- What Is Dwell Time?
- Does Dwell Time Affect SEO?
- How Do You Calculate Dwell Time?
- How to Increase Dwell Time – 5 Tips to Keep Users on Your Website Longer
- How Does Knowing Dwell Time Benefit You?
- Dwell Time Indicates Overall Website Performance
What Is Dwell Time?
Simply speaking, dwell time is the amount of time someone spends on your website. It starts when somebody clicks on the link they found in SERPs and ends when they go back to the search results. It is the total amount of time people end up interacting with your online presence and, as such, should be as long as possible. The longer people spend on your website, the longer they will interact with your business, and the bigger chance they will convert! A perfect example of what dwell time exactly is would be a cake recipe. The best recipes will have longer dwell times because more people are spending longer on the sites that contain those recipes – and presumably using them to bake! If you have a recipe that isn’t good or information that isn’t being conveyed in a useful manner, readers will not want to spend time on your site. Hence, your dwell time will be shorter.Dwell Time vs. Bounce Rate vs. Time on Page
While these three terms are often confused, there are key differences between them. The definitions of each are as follows:- Bounce Rate is the rate at which people leave your website without taking any action at all.
- Time on Page is the time someone has spent on a specific page on your website.
- Dwell Time is the time someone spends on your website as a whole.
Does Dwell Time Affect SEO?
While not an overt Google ranking factor, dwell time nevertheless indirectly relates to the strength of your search ranking. It indicates the quality and relevance of your content and will contribute to the search intent of the content on your site. If someone is searching for the best ways to evaluate real estate purchases and your content has the highest dwell time, it indicates that your content is relevant and of great quality. At the end of the day, it is an easy metric to look at to determine whether or not your content is doing what it was designed to do!How Do You Calculate Dwell Time?
Dwell time is luckily easy to determine. Utilizing a tool such as Google Analytics, you can access the raw data of your site and do a simple computation to determine what the dwell time of your site is. The formula is:total duration of all sessions ÷ total number of sessions
This will give you a total number of seconds (that you can then divide by 60 for minutes) that people will linger on your entire website for. Of course, this does not need to be calculated manually! Google Analytics contains an “average session duration” metric that you can use at any time.