Dwell time is the measure of time that how long visitors stay at your site. In more precise words, dwell time starts when the user clicks the SERP blue link and goes back to SERP.
You can think of it as a visiting timer that starts when someone clicks your page in the browser and ends when they leave your page. Naturally, if someone is interested in what you have to offer, they are more likely to stay on your page. Therefore, your dwell time will also increase.
It’s why dwell time is an excellent indicator of the relevance and quality of your page and can be very helpful in determining visitor’s satisfaction levels.
Before attempting to improve it, you must know how your site is currently performing in terms of Dwell Time. After all, you can measure improvements only when you have a clear picture of the past.
Effective Ways to Optimize Dwell Time
Okay, now that you know why the dwell time for your website matters, it’s time to take action. In an attempt to increase the dwell time, in short, you have to focus on two factors:
- Provide an excellent user experience
- Creating relevant, unique, valuable, and engaging content
However, the devil is in the details. For this reason, here are some actionable tips on how to do it.
1. Make Your Content Highly Readable
Readability has gained importance in recent years. Here are some recommendations to make the content readable:
Be Trustworthy: People want to connect with other people. Therefore, do not be afraid to let your personality shine in your writing. Ask questions as it will help others relate to your content on a more personal level and it will become more entertaining.
Use media: Images, infographics, videos, and other media are great tools to emphasize what you’re talking about and segment your content. Also, lots of free stock photos and many services are there for which WordPress supports using them. Hence, there is really no excuse not to use them.
2. Avoid Irrelevant Content
Dwell time is never affected by the number of visits but by the relevance of the page. Irrelevant and uninteresting content is always dull and leaves the user frustrated, which reduces the dwell time.
Thus, make sure that your content on the landing page is relevant, engaging, and does not contain just a clickbait title.
3. Know Your Target Audience Well
One way to find out what your audience is looking for is to understand their needs: what questions do they have in mind? What answers are they looking for on your site?
- Who are they
- Where are they from
- What are they looking for
On top of that, pay attention to keyword research as well. This ensures that you attract your target customers, not just random internet users. Someone who is specifically looking for what you are selling is likely to stay longer.
4. Obey Reader’s Intent & Follow Good UX Practices
The best thing about UX is, it helps the reader find what they are looking for quickly – you can create a table of contents or short paragraphs and bullet points to make the content more digestible.
Poor user experience can be a crucial component for short dwell time. Content also matters. If your introduction is confusing or does not get to its point quickly, you may have less time to keep user. Perhaps, your content is not matching the user’s intent.
Take a look at other high-ranking articles on SERPs to understand better why this reader is searching for this topic. Intention matters. If your article is not responding well to readers initially, it can be a significant contributor for a short period.
5. Ensure the Page is Fast and Clean
Slow loading time is a significant obstacle to high stay times – if your page takes too long to load, readers probably won’t last long.
Additionally, once readers are scrolling your page, they may choose to leave the page if they feel that the images are not loading correctly or face any ineffective experience.
It means that having clean code for a quick load time (including compressing your images and caching your web pages) and following SEO best practices are key to increasing your dwell time.
Ensure that the page loads quickly and efficiently, even on browsers and devices. A good mobile experience is essential here because short mobile usage will contribute to an overall short dwell time.
6. Use Strategic Internal Linking
Internal linking allows you to keep users on your website longer. Of course, these links cannot be random. It is essential to select relevant links that would logically be of interest to the user based on the current content.
7. Improve Your Website Structure
Design your page so that users can easily find what they need. Classify your content, keep your site design as simple as you can, and focus on navigation and readability. Finding the balance between SEO and web design is essential to increasing your readers’ stay. If you face challenges in blending these two components, we’re happy to guide you. All you need to do is dial us, we won’t charge for it.
8. Improve Your Page Speed
According to Google, 53% of mobile users leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Pages with longer load times have higher bounce rates and shorter dwell times. Do not let this happen in the case of your website.
Optimize your site images, use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and improve your server response time. These exercises help speed up your website and drive high conversions.
9. Adopt Better Engagement Tactics
Just as internal links to other pages and articles can persuade your visitors to stay on your site for longer, so too can engagement techniques such as content recommendations.
By suggesting relevant posts to your readers, you’re providing them with a solid incentive to remain on your site. This tactic can be highly efficient when implemented correctly. The more closely related the recommended posts are to the piece of content the reader is reading, the more likely they are to remain on your site by clicking through. After all, if a visitor can learn more about another topic of interest without returning to the SERPs, why wouldn’t they?