How to Increase SEO Dwell Time

Are you doing everything you can to rank for a specific keyword and still not showing up at the top of the SERPs? Then maybe your dwell time has something to do with it.

Here’s the thing: if people spend less time on your site and get what they want elsewhere, it’s time to figure out why and then fix it. 

After developing hundreds of high-ranking pages, I’m here to show you the role dwell time plays in ranking and to walk you through some simple steps to increase it.

Key Takeaways

• Dwell time refers to the amount of time a user spends on a webpage after clicking a search result before returning to the search engine results page (SERP).
• Higher dwell time indicates user engagement and content relevance, which can positively impact search engine rankings.
• Create high-quality, engaging content that meets user intent and keeps visitors interested to improve dwell time.
• Enhance user experience with fast load times, easy navigation, and a mobile-friendly design to encourage visitors to stay longer.
• Use internal links to guide users to related content on your site, increasing the overall time spent on your pages and reducing bounce rates.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is Dwell Time?
• Why Is Dwell Time Important?
• What Dwell Time Isn’t
• How to Improve Dwell Time
  • 1. Hook Readers In
  • 2. Make Content Scannable
  • 3. Incorporate Rich Media
  • 4. Match Search Intent
  • 5. Improve Internal Linking
  • 6. Improve Site Speed
  • 7. Prioritize Mobile
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is Dwell Time?

So, what is dwell time, and why does it matter? Simply put, dwell time is the length of time a user spends on your page before returning to SERPs. 

Dwell time is essential because:

• It helps you determine if your content meets search intent, the driving force behind what potential customers are really looking for.
• Longer dwell time can signal to search engines that your content is engaging and relevant, which can boost your rank in the SERPS.
• A higher SERP rank can help to increase organic traffic and conversions.

It’s also a hot topic at the moment, with the recent buzz around the Google algorithm document leak sparking renewed debate about dwell times potential as a likely ranking signal. 

While the dwell time isn’t mentioned directly in the leaked documents, concepts around user engagement and behavior are front and center. 

Elements in the leaked documents related to click time suggest they play a role in the algorithm. For example, long clicks (when users stay on your website longer)) are directly referenced, and these relate to how people interact with search results and for how long.

This is where dwell time comes into play.

Now you know what dwell time is, let me explain how it differs from bounce rate and time on page.

Why Is Dwell Time Important?

Let’s say you want to establish a better morning routine. You Google “healthy morning routine.”

You click on the first result. But the page is hard to navigate, and the content’s not useful.

Within a few seconds, you hit back on your browser and click on the second result.

The second page has excellent content, and the website is easy to scroll through. You spend six minutes there and then go back to the SERP.

Now, if other people also spend more time on the second page, Google may factor that into its page rankings and demote the current first result.

See how that could impact your SEO efforts? 

Let’s get to it then. Here are seven strategies to increase your pages’ dwell time.

What Dwell Time Isn’t

Bounce rate, time on page, and dwell time. You may have heard of these metrics, and while they’re all related to user engagement, their meanings can be blurry. 

Let’s quickly break down the differences: 

• Dwell time meaning: the total time from when someone clicks on a SERP result and stays on a page before returning to the SERPs.
• Time on page meaning: the time a viewer spends on a specific page until they go anywhere else. Fortunately, the days when this metric was measured based on two clicks, requiring a user to click on a second page on your site, are gone. You can now monitor average engagement time for how long a visitor spends on each page of your website (including a single visit to one page) with GA4. 
• Bounce rate meaning: when viewers visit a webpage and leave without taking any action such as navigating to another page or filling out a form. Bounce rate helps you to understand how well your content is performing. To calculate bounce rate in GA4, divide the number of bounced (or non-engaged sessions) by the total number of sessions x 100. 

The big difference between them is that dwell time measures how long someone spends on your site overall from a search result before they head back to the SERPs, as opposed to the amount of time they spend on one specific page (time on page). 

Meanwhile, bounce rate tracks interactions across your entire site from all sources instead of being linked to clicks to and from the SERPs. 

