What is Dwell Time? Its Impact on SEO and User Experience

What is dwell time? Imagine you click through the websites listed on the first page of search results but don’t find what you’re looking for, you might click back to explore other options. This process repeats and contributes to “dwell time” – a significant metric in search engine optimization. Let’s dive deeper into this metric, its importance, and how to increase it.

What Is Dwell Time?

In the Cambridge Dictionary, “dwell time” (noun) means “how long people are likely to spend looking at an advertisement, buying goods, etc., especially while they are waiting somewhere, such as an airport or train station.”

Dwell time in SEO is a user’s duration on a particular webpage before returning to the search engine results page (SERP). It begins when a user clicks on a search result and ends when they navigate away from the page. 

For example, you search for the keyword “best pool cue shaft” and click on the first organic result. If the page is full of ads and lacks valuable content, you may return to the SERP after only 10 seconds. In this case, the dwell time is 10 seconds. 

Contrarily, the dwell time will be higher if you find a helpful list of the best cue shafts and spend more than five minutes on it.

How to Calculate Dwell Time

What is considered dwell time? In Google Analytics, dwell time is reflected in “Average Session Duration,” indicating the average time visitors spend on a website. The system calculates this metric by dividing the total duration of all sessions by the total number of sessions.

There are two ways to access average session duration, or dwell time, in Google Analytics:

• Find the average dwell time across all the accounts you’re tracking: Log into your Google Analytics home and find “Average Session Duration” on the homepage. 
• Find the dwell time for individual landing pages or blog posts: Open the “Behavior” section on the left side of the screen, then select “Site Content” followed by “Landing Pages.”

It’s essential to clarify that while “Average Session Duration” can reflect dwell time, they are not identical: 

• Dwell time is the amount of time a user spends on a page after arriving from the SERP.
• The average session duration may include time spent on a page after navigating from other sources, such as landing pages, email links, or social media platforms.

To isolate landing page metrics related to the SERPs, you can simply add a segment for “Organic Traffic.”

(Source: Blog Hubspot)

What’s a Good Dwell Time?

The answer depends on numerous factors:

• Your niche: Different industries and topics have varying expectations for dwell time.
• Type of content: Certain content formats naturally lead to longer or shorter dwell times.
• Search query relevance: The intent behind the search query can influence how long users stay on your page.
• Seasonal trends: Dwell time fluctuates based on seasonal interests or trends.

Most marketers agree that it’s uncommon for average session durations to exceed 10 minutes or fall below one minute. The industry benchmark for average dwell time is 2-4 minutes. It typically takes this amount of time to browse a website and get a sense of its design.

Instead of focusing on a specific time frame, it’s more beneficial to enhance your overall sitewide dwell time through the strategies ROI Digitally’s experts share below.

Dwell Time vs. Bounce Rate vs. Time-on-Page

We’ve seen much confusion about dwell time, bounce rate, and time on page. While they are all metrics used to measure user engagement, each represents different aspects of user behavior.

Here is a table showcasing their differences: 

Metric	Definition	Purpose
Dwell Time	The duration users spend on a webpage from the SERP before returning there or navigating to another website.	Measure how engaging and relevant the content is to users’ search queries.
Bounce Rate	The percentage of visitors who land on a webpage and leave without interacting with anything on the page	Measure the proportion of single-page sessions to all sessions on your website.
Time-on-Page	The duration users spend on a specific webpage before moving on to another page within the same website or navigating away.	Calculate the time between the user’s first arrival on the page and their next interaction or departure.

So, even though these three metrics have something in common, each measures a different statistic that provides valuable data for your SEO strategy.

Is Dwell Time a Ranking Factor?

The concept of dwell time emerged in the late 2000s and gained popularity during the 2010s. Bing was the first search engine to discuss dwell time in 2011, describing it as “a signal we watch” to measure quality.

Bing mentioned “dwell time.”

However, whether dwell time influences Google’s ranking algorithm appears uncertain. While some SEO experts speculate that dwell time could affect rankings due to potential effects on machine learning algorithms, no official evidence supports this theory.

Google’s Nick Frost said in 2017:

“Google is now integrating machine learning into [the process of figuring out the relationship between a search and the best page for that search]. 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.”

And Cyrus Shepard – an SEO specialist – then shared on his social media:

It led to the belief that low dwell times may indicate users find the content unhelpful. Accordingly, machine learning could underestimate your website and cause it to drop rankings on SERP. Conversely, higher dwell times can lead Google to believe that the content is high quality, allowing it to top the rankings.

Meanwhile, Gary Illyes, a Google webmaster trends analyst, downplayed the significance of dwell time in the Reddit Ask Me Anything session in 2019. He referred to it as “generally made-up crap,” emphasizing that search algorithms are much simpler than commonly believed.

In fact, lower dwell time only sometimes indicates poor content quality or user dissatisfaction. For example, users may quickly find the needed information at the top of a page and promptly return to the search results. This situation means the page effectively addressed users’ search intent, which aligns with Google’s objectives.

