Ever wondered why certain websites rank higher with ordinary organic & non-targeted traffic? Simply because of the quality of the website. The quality of a website depends on multiple factors like secured URL, promising navigation structure, reliable information, engaging content & aesthetics of the website. So we can say user engagement plays an important role in the website ranking whether on Google SERPs or another search engine. The concept of Dwell Time is also based on the principle of user engagement. 

If you are able to retain your website visitors you can create an individual fanbase for your content & information. You can have some of the finest web pages hanging on the search engine results, however, you need to review the performance of each web page of your website. A single web page with a bug can lead to a mixed content error on your website. Consequently, you can face a pointless bounce rate. Protect the Dwell Time of your website visitors. 

In this website post, we are going to guide you through the topic of Dwell Time and the ways in which you can improve it and retain your website rank. We will also discuss other aspects related to Dwell Time and corresponding factors affecting it. The article is distributed into the following segments for better understanding:

  • How to define Dwell Time?
  • What Are The Factors Affecting Dwell Time?
  • What’s the difference between Dwell Time & Time on Page?
  • Preferred Strategies To Improve Dwell Time On Web Pages

The significance of user retention on your web page also relates to your confidence level. The more engagement you’re able to achieve the more encouraged you will get. The skilled WordPress developers at WSAI Technologies aim to suggest to you the right means of learning through which you could achieve your goals successfully. Let’s start the topic!!

How to Define Dwell Time?

Dwell Time is the time frame in which an internet user stays on your website’s web page. When he or she moves back to the search engine results, your Dwell Time is over. Experts suggest that you must focus on increasing the Dwell Time of your website users. It helps your website rank exceptionally on the SERPs. Though Google hasn’t declared this factor crucial for search engine ranking in any module of its protocol yet, experts believe that it plays an important role in the website ranking. 

For instance, you can consider yourself. Sometimes, while searching a piece of information on the Google SERPs you find your top results worthless. It happens to all of us. The reasons could be personal. However, it may happen to a lot of others you don’t know. Lots of internet users approach solutions for common problems. 

As such, you never know how many others bounced from a particular web page following its unfamiliarity to the solution. There may be other reasons like an annoying navigation menu or a slow web page loading. Though websites ranking higher don’t face a web page loading speed issue, it could be shut due to maintenance. So, the point is that there can be ample reasons for your web page’s bounce rate or lower Dwell Time that you need to figure out.

Factors Affecting The Dwell Time

As discussed earlier, there can be different reasons affecting your web page Dwell Time. If we could track them down, we can think of prospective solutions to such problems. The reasons can be of a personal nature, however, you only need to focus on improvement in the Dwell Time. Remember that your goal should never be apart from user engagement. The major factors affecting Dwell Time are:

1. Poor User Interface

If you’re running an e-commerce website or an open-source general-purpose tool, you’re soon going to be triggered. People usually have high expectations from the user interface of such websites. If they find it complicated & time-consuming to use it they immediately get back to the SERPs. Many world-renowned websites face this problem and design their front end accordingly. Always make sure that you need to simplify your website’s user experience. 

2. Links to Paid Services

If you have created a new website that offers online courses, try to make it free of cost for a specified time period. Focus on generating organic traffic with higher Dwell Time initially. If you want to earn, begin with the internet users, instead of money. Lots of visitors see for free online courses and you have you analyze their subjects of interest along with the demand for the same.

3. Structure of Information

There are more mobile phone internet users than desktop users across the world. The reason being easy accessibility, compact size, superior battery life, better portability. Following this, a lot of webmasters switch to specific web designs & mobile friendly themes these days. The aim is to intensify the structure of information on a web page to provide for user convenience.

4. Navigation Menu

No matter how engaging content you can produce you can’t hold your visitors without any additional options. The navigation menu is often located on the web page header. It provides links to other web pages having the same sort of information. Moreover, it encourages your visitors to approach you via phone or email if they’re experiencing some associated doubts or queries.

5. No Internal Links

Some internet users don’t even like to approach a navigation menu. If you’re running a product-specific e-commerce website with an online store, you essentially need to include internal links in your articles & website blogs. You can also do this for an online course website. Your web pages can become a fine source of Call to Action to convert prospective users to potential buyers. Don’t forget that!

This way you can analyze your drawbacks and improve your Dwell Time accordingly. There could be more reasons related to your web page issue and therefore we suggest you conduct a detailed analysis through the way of online web page performance testing tools like Ahrefs & Google Analytics. For WordPress developers, we instead suggest approaching a web page analysis plugin. All the best!!

Difference Between Dwell Time & Time on Page?

Many emerging WordPress developers consider these terms identical. However, there’s a huge difference between the two. You need to understand this difference to maintain your awareness regarding Dwell Time on your web pages. The concept of Time on Page has nothing to do with the factors we’ve discussed earlier. As it is itself related to your website’s web page proceeding, not exit. That’s right. Time on Page doesn’t mean your website user is going to exit & reach out to the SERPs. It means the time frame to which your visitor remains on a specified web page before switching to another web page on your website. 

Therefore, you can’t declare it a matter of concern. Instead, you can use it to highlight the performance of your web pages as compared to one another. It also helps you figure out your best web pages and rank up through the same. On the other hand, you have to pay attention in case evaluating the Dwell Time of your web pages. It is always better if your visitor jumps to another web page instead of leaves for SERPs. In the next segment of the post, we’ll figure out various techniques through which you can raise your Dwell Time!

How to Improve Dwell Time on Your Web Pages?

