What is Dwell Time and How it Impacts SEO?

What is Dwell Time?

Dwell time, do you know what is it? Let’s separate the phrase ‘dwell’ and ‘time’, dwell means ‘live in or at a specified place’. Does this give you a sense? Simply, it is the time of a person or a product who spend their presence at a particular place. In SEO, dwell time is the time a user spent on your website or webpage. The time is calculated from when the user clicks your site in the SERP results, and it ends when the user get back to the SERPs.

Many SEO professionals understood this dwell time wrong; the dwell time is running inside the search engines. Though it may be a factor for improving organic traffic, first you need to clearly understand what dwell time is.

As an SEO, while learning about the important factors, I got the phrase ‘dwell time’ from ‘Dwell Time Impacts SEO‘, and I am eager to learn what is it. After some surveys and research, I’m here to explain to you what is dwell time and how it impacts SEO. After reading this article, you would have a conclusion about dwell time, and you can start improving your website SEO rank.

As mentioned earlier, many SEO experts were confused about the concept of dwell time. First, I’ll explain what a dwell time is not, there are many factors that relate to dwell time, but they are not the exact ones.

Dwell Time is not a Bounce Rate

Many people confuse dwell time with bounce rate, we know that dwell time is the time user spent on your site. Do you know what is bounce rate is? If you understood the concept of bounce rate, then you can clearly differ these terms. Let us have a quick look at the bounce rate.

Bounce Rate

The term bounce refers to the action of the user when a user enters your site on a particular page and leaves your site from that similar page without taking any actions. This bounce rate is calculated with three main factors,

Page-level Bounce Rate – Total number of bounces on a particular date range divided by the total number of entrances or clicks in the same date range and this is calculated within the same page.

Site down Bounce Rate – The total number of bounces on all the pages of the website divided by the total number of clicks on all the pages of the website.

Segmented bounce rate – This segmented rate is calculated with a selection of pages on a website i.e., the total number of bounces on a segment divided by the total number of clicks on the segment.

This calculation is done for the percentage of rates and having 100% is not worthy. If a person enters your site and left without doing any actions then the bounce will be 100, and if the user clicks any of the other pages, then the rate will be 0.

Dwell Time Vs Bounce Rate

So, we can differentiate these two factors, ‘dwell time’ and ‘bounce rate’. Bounce rate is the rate that is calculated based on the clicks on your site and the dwell time is the time that the user spends on your site.

Dwell Time is not Average time on Page

The average time on a page is calculated for a particular page and not for a website. When the user is redirected from any social media or any backlinks and their average time spent on that particular page. The dwell time is totally different from this, and dwell time is for the whole website.

Dwell Time is not Click-Through Rate

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the ratio of the number of clicks on your site to the number of views in SERP. It can be explained in simple for Ads, CTR for Ads is the ratio number of the number of times your ad is clicked to the number of times your ad is shown.

Simply, CTR = Clicks / Impression

So, dwell time is not also a CTR, having a CTR of about 2% is good to have but you should improve that in future to have a competitive website in this digital world.

Well, the differences between each term that confuses dwell time have been explained. I think it would give you the sense to understand dwell time. Now we will move to the analysis of Dwell Time, that is how it is calculated and resembles your ranking.

Dwell Time Analysis – How Dwell Time impacts SEO?

If you have a better SEO ranking, and your site is already on the first page of SERP, it is not good to avoid dwell time. Because dwell time directly impacts SEO and improve your website ranking.

For example, assume your website is ranking on #5 or #6 with the keyword ‘What is SEO’. If the user search for ‘What is SEO’ in search engines, the search engines crawl the sites and show the results. Usually, the user will click the #1 ranked website, if that particular site does not give exact answers the user will get back and move on to another site. This will be repeated, till the user get his/her satisfying conclusion or solution for his query.

When users get into your page and are impressed with your content and answers, they will spend more time on your website. This gives a better dwell time for your website, if this happens for a number of users and many times, then search engines like Google and Bing will automatically crawl your website to the #1 position.

This is not magic; it is the reward for your impressive and highly professional content on your website. But dwell time is not only an important factor for SEO, but the dwell time also improves only when you have a perfect and professional business website.

How to improve Dwell Time?

Dwell time is the engagement of the user in your website for a long time, this can be done with the perfect SEO tips and strategies like On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. While talking about On-Page SEO, the first preference is for content, your content should be clear and informative. It is sure that the content with less information will not rank though you have earned backlinks and perfect keywords.

Though it is ranked, the users will not engage with your content. So, try to add some attractive and perfectly required images. Add some of the videos related to your content, which will help the user to get a practical view. Adding videos will make the user spend more time on your website. Try to give exact backlinks with perfect anchor text, and make sure the anchor text is related to your keyword.

The technical terms like load time will also impact the dwell time, if your site loads for a long time, then the user might get irritated and get back to SERP without viewing your website. So, it is important to have a perfect website to increase dwell time.