Therefore, dwell time is unlikely to be a direct ranking factor. However, it offers valuable insights into user behavior. Longer dwell times may indicate engaging content, while consistently low dwell times could signal underlying issues leading users to bounce from pages.

Enhancing Dwell Time Practices 

Regardless of your idea on the dwell time meaning, making visitors stay longer on your page is beneficial. Here are ROI Digitally’s several practices for enhancing dwell time and boosting visitor engagement on your pages. 

1. Understand the Search Intent

A typical reason for low dwell time is users can not find what they want on your webpage. Therefore, you must identify exactly what the user seeks before creating your content. Understand their problem and provide solutions accordingly. 

So, whenever you get a keyword, the first step is to determine its search intent:

• Navigational intent: Users seek a specific page (e.g., “roi digitally linkedin”).
• Informational intent: Users seek information on a topic (e.g., “what is dwell time”).
• Commercial intent: Users research before purchasing (e.g., “best fiber pool cue”).
• Transactional intent: Users aim to complete an action or purchase (e.g., “buy dog food”).

An effective way to determine the search intent is to use SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool. It categorizes search intent for each query, as shown in the image below.

Identify search intent by using Keyword Magic Tool (Source: SEMrush)

Once you get users’ search intent, adapt your tone to resonate with their language and address their needs effectively. 

2. Create Longer and Better Content 

As mentioned in our last blog about SEO content, clunky or irrelevant writing reduces your chances of ranking well and results in poor engagement metrics. Hence, you must improve your website’s content quality for a higher dwell time. 

Follow these approaches:

• Find relevant keywords and incorporate user queries seamlessly into your material.
• Analyze your competitors’ strategies to find areas for improvement.
• Use relevant pictures, like screenshots or illustrations, to explain things visually.
• Speed up your webpage so it loads quickly, and people don’t get impatient and leave.
• Let visitors leave comments or ratings so they feel involved and want to stay engaged with your content.
• Increase content in quantity along with quality.

You can use tools to simplify the process of creating engaging and helpful content for users: 

• SEMrush’s SEO Content Template provides tailored recommendations based on the top search results for your main keyword. 
• SEO Writing Assistant analyzes your text’s readability, SEO effectiveness, tone of voice, and originality. 
• Grammarly checks and points out errors, suggestions, and improvements for your writing. 
• Hemingway Editor gives you tips to simplify long, complex, or passive sentences and paragraphs. 

Besides, here is a simple math: Reading a 4,000-word blog post takes longer than a 400-word one. Thus, we want to share some simple tips on content creation to create longer content and ensure people spend more time on your webpage:

1. Give more examples and details to explain your points clearly.
2. Create a story to drive engagement.
3. Convert your long-form content into audio.
4. Organize the content into digestible sections with appropriate HTML header tags.

With the development of AI generators, creating long-form content is becoming easier. Creators can create 2000-word content in a few minutes by feeding ChatGPT with proper prompts like this:

Remember, enhancing content quality and length is crucial. However, to ensure accuracy and coherence, you must consider the relevance and quality of automated content creation.

3. Focus On User Experience

The dwell time meaning shows us how user experience takes a crucial role in deciding dwell time, especially at the top of the page. Readers unimpressed with the first user experience above the fold are less likely to stay around for long. According to AWS, 88% of visitors won’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.

Regarding user experience design, various disciplines play crucial roles, including:

• Content quality
• Visual design
• Accessibility
• Navigation time
• Security
• Interaction design

It’s essential to grasp how each aspect influences the overall customer experience on your site and effectively improve them.

Check out this table to get the best tips for enhancing the overall page experience:

	How To Do It
Scannable content	Structure your content with clear headings, subheadings, bullets, and short paragraphs for easy scanning.
Load time	Ensure your webpage loads the main content within 2.5 seconds or less to prevent user frustration.
Browser compatibility	Test your site across various browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, to ensure consistent loading and display.
Navigation	Provide clear navigation bars to help users quickly find what they want on your site.
Technical SEO	Monitor page loading time regularly, audit your site’s code and markup, and address any issues using tools like Site Audit.
Mobile-friendly pages	Ensure every webpage has a mobile-friendly version to cater to users accessing your site on mobile devices.
Attractive calls to action (CTA)	Carefully choose the message you want to evoke for a user (trust, experience, intelligence), and choose your colors wisely.
Bullet points	Make your writing more attractive and enable users to get all the necessary information.

4. Use the PPT Formula

Brian Dean, the renowned SEO expert behind Backlinko, introduced the PPT formula used in the hook. PPT stands for Preview, Proof, and Transition. It is a structured method for engaging readers and drawing them to delve into and spend more time on your content. 

The PPT formula (Source: Backlinko)

Let’s break down each component of the PPT framework:

1. Preview: From the first line, you should provide users with a brief and concise preview of your content.

A glimpse into your content’s value proposition lets users quickly ascertain that the information they seek is readily available in your writing.

