There are plenty of web concepts that not all people are familiar with. And those that are familiar with most of them often tend to neglect the more important ones. But, as it turns out, Dwell Time is quite important when it comes to website development and SEO improvements. So, how are you supposed to improve dwell time? Well, to answer that, we will explore certain ways in which you can improve it.
A quick reminder of what we’re talking about here
Simply put, dwell time is the time the user spends between clicking on a search result and coming back from your website. During that time we can safely assume that they dwelled on your website further exploring their desired search. As you might guess, this particular metric is in a tight correlation to good your website is and how engaging your content is. Therefore, by keeping track of the time people spent dwelling on your web pages, you can have an unbiased overview of your website’s traffic. This should give you a good idea of how your marketing strategy is working and how well you are managing your SEO efforts.
Can you actually measure it?
While Google Analytics is great for conducting website marketing analysis, it is still unable to provide accurate metrics for the time spent on certain pages. So, to get an idea of what your dwell time is, you’ll need to rely on Average Time on Page and Bounce Rate. Both of them are closely connected and should give you a good enough idea of how good it is. Therefore, until Google starts giving us other metrics, we suggest that you keep track of Average Time on Page and Bounce Rate.
What are the best ways to improve Dwell Time?
As it is with most things regarding websites and SEO, you need to approach this in multiple ways. Your first need to optimize your SEO so that your website will pop up in search results. Then you need to have an engaging, well-designed website so that people will stay on it for as long as possible. Therefore, let’s take a look at various aspects that you’ll have to address:
- Strong SEO management
- Website layout
- Intuitive design
- Quality content
- User experience
Establish a strong SEO management strategy
It is hard to overstate the importance of SEO management when it comes to how to improve dwell time. After all, the quality of your SEO and your continual improvement of it are what is going to bring people in. Now, setting up and managing a decent SEO takes time and experience, which is why we won’t go in-depth. But, if there is one key element that you should keep an eye on that is picking the right keywords. Proper keywords will not only make your website appear in search results, but they will also make organization and promotion much easier. So, take extra care to pick just the right ones.
Consider the overall layout of your website
Another important aspect to keep in mind is the look of your website. Of course, in order for people to spend time on your website, they need to be able to find engaging content. But, they also need to enjoy looking at your website. The colors, the fonts, the artwork… All have to work together in order for your website to be enjoyable. The best thing to do here is to hire an experienced web artist to work with. Trust us when we tell you that a lot of people will visit and revisit a website only if it well thought out and it has a well-designed look.
Focus on intuitive design
While having intuitive design sounds like a straightforward idea, not many companies actually manage to achieve it. To be clear, by “intuitive design” we mean that ease of use of your website. This means that when a person visits your website, they need to be able to navigate easily. Whatever information they are looking for should be presented clearly and the related topics should be easy to see and navigate to. The more intuitive your website is, the more time people will spend on it.
Therefore, if you want to improve dwell time, try to think like a customer and see how you can better organize your website. Keep in mind though that everyone things that their website is intuitive. So, consider asking someone who has nothing to do with your website to test it out.
Invest in quality content
The only way that people will stay on your website is if they have something of value to see. This means that if you want to improve dwell time, you need to focus on having quality content. Sometimes websites focus on quantity over quality, which often leads them to neglect the importance of backlinks. They think that having as many posts as possible will somehow make their website more noticed or sought after. This is a faulty idea, as no one wants to sieve through piles of useless content in order to find something that interests them. So, when creating content for your website, try to keep it short and sweet. The more you focus on your quality, the more time users will spend on your web pages.
Think like a user – consider how they view your web pages
The final thing we would like to mention is that improving your dwell time is a continual process. Don’t expect that you can simply change a thing or two and that your Dwell Time will magically improve. To truly make people both find and stay on your website you need to both improve it and keep a close eye on how people perceive it. The more you are able to think as a user the easier it will be to figure out which aspects of your website to improve.