How to Improve Dwell Time

Fortunately, there’s a ton you can do to improve dwell time. Below, I’ll discuss seven actionable steps you can introduce today. Let’s start with an infographic to highlight those tips:

1. Hook Readers In

Attention spans are shorter than ever, which means you have one shot to quickly make a great first impression and grab your reader’s attention. 

Are your blog post introductions reeling in readers? Each introduction needs to be interesting and relevant to your target keywords to foster dwell time.

For example, all of my recent blogs have an early “key takeaways” section to show exactly what you need to pull from the article.

Adding quick insights (key takeaways) at the beginning of the post is the hook. It adds value by allowing viewers to grasp essential points while acting as a transition, encouraging further reading. 

It’s also a great opportunity to include keywords, provide actionable advice in a scannable format, and serve as a teaser of what readers can expect to learn from your article.  

2. Make Content Scannable

An engaging introduction grabs attention for sure, but you’ll need to make content scannable to keep visitors engaged and excited to stay on your page longer. 

A good way to make content scannable and boost dwell time is using H2s (and H3s, H4s, etc) to break content into sections so it’s easy to read. It also makes it easier for folks to go back and reference your content later.

A good example is this article on defining your target audience.

Let’s dive into how I’ve crafted a user-friendly reader experience.

First, I use a clear structure with a mix of H2 and H3 headings, which breaks the content into manageable sections for easy reading. The sections are then further enhanced with scannable content elements like: 

• Bullet points: Turning succinct lists into bullet-point format makes the content easier to digest while helping readers find the meat of the content faster.
• Visuals and screenshots: Break up large sections of text and keep readers engaged by including relevant images. Use them to illustrate key points and make concepts easier to understand and recall.
• Internal links: Encourage readers to enhance their learning with well-placed, relevant internal links that direct them to other pages on your site. Doing so also keeps people on your site longer, increasing dwell time. Win, win!

Finally, I provide actionable insights for my readers to apply, adding to the overall value and experience.

3. Incorporate Rich Media

Infographics aren’t just great for referral traffic. Visuals can also help keep your site visitors engaged and enhance your dwell time.

For example, check out this content layering infographic. Visual representation makes a complex topic easier to digest and understand.

Image source

Do you see how using colors, icons, and graphics helps capture the reader’s attention? It makes the whole experience more enjoyable and engaging. 

But that’s not all.

Including rich media is an excellent way for readers to grasp key points quickly without too much text. It also presents information in a structured, logical way, focusing on the most important aspects without getting lost in details.

Here are a few tools you can use to create visuals for your content quickly:

• Canva
• Venngage
• Piktochart
• Visme

Video can also encourage visitors to stick around. According to research from Hubspot, 62% of consumers watch videos to learn about brands, which could mean increased dwell time on your website. Think product reviews, how-tos, training programs, UGC (user-generated content), demos, etc. 

Embedding videos in your content can be effective, too. It aids understanding, breaks up text, and makes content more dynamic and appealing to different learning styles.

Here are a few different strategies to improve the effectiveness of video:

• Use an eye-catching video thumbnail so users will click and watch, like this example from internet personality and YouTuber MrBeast:

• Customer testimonials or product videos can be a powerful way to push conversions.
• Embed a video explaining a specific strategy or concept you touch on within your content. Use the video to dive deeper into the strategy.
• Insert a video containing information with related content.

4. Match Search Intent

If you’re looking to rank #1 for a keyword on Google, your content needs to be the most relevant to the query searched. In other words, the content on your page needs to reflect a searcher’s intent, the reason for the search.

Let’s say you’re trying to rank for “best spa” in NYC.

Google knows the most relevant results from millions of searchers who have bounced or stuck around on pages. In this case, the top results are spa options based on a searcher’s location and the best spas worldwide.  

A landing page spotlighting a specific spa won’t work. However, charts showing different destination spa amenities and price comparison tools may be effective.  