2. Proof: After the preview, you explain the content in the previous section with concrete evidence.

You can provide proof by using compelling statistics, data points, case studies, or examples that validate the relevance and reliability of your content. This step establishes credibility and builds trust with your audience.

3. Transition: In this section, you smoothly transition from the review and proof into the main body of your content. 

Once you’ve captured the reader’s interest with a compelling preview and provided evidence to support your claims, let’s move to the next part. This transition is a gentle prompt to guide users onward, signaling the beginning of the substantive discussion or exploration of the topic. 

Simple transition phrases like “Let’s begin” or “Let’s get started” can effectively segue into the next section. They will maintain the reader’s momentum and encourage continued engagement.

For example, if you want to write a blog post with the keyword “SEO checklist,” here is a recommended hook you can use:

“Today, [your website name] shares the detailed SEO checklist you need to boost your visibility and rank higher. Following this checklist, you can grow your organic traffic to [statistic], like what we gained last year. Let’s get started!”

This structured approach captivates readers from the outset while boosting a seamless progression through your content. Experiment with the PPT formula in your writing and observe how it positively influences your engagement metrics, especially dwell time. 

5. Integrate Multimedia 

Break up your content with multimedia elements like videos, podcasts, and images to explain the text clearly and keep readers engaged. This practice also prevents users from feeling overwhelmed by too much text.

Wistia analyzed the 100 highest-trafficked pages and revealed the average time visitors stayed on those pages:

• Pages without video typically have an average time spent of 4.3 minutes
• Pages with videos usually have an average time of 6 minutes.

People spent about 1.4 more times on pages with video than without (Source: Wistia)

When users watch a video to the end, it boosts metrics like dwell time and average time on page. Moreover, integrating multimedia also drives traffic to other content types your business offers. 

For instance, embedding a relevant YouTube video in a blog post can attract more views to your channel. Meanwhile, linking to a podcast episode can increase listenership.

The longer people engage with your content, the better acquainted they become with your brand. It increases the likelihood of noticing and responding to a CTA. While multimedia factors alone may not drastically impact rankings, they positively contribute to your overall SEO efforts.

Pro tip: To maximize your video’s potential, embed CTAs directly into it to capture your viewers’ attention when most engaged.

6. Improve Internal Linking Strategy

Now that you understand “What is dwell time?”, using interlinks to other relevant blog posts or landing pages becomes even more critical. It is a top strategy for enhancing your website’s dwell time. 

Including relevant links facilitates seamless navigation for readers, extending their stay and increasing the likelihood of conversions. Nonetheless, it’s crucial to interlink only high-quality, relevant pages for optimal outcomes. Haphazard interlinking can elevate bounce rates and diminish traffic, thereby losing sales potential.

Follow these key steps to implement internal linking effectively:

• Build an Organized Website Structure: Organize your website into reasonable categories and subcategories to create a clear hierarchy. 

• Check Your Site’s Orphan Pages: Identify orphan pages (those are not linked to any other page) and hyperlink them to relevant content to enhance accessibility.
• Use Relevant Descriptive Anchor Text: Anchor text should accurately describe the linked content and align with the user’s intent. 
• Audit Your Website Links: Regularly audit your internal links to identify broken or unindexable links that may hinder user navigation and search engine indexing. 
• Address Pages Crawl Depth: Maintain an optimal page crawl depth to ensure search engine bots can efficiently index your website. 
• Evaluate Internal Links Quality and Quantity: Optimize pages with inadequate internal links and reduce spammy or excessive linking practices.
• Resolve Broken Internal Links: Replace broken links with relevant and accessible content to maintain a positive user experience.

We recommend using website audit tools such as Google Search Console, GTmetrix, and SEMrush to conduct these tasks quickly and effectively.

7. Encourage Community & Comments

Another way to increase dwell time is to encourage engagement from the community and the comments they contribute. Building this engagement takes time, but if the content consistently maintains a high standard, readership, engagement, and comments will likely improve.

Build a community (Source: WIXBlog)

Users are often keen to hear others’ opinions and perspectives. A blog post’s comment section can be a platform for this interaction. Engaging with comments can lead to increased user involvement and more extended periods of online activity on your website.

Furthermore, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes has noted:

“In general, seeing a healthy, thriving community on a site can help a lot. It feeds into the general quality. Say, there’s good content – 5 points, great links from great pages – 2 points, thriving community – 1 point.”

He emphasized that these points are random and do not reflect the specific weighting of certain elements in Google’s algorithms. While a thriving community is not a direct ranking factor, its contribution to broader quality signals demonstrates its importance.

The Bottom Line

Once understand “what is dwell time,” you can better measure users’ interest, engagement, and satisfaction on your web pages. Utilizing the strategies we shared above will create a more fulfilling user experience and increase dwell time. Contact ROI today for expert advice on increasing dwell time and overall SEO strategy. We are ready to help!