You might have got a clear insight to the meaning & significance of maintaining high Dwell Time for your web pages. If you’re undergoing issues to improve your Dwell Time, you just need to review the factors affecting your visitor’s retention and conclude some strategies. You can review the enlisted ideas for additional support. Though there could be other reasons for your lowering Dwell Time, you’ll find these strategies encouraging & thought-provoking. Let’s get started:

1. Engage your readers

Your readers are your best friend. You need to create a relationship with them. A study has shown that the first 10 seconds of your web page visit are the deciding factor. Though it is not universally right as there are multiple categories of users & websites on the internet. However, you have to believe that visitors do analyse your website content. In Fact that’s why they visit you. To engage your readers you have to keep inspecting on the following grounds:

  • The introduction part of your content
  • Grammatical mistakes in the content
  • Readability of the content (make sure that the content is easy to understand)
  • Reliability of the information (references & ideas)
  • Uniqueness that differentiates your writing style
  • Relevancy of the content (don’t mention irrelevant portions)

These are commonly called the basic rules of content writing or SEO content. The introduction part of your content should always address the problem often faced by the users. You must also highlight all the segments you’ll cover in the article so that the user develops an interest to go for the whole content if having adequate time. 

2. Distribute the content properly

Readers never like to see long paragraphs. Infact, too much information is indigestible. Lots of technical articles face this kind of issue. When a reader wants to have an insight of a technical topic, he wants to read in parts. Skipping long sentences may also work. Not just technical, any knowledge-based article could create problems if not structured properly. The WordPress CMS provides you many useful plugins to structure your content properly. Yoast SEO is one of them. 

If you use WordPress you might have heard about the Yoast Plugin. It helps you figure out if you’ve missed to put the H1, H2 & H3 tags in your article. These tags are essential to understand the whole article easily. They hold your visitor interest for a long time and help to enhance the Dwell Time of the web page. The same principle applies to many step-by-step technical guides approached by thousands of information enthusiasts out there. 

3. Don’t forget pictures

Another powerful way to improve the user convenience is to add pictures. Whatever lefts misconceived can be grabbed through pictured messages easily. If you have a dedicated designer support you can plan to include innovative infographics in your articles. You can also approach other websites & online picture galleries for reference. Google Images is also a brilliant source of infographics that you’d like to include in your content. Moreover it provides you the link to the website for further reference. Taking reference is not bad, until you’re providing a unique set of information. For fresh & appealing infographics you can go with Piktochart, Visme or Canva.

4. Examine the search goal

The need to examine the search goal usually arises when you want to target the shopping enthusiasts or simply shoppers. The internet users who want to shop often need information. To retain them on your blog post you have to analyse their search objective keeping the following things in mind:

  • Initial search queries or keywords in the form of phrases
  • Problems or issues of the users 
  • Brand Preferences of the users
  • Website or web page preferences of the users
  • Buying decision of the buyer or simply his/her buyer’s journey

Analysing the buyer’s journey is simple. You just have to review their search engine queries. If you could understand the spot where the buyer resides at the moment, you can create the content accordingly. Make sure to analyse the search volume of that query on a monthly basis. 

5. Elaborate your article

As far as your content is concerned to solve complex user problems, you have to deliver with patience. You have to make them understand what you want to convey. Certain topics are hard to explain in 2-3 sentences. For example, you can’t describe WordPress in one sentence, especially to a learner. If your users learn well they will undergo genuine & perfect buying decisions. Even better, they will come back to you for more information. To elaborate your web page content you must conduct a detailed research in advance and go through various aspects of the topic. Make sure that your content essentially provides for the user problem and experience.

6. Add comments to web page

This can be a very innovative technique to improve user Dwell Time. It creates ease for user enquiries. The users often get annoyed when redirected to the contact page to ask questions. With a dedicated comment box in the bottom of each article you post, you provide them a medium to reach you immediately. Infact, there’s no point one should call or email you personally to know the answer to a doubt raised in a blog post. Think smart!

7. Include video descriptions

Video descriptions can be personal or referenced. Users don’t bother about the source. But you need to take care of certain things. Make sure that the videos are not too long. Video descriptions are trending among emerging website blogs and guest posts these days. They are very useful in providing visual information along with writing for your website visitors. Talking about the Dwell Time, a video description amazingly provides for the user engagement. Visuals are easy to remember that this way your web page user can understand the whole article easily. 

8. Include a dedicated Q&A section

There can be a great possibility that your web page users don’t remember any additional queries to put for a broader insight to the topic. Means, he can raise more questions but he doesn’t know any at the moment. This way he could spend more time on your web page. Certain users also wish for additional information they haven’t targeted to go for. 

9. Use internal linking

The point to be noted here is that you should not mislead the user to an irrelevant page. The internal linking must be done in a way that the user only visits there to clear a doubt and back. If the user finds that the internal link doesn’t do anything for his learning goal he will escape the first page too. Try to make the internal link to the point and solve the user’s problem right away.

10. Enhance your page speed

Your web page speed should never be a sloth. Whether call it bounce rate or poor Dwell Time, an inadequate web page loading speed can easily ruin your first impression. You can make use of a few tools or plugins to overcome this. The best options you can go for are Pagespeed Insights, WebPage Test, Pingdom Website Speed Test, etc. 

Apart from this, you can decide on a responsive design and the mobile friendly UX as discussed earlier. It will help you capture better online traffic for a fine start.

Conclusion

We hope this article helped you with your important queries regarding the meaning & impact of Dwell Time on website ranking. There can be certain exceptions regarding personal experiences that we couldn’t include in this piece of information. In that case you are good to go with the comments section. At WSAI Technologies, we love to help you out with your WordPress development & content writing issues. We understand that information resides in the success & failure of each website address present on the SERPs. Let’s build the best websites together!!