Improving dwell time: A great hack to boost your SEO efforts
As you likely know, there’s no one-step guide to ranking highly in Google. Instead, it takes time and effort spent creating compelling content, optimising posts and tweaking onsite variables. However, there is one key metric you should always be focusing on to help boost your site’s rankings and that is dwell time.
What is dwell time?
Dwell time refers to how long a person spends on a page once they find it in the search engines. It is the amount of time taken for someone to then click back through to the SERPs once they have found your article.
Why is dwell time important?
Dwell time has become a crucial Google ranking factor as it helps tell Google a number of things about your content. If your dwell time for an article is quite long, then it means that people are actually reading your content and that they must be finding it useful.
On the flip side, if your page has a short dwell time, then it means the content is directly answering the question asked, and that the user needs to return for more information. As such, Google can then drop your page in the rankings next time someone searches your query as they believe what you offer isn’t relevant.
Ways to improve your dwell time
By improving your dwell time for target keywords, Google can realise your content is indeed more valuable and can promote you more highly for future searches. Here are four great ways to boost your dwell time:
1. Write long content. It will naturally take longer for people to read long content, and by doing so you have more chance to genuinely answer the question the user wants.
2. Provide relevant information. If you are trying to rank for a keyword or phrase, then make sure you answer the question. You can’t trick Google.
3. Write in an engaging way. By having interesting and engaging content, people will want to stick around and read your article instead of someone else’s.
4. Make the page easily digestible. Format your content with short sentences, plenty of paragraphs and utilise headings and lists. This makes it far easier to scan and take in content as opposed to large imposing blocks of text.
It’s time to head over to your Google Analytics and see how well your content is performing and what your dwell time is like. If your pages have high bounce rates and low time spent on page, then it’s likely you need to start implementing some of the points above. If you are struggling with SEO in general and would like to improve your site-wide rankings, then it may be time to bring in some outside help.
As a passionate team of SEO experts, we are always looking for more sites to help improve their SEO performance and grow their company. To find out more, contact us today.