Dwell Time: The Ultimate Guide for Bloggers to Improve It in 2024

Did you know that by improving your website’s dwell time, you can achieve better search rankings along with better user experience?

We all know how important search traffic is. But search engines like Google considers a ton of factors into consideration while ranking a page.

If you want to improve your website’s search traffic, you should keep an eye on few of those ranking factors for better results. Although dwell time is NOT a Google ranking factor (Or is it? We’ll find out), but it can significantly improve your user experience and rankings.

Let’s jump into the details and find out what is it all about and how you can improve your website’s dwell overall time and so on.

Dwell Time: What Is It All About? How to Improve It In 2024?

dwell time

What Is Dwell Time?

Dwell time is the amount of time someone stays on a web page on your website before returning back to the SERP results.

In simple words, it is the amount of time a user spends on your page before going back to their search.

The more time they spend on your page, the better dwell overall time your page gets.

Consider these two scenarios.

Scenario 1: Someone visits a page on your website from Google search and stays on that page for a long time.

Scenario 2: Someone visits a page on your website from Google search and leaves that page quickly.

In scenario 1, Google considers that your website must be providing great value to the users for that term because the users are spending more time on your page.

In scenario 2, Google assumes that your website is not serving the users intent for that term because the users are leaving your page instantly after arriving.

Since Google always wants to give the BEST possible experience to all its users, it ranks your SERP result higher (in scenario 1) and degrades your rankings (in scenario 2).

In a nutshell, your website dwell overall time is directly proportional to your website organic rankings.

Dwell time example

Let’s talk about an example of dwell overall time so you can understand even better.

Let’s assume, you’re searching for a topic around “best yoga practices,” and you’ll most probably click on a search result that’s most interesting to you.

Suppose reading that page took you around 5 minutes and after you decide to return to the SERPs to get more information from other sources about the same particular topic (i.e “best yoga practices), so you click back.

The time between those 2 clicks (i.e the time between their arrival on your page and existing back to the SERP results), that 5 minutes is your dwell time.

Are you getting it?

To predict your website’s overall time spent, you should know how much time people typically spend on various pages on your website. That way, you’ll get an estimation of what your page average time spent is.

Dwell Time Vs Bounce Rate

Most people get confused with both dwell overall time and bounce rate. Are they both the same?

No, they are not the same.

Bounce rate is when a bounce happens on your website i.e when someone visits only one page and leaves your site without clicking on any other link or page on your site.

That means the bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions divided by all the sessions for your website.

bounce rate in action

Whereas the dwell time is the amount of time someone stays on a web page on your site before leaving back to the SERP results on Google.

Another important difference between both is that it doesn’t matter how much time someone spends on your time (be it 5 seconds or 5 minutes), if they abandon your site without clicking on any other page on your site, it can be a “bounce”.

Same is not the case with it as the more time spent on your site can make a huge difference as it improves your page dwell overall time.

Although you can find few user engagement metrics like time on page, bounce rate of your website in Google Analytics but you can’t find a metric to measure it.

Is Dwell Time A Google Ranking Factor

No one knows whether it is a Google ranking factor or not because Google never said publicly that it considers it as a ranking factor while ranking a page.

But Google definitely considers it to provide a better experience to the users.

Here we want to tell you ONE important thing. Google never focuses on ONE or TWO metrics to rank a web page (in fact, it considers over 200 ranking factors to rank a page in search results).

Most SEO experts also tell you the same thing.

In one of the Whiteboard Friday videos, Rank Fishkin, SEO expert told that Google doesn’t depend on just one metric as it considers all of the metrics (including organic CTR, searcher intent etc) to rank a page in Google search results.

Have a look at it.

impact queries

Here’s what Duane Forrester (Senior Project Manager for Bing) said about the importance of it.

“Your goal should be that when a visitor lands on your page, the content answers all of their needs, encouraging their next action to remain with you. If your content does not encourage them to remain with you, they will leave. The search engines can get a sense of this by watching the dwell overall time.”

As you can see, your content plays a crucial role in increasing your overall time, so make sure to focus on creating highly valuable content to increase it.

Although Google never officially stated that dwell time is a ranking factor but most experts think Google considers it while ranking a page to provide better user experience.

For example, when you click on a search result on Google and then click back, you’ll see a “People also search for” section with relevant content under the original listing you clicked on.

Here’s how it looks like;

google search string

As you can see above, you’ll be shown “People also search for” section with relevant content to the topic you’re searching for (in the above example, it is “best SEO practices”).