Now, let’s say a spa targets “corporate wellness retreats.” Here are the steps they can take to do competitive research on Ubersuggest:

First, review search volume, Cost Per Click, Paid Difficulty, and SEO Difficulty under “Keyword Ideas.”

Next, hit the down arrow next to the search icon to analyze the top SERP results for that keyword.

Are the top results product pages, blog posts, or another format? For a search of “corporate wellness retreat,” we can see most of the top 10 results are landing pages.

As you review each page, take notes on the page’s content to see how you can improve.

You can also review on-page optimizations, such as using keywords in headlines, subheadings, and other factors encouraging dwell time.

Then, review the top results of the off-page SEO strategy. Copy the URL of any result into Ubersuggest’s Dashboard to see more about the domain, including

• The number of backlinks pointing to their domain.
• Keyword rankings
• Estimated traffic value
• On-page SEO score
• Top SEO opportunities 

5. Improve Internal Linking

If someone wants to learn more about a specific topic you’ve covered, make it easy to access with an internal link. 

Internal links help keep users on your site and increase dwell time. They’re also a key feature for on-page optimization.

Your internal links can also guide users to take the next step along your inbound funnel.

As you may know, a pillar page is a central piece on a website covering an in-depth topic.  

Let’s say you want to target a keyword with significant volume, like “camper living.”

Once you create a pillar page targeting the keyword, you may develop a blog post reviewing an RV essential like a mobile hotspot. Then, link to this piece on your pillar page.

Here are a few internal linking strategies to boost dwell time:

• Embed relevant links within your content to guide readers to related articles.
• Use descriptive anchor text so viewers know exactly what they will get by clicking.
• Use well-placed CTAs like ‘read more.’ 
• Highlight related and popular posts.
• Leverage sidebar links.
• Segment content into series.
• Create a content hub.

6. Improve Site Speed

Want a super-easy way to increase dwell time and make a great first impression? Then, make sure your pages load fast.

47% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less. Keep them waiting longer than that, and you risk losing them to your competitors.  

Here are a few tools to help speed up your site:

• Page Speed Insights
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• WebPageTest
• GTmetrix

7. Prioritize Mobile

Around half of worldwide traffic comes from mobile devices, which means you need to provide a mobile-first experience on your website.

What does that mean? To improve dwell time, your site must perform well on mobile devices, not just desktops, due to Google’s mobile-first indexing. It prioritizes the mobile version of websites for crawling and ranking in response to the increased shift towards mobile usage.

Here’s how to double-check that you’ve optimized your mobile pages:

1. Visit PageSpeed Insights.
2. Enter a URL and click the “Analyze” button.
3. Ensure the “Mobile” tab is selected.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is like having a personal mobile website coach. It gives you an overall score from 0-100 that shows how well your site is optimized for mobile users. It gives you valuable information about mobile usability issues, loading speed, elements that impact the mobile user experience, and recommendations for improvements. 

FAQs

What is dwell time?

Dwell time measures the length of time a user stays on your page after clicking on it from the search engine results page (SERP) before returning to the search results.

What is a good dwell time?

Industry benchmarks for the average time on site is around two and a half minutes, according to a recent study, so that’s a good goal.  Keep in mind, though, that this can change depending on your niche, content type, and the keywords people use to find your page.

How is dwell time calculated?

There’s no distinct calculation, but engaged sessions and engagement time in Google Analytics 4 will tell you how long your user stays on the page.

How do you increase dwell time on a website?

You can increase dwell time by considering the user’s search intent, hooking the reader in with your introduction, writing scannable content with plenty of images, and improving site speeds. 

Adding backlinks and encouraging conversation helps, too.

Conclusion

All of these techniques can help increase dwell time. But let your rankings and analytics reveal the most effective elements for your content. Start at the top of the list and test each strategy. For example, you might find that your users respond to interactive content elements or prefer lists. Then, fine-tune your SEO for those elements for an additional boost. Once you see what works to drive traffic and increase dwell time, you can fine-tune your strategy and improve your rank on Google.