What is Dwell Time and why is it important for SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is among the most in-demand skills right now, considering the importance it has on one of the most important aspects of today: digital marketing. SEO refers to the optimization of one’s resources (like websites, pages etc.) in such a manner that upon a search, your resource comes on top, not the other. With so many websites and marketplaces waiting to compete for that singular piece of pie, competition is at an all-time high, and in this era, content and SEO is the name of the game.

What is dwell time? Does it have any effect on your rating or your optimization? If so, why is dwell time important for SEO? These are all questions that usually pop up once you search for dwell time or start asking questions from the industry insiders. Is it actually reflective of how better your content is or how well optimized your website. What actually constitutes dwell time?

So, without any further ado, let’s get into what is dwell time and why is it important for SEO.

What is dwell time?

Dwell time, in the simplest words possible, is basically the amount of time a user spends on your page or website before they go back to the SERPs (search engine result pages) after clicking the link.  Since you are staying at a website, reading and interacting with its content, you are basically contributing to its dwell time.

If you have even a rudimentary idea of how search engine optimization works, you can then understand why dwell time is such a discussed thing. The more people spend time on your website, it basically means the better the website is, as they have obviously found the content helpful and relevant to whatever the query was.

Dwell time therefore is the time a user takes from opening or accessing your website to getting back to the results page. During this time, depending obviously on how long the user has stayed on the website, the timer for dwell time runs, allowing Google to check and gauge how the user might have had the experience of your website.

Now, we all contribute to dwell time of many different websites, starting from websites like Amazon or Craigslist, and the reason for those is simple: we’re looking for something to buy there, and so, it will take some time, obviously, which obviously contributes to their dwell time and is the reason why they appear at the top whenever you search online shopping or digital marketplace.

Similarly, we also know when to quit on a website: for instance, you access a website that does not have good content written or seems really low budget and low quality or has the obvious signs of poor development, you are not going to contribute to its dwell time, and so, you immediately switch back to the result pages and access another website.

Now before we go into the inherent issues and shortcomings of measuring dwell time and how people mistake it for other parameters, lets first look into why dwell time is so important for SEO.

Why is dwell time so important for SEO?

So the first thing that dwell time is evident of is how much relevant is your website. Lets suppose you run a tech blog or website, and you are a big authority on new tech releases; everything from new phones, laptops to graphic cards and whatnot. Well, if you deliver news regularly that is accurate, people will be spending more and more time on your website, thereby increasing your authority and letting Google know that your website is not just relevant but also helpful.

If the user cant find what they came on your website for, chances are, they will leave immediately, leading to a small dwell time that translates negatively.

Differentiating dwell time and other parameters

Let’s ponder upon these briefly before getting into the shortcomings of dwell time.

· Bounce rate vs dwell time: Bounce occurs when a user visits a singular page on your website before switching to another tab or closing out.

· Dwell time vs session duration: A session starts when a search is performed, an SERP shows itself and the user navigates to a website. And then, the time spent on the website will not be dwell time, it will be session duration. If it begins with a search and ends on the same SERP, then we can call it dwell time.

· Click-through rate vs dwell time: Click-through rate or CTR is the times your link or URL has been clicked out of all the times it has been displayed on a SERP.  Of course, dwell time is entirely different.

· Average time on-page vs dwell time: This is among the most commonly mistaken one. Many people confuse average time on page with dwell time whereas both are different. For there to be a dwell time, you need to access the site from an SERP following a search. Then and only then would it be considered dwell time.

· RankBrain vs dwell time: Lastly, and among the misconceptions prevalent within the well-versed community of the SEO people, RankBrain is basically a tool that uses historical patterns and interaction data to predict about new and unseen queries.

The inherent issues with gauging dwell time

The first and foremost? Weather and price aggregators and websites. How long are you going to stare at 88F? Not more than a few seconds, ideally.