When you search for “best SEO practices” (or any other term) on Google search and click on a link to visit that page and click back, you’ll instantly see the above “people also search for” section appearing.

If someone is returning the search results, they most probably might not have found the answer they were actually searching for.

In order to provide them with the better search experience, Google instantly suggests them a few related searches to make your search experience better.

So there you go. Although it is not a big ranking factor but it definitely improves your user and search experience of your website audience.

Then, how to improve it? Let’s talk about it now.

How to Improve Dwell time: Top 5 Ways

Improving the overall time spent on your page is NOT hard. You just need to figure out what the searchers want and serve them with the right content (or products).

That being said, here are 5 proven ways to increase overall time spent on your pages in 2024 and beyond.

1. Use the APP method

Brian Dean, the SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko introduced the term the “APP model”.

APP stands for Agree, Promise, and Preview.

app method

Let’s break each element in APP so you can understand better about the APP model to increase your website’s overall time significantly.

As we discussed above APP stands for Agree, Promise, and Preview, so let’s now talk about each one of them.

Agree: We all know how important the introduction lines are. When you’re writing a blog post, you should spend quality time in writing compelling introduction lines. Here’s where you should also make Google searchers agree with your topic (or any problem) they are facing.

For instance, if you start an introduction with something like “It’s hard to lose belly fat” (considering that you’re writing a topic around belly fat reduction), it’s easier to make people agree with what you said. Because that’s true. So the key here is to make people agree in the introduction itself.

Promise: Now that you’ve got your readers attention, it’s time for the next element i.e Promise.

Here’s where you can persuade them with some actionable elements (you can give a sneak peak of what you’re going to deliver within your page)

Here’s an example of Brian Dean’s SEO techniques post.

app in action

As you can see above, Brian is promising the readers that he’s going to teach you the exact SEO techniques he used to generate over 200k unique visitors per month to his site.

Anyone who’s searching for “SEO techniques to increase their traffic” on Google and lands on his page will definitely check out his whole post (which ultimately improves his page overall time).

Preview: Now, let’s talk about the final important which is Preview. You can tell your readers exactly what they are going to discover in your post.

Here’s an example.

example app

As you can see above, (it’s another example of Brian Dean’s blog post), you’ll find that Brian is giving the readers a preview of what they are going to discover within the post.

Once you carefully used all the elements in the APP model (Agree, Promise and Preview), you’re done with a great introduction that helps you improve your overall page time.

Read: Image Optimization: How to Optimize Images for Google Search

2. Create content that makes people stick to your site like glue

Create content that makes Google searchers stick to your site like glue. Yes, creating content worthy of sticking around on your website is the KEY.

Create longer articles

A 2000+ word article definitely takes more time to read when compared to a 300 word article, right? Usually it takes more than 5 minutes for someone to read a longer article, which means, by creating long form of content, you can easily increase your page time.

But make sure your content is worth reading. Otherwise, even if you write a gigantic 5000+ word post to increase it, no one reads it and it won’t help you with it at all.

Above all, creating detailed articles can increase your search traffic besides improving your overall time. Just have a look at the following illustration.

avg word count

As you can see above, the average page length of the top 5 positions in Google is around 2000 words. That means, Google also prefers to rank detailed content.

Here are a few essential tips to create 2000+ word articles.

Know what good content is: Before you even decide to create a 2000-word article, it’s better to first know what good content actually is. Why? Simply because you can’t convince readers to stay on your site by filling your articles with junk, right?

Your content needs to be extremely good. It should answer your target audience’s questions, help them achieve their goals, solve their problems, encourage your audience to stay on your site longer and if possible entertain them! If your content has these attributes, it will surely perform well socially and organically.

Research your competitors: The best way to create long-form of content that’s helpful for your target audience is to research your competitor websites thoroughly so you can learn a lot of things including;

  • How to craft your posts
  • How to write compelling headlines
  • How to optimize your posts for keywords
  • How to build links to your contents
  • How to add call to actions within your content
  • How to increase your social shares and so on

Read: Keyword Cannibalization: What Is It And How to Fix It Easily On Your Website

Give something extra (such as eBooks, checklists at the end)

Giving something extra to your audience always works like a charm. You can give something extra that including anything related to your content such as free downloadable resources, cheatsheets, PDF version of your article, checklist, extra information, video related to the content and so on.

Make sure to provide those extra resources at the end of your article so they will be spending more time to go through them. For example, you might have written an article around “increasing website sales”, at the end of that post (or anywhere within your article), you can include a video by sharing your own sales experience.

