your Website

When improving the SEO of your website, considering the user behaviour metrics can sometimes be an after-thought. These metrics show how people interact with your website and indicate to Google the relevance and importance of the content, thereby improving your chances of climbing the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Position). I’d like to explore the dwell time metric and why this should be a KPI for your SEO strategy.

Dwell time is how long a user will remain on a page, while engaged with it’s content. This is a particularly important metric for blogs as a user will read the article and usually leave without navigating further into the site. This can, in turn, contaminate the bounce rate KPI, which shows the percentage of users who landed on a page and immediately left without interaction. These two metrics are observed by search engines to determine the relevancy of your content and ultimately your position in the rankings.

So whenever we look at bounce rates for a category, such as the blog, we always need to consider the average time on that page as well. If the dwell time is low, then the content isn’t relevant, therefore increasing the dwell time on pages will show the search engine algorithms that your content is engaging the user.

This case study shows an increase in average time on page week on week. The metric improved by over 100% and as a bonus, the bounce rate also decreased.

So how is this possible? When writing an article such as this one, the time it takes the user to finish reading will probably only be about 2 - 3 minutes. After that, they will most likely exit the site. We have two objectives here; increase dwell time and decrease bounce rate.

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Increasing Dwell Time

The best method for this I’ve found, which is a direct result from the case study mentioned above, is including video on your pages. I’ve explored this in a previous post about making content emotionally engaging. This looked at how an audience would rather be shown a story more than reading about it, which is called neural coupling.

Either creating, or linking to relevant video content will engage your audience, increase dwell time and improve your onsite metrics for better search engine positioning.

If your content is about statistics, then consider using interactive graphs and charts. Google Charts provides an excellent, free resource for this, which can be implemented through Google Tag Manager.

Before publishing your content, always consider how it can be augmented to engage the reader further, through video and interactive elements.

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Decrease Bounce Rate

Blog posts sometimes miss an opportunity to internally link to other pages with relevant content. Once a user is engaged, the author should provide additional navigation points for the user to explore. This can be in the form of internal linking, call to actions or creative banners.

This is a particularly important consideration for ecommerce sites, looking to incrementally increase sales. Monetising a blog can provide a benefit which stacks over time and can be achieved by creating banners within the article, which have a clear call to action, related to the blog post itself. Analysing this by creating specific goal funnels, with the blog as a required initial step can help understand this and improve overall bounce rate.

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So when looking at your content plan, always consider the metrics for dwell time in your analysis of performance. As an important part of any SEO strategy, including this within your KPIs could see your overall ranking positions improve.

Need help with your content plan and looking to increase your website’s dwell time? Get in touch today!