Here’s an example of such post where you’ll find both the article along with a video.

3. Fix slow loading pages

No one likes to spend their time on a slow loading website. If your pages are loading slowly, your overall time will be really less when compared to your competitor sites (if their site speed is much better).

So make sure to fix slow loading pages. Properly optimize your image sizes before you upload them, use fewer plugins, and make sure to use the following tips to increase your page performance.

Stop showing popups

Whether you know it or not, search engines like Google and Bing are clearly against including elements such as popups, annoying ads on your site. Why? Most people find them irrelevant and often abandon a site with popups or annoying ads.

That’s why search engines like Google are often against such things. So stop using them if you’re already using and test your search results after a while to see any increase your search traffic and rankings.

For a couple of weeks, we too used exit-intent technology to show exit popups (they appear right before someone leaves our site) but stopped using them for obvious reasons.

Use a powerful caching plugin

At Bloggers Passion, we use and highly recommend WP Rocket (it’s a premium caching plugin that costs you $49 where you’ll get 1 year of support and updates for 1 website.

Although there are a ton of other caching plugins like WP Super Cache, W3 total cache etc but WP Rocket plugin outperforms all of them. So if you can spend a few bucks, it’s a great plugin to boost your site performance and speed.

Here are few benefits of using WP Rocket plugin.

  • Cache
  • Preload
  • Database optimizer
  • CDN
  • Heartbeat, add-ons, image optimization
  • File optimization
  • Media (provides options including LazyLoad It can improve actual and perceived loading time as images, iframes, videos etc will be loaded only as they view
  • Reduce the number of HTTP requests

Here’s how the lazyload feature looks like in the backend of this plugin.

lazyloading

If you’re curious, you can read our detailed review of WP Rocket plugin from here.

Invest in a faster web host

At Bloggers Passion, we’re using WPX hosting (although it is a bit expensive, costs you around $25 per month) but every penny is worth it. It is faster, reliable and more importantly secure hosting.

WPX hosting offers you 3 pricing plans which are;

  • Business (costs you $24.99 per month where you can install up to 5 websites)
  • Professional (costs you $49.99 per month where you can install up to 15 websites)
  • Elite (costs you $99 per month where you can install up to 35 websites)

You can read our WPX hosting review (where you’ll also find a special link to grab their hosting at $12.50 for the first month) for more details about their features, benefits and so on.

4. Add internal links smartly

Since dwell time is mostly measured on the time between someone reaching at a page and returning to the SERPs, it makes a lot of sense to add internal links to improve it.

Even authority SEO blogs like Ahrefs, Wordstream believe that there’s a correlation between internal linking and dwell time, as they believe internal linking helps you improve your overall website’s time.

Here’s what few SEO experts have to say about the importance of using internal links to improve it:

“By adding more internal links, you’re making your visitors to stay busy when they’ve consumed the content that you provide on one page and it ultimately increases the overall session duration per user.”

Above all, adding internal links has a ton of other benefits too including;

  • Helps you with SEO
  • Helps you with better crawlability
  • Helps you pass the link juice to other pages (which are relevant)
  • Helps your readers to read more relevant content
  • And the list goes on

So how can you smartly do internal linking on your site?

Here are few quick yet most effective tips for adding internal links within your pages to improve your website’s SEO .

Use tools: The best way to interlink to your old posts which are relevant is to use tools like WordPress SEO by Yoast as the premium version gives you automatic internal linking recommendations. These internal link suggestions are highly relevant to the topic you cover so you can easily include them within your posts.

Smartly use Google: Another awesome way to interlink is to simply use a search term on Google like “site:yourblogname.com category or topic name” to find all the relevant blog posts within your blog around a particular keyword to easily internal link to your old posts which are relevant to your targeted topics.

Link while you write: Most people often add internal links once they are done with the writing part of their articles. Instead of that, link to your old contents and relevant contents while writing. We personally use Google Docs for writing blog posts and we often interlink while writing as it saves time and allows us to add highly relevant content.

Quick note: We also have written a useful guide on how to interlink your blog posts where you can find even more incredible tips and action elements, so make sure to go through the whole post.

Read: Link Whisper Plugin Review: Is it the Best Plugin for Adding Internal Links smartly?

5. Create call to actions

Last but not least: make sure to include call to actions at the end of every blog post you publish.

If you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you’ll notice that we often end our blog posts with a conclusion and we also ask questions if you’ve any related to the topic. That’s actually a call to action!

That way, people will spend more time asking questions in the comment section.

So whenever you’re writing a blog post, make sure to ask yourself “what’s the #1 thing your audience can take away from your post”.

Also make sure to find out what’s the #1 thing you want from your blog posts. Do you want more shares, comments or ask your readers to read some other relevant articles?

Find out your call to action and include them in every post you publish.

FAQs

Here are a few interesting questions that can help you better understand it along with its impact on your websites in 2024 and beyond.

What is dwell time?

It is the amount of time that’s spent between that a visitor spends on a page before returning to the SERPs. In simple terms, how long someone stays at one page on your site before they return back to the search results for the same term (or keyword or topic).

What are the factors that affect dwell time?

Here are some of the factors that could affect the dwell time.

→ The quality of your content
→ The bad speed of your web pages
→ Not satisfying the searchers intent
→ Mobile friendliness issues
→ And the list goes on

How to measure dwell time?

Google doesn’t provide you any metrics to specifically measure dwell time of your site. But it can be literally considered a combination of both metrics which are bounce rate and average time spent on a page.

That means, you can use Google Analytics and keep an eye on those two metrics including bounce rate and average time on page to estimate your page overall time spent.

Can inter-linking help in improving in dwell time?

The short answer is YES. We’ve already discussed above that dwell time is measured as the time between arriving at a page and returning to the SERPs. So even if someone visits your site from Google, clicks on any another page on your site, it’s still going to increase your website’s overall time spent.

What are the benefits of increasing the dwell time?

There are a ton of major benefits which include;

→ Better user engagement (improving it literally means, your website users are highly engaged with what you’re serving in your page be it better content, products, services and so on)
→ Better search rankings (although it’s not an official Google ranking factor, but as we discussed above Google takes it into consideration to provide relevant search results for the searcher)
→ Better conversions (if someone is spending more time on a page on your site means, they are going to convert into a sale if you promote the right products at the right time)
→ And the list goes on and on


Final Thoughts

Although Google never publicly disclosed it is a ranking factor or not, but it’s always a smart idea to improve your dwell overall time since it helps with better user engagement and average session time per user.

Hopefully by using the above strategies, you can dramatically improve your dwell time by satisfying your searcher’s intent.

So did you find this detailed guide useful? If you still have any questions, let us know in the comments.

About Author
Anil Agarwal is the Founder of Bloggerspassion. He is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable blogs for over a decade Now. He has been featured in Over 100 Publications including Forbes, The HuffPost, HubSpot, Shopify, Semrush, Kinsta, Bluehost, Hostinger and G2.com etc. Know more about Anil Agarwal from here.

Reader Comments (7)

  1. Very informative guide you make and now I focused on this because it helps me to drive more traffic and helps to increase thanks for sharing

    Reply
  2. Brilliant Guide on Dwell Time Improvement.
    Your Post is quite informative and useful.
    Thanks for Sharing. !!!
    Keep Posting !! Looking forward to know more you.

    Reply
  3. Hey Anil Sir,

    Very informative guide you make and now I focused on this because it helps me to drive more traffic and helps to increase ranking too.

    Reply
  4. Hey Anil Agarwal,

    Great post and lot of things to consider. I like the tips that you have listed to improve the dwell time. Dwell time really matters for websites and provides better user experience. using the AAP technique will helps a lot and creating an attractive content will provide better results and allows more google searchers, readers and viewers to stick to it. Whereas creating an alluring content will attract and engage more readers to it. Creating longer content can effectively increase the dwell time of page.Sorting the slow loading page problem is also necessary, As people never like to visit the site with slow loading time.As slow loading of page consume much time, so it is really a good idea to fix the slow loading page problem. faster web host works well, so it is really helpful to invest in fast working web host. Creating (CTA) call to action and adding internal links are also necessary for getting good benefits. Your all the listed tips are effective but an idea of fixing the slow loading page and creating longer content are really great ideas.

    Very helpful and informative post. thanks for a sharing.

    Reply
    • Hi Aadarsh, that’s a long and insightful comment. Yes, dwell time matters if you want to improve your searchers and website users experience. Thanks to Brian Dean from Backlinko for revealing that APP method (and if used right, it can be a great way to create killer introductions to improve your dwell time).

      It’s also true about creating long form of content as it helps you with search rankings and your audience will find it useful. Just make sure to fix all your site speed issues and create evergreen content. You’re good to go! Thanks for stopping by!

      Reply

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