4 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Dwell Time - Adpearance

4 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Dwell Time

The average dwell time for sites ranking in the top 10 for a Google search is as high as 3 minutes and 10 seconds. This metric shows how successful your website is in moving customers to purchase—the longer the dwell time, the more likely that customer is finding exactly what they need.

4 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Dwell Time

A study from SearchEngineLand found that the average dwell time for sites ranking in the top 10 for a Google search is as high as 3 minutes and 10 seconds. The importance of dwell time is twofold:

  1. This metric shows how successful your website is in moving customers to purchase—the longer the dwell time, the more likely that customer is finding exactly what they need.
  2. By extending dwell time, search engines understand your website can be trusted, helping to increase your rank and placement on search engine result pages (SERP).

As tantalizing as longer dwell time is, most importantly you want your customers to reach a goal, whether that’s purchasing your product or filling out a lead generation form.  So, how do you retain users once they visit your site? By providing a solid user experience to get them where they need to go, filling your site with helpful and unique content laced with rich media, and making SEO the bedrock of your site’s foundation, dwell time will increase. In turn, SERP goes up, and with that more, new and returning customers for your business.

Clear Navigation Shows the Way

To get your customers to move down the sales funnel, it’s critical to remember that what you feel is important to your business might not correlate with what your customer feels is important to them. While you may believe that your company’s history and info about the business is important, most customers aren’t visiting your site for that information. They came to buy goods and services. Providing the easiest path to that information is paramount to hooking a customer’s interest, which eventually increases dwell time.

An easily navigable site provides these benefits:

  • Longer per visit duration and a lower bounce rate – Easy navigation for both desktop and mobile sites keep your customers from asking “Where am I?” while on your site. The less a customer has to dig to find the information they need, the less likely they’ll get frustrated and bounce away from your site.
  • Clear, concise information – Structure is important. By filling your navigation menu with appropriate content that is short and to-the-point, customers can find what they are looking for and move forward fast.

Convertible Content Makes Them Stay

Create content for your website that keeps your audience engaged, but also pushes them toward the desired goal—a one-time purchase, making a phone call, or even submitting a form. To create content that converts:

  • Set yourself apart from the competition – Have a blog topic that covers well-worn territory? Find a new approach to the topic or choose a new narrative style.

  • Master internal linking – Cluster your content together through internal linking so that customers get hooked by your fresh content and stay awhile to learn more.

  • Call them to action – Bake in appropriate call-to-action moments to allow people to convert when they are ready to make a decision.

  • Hook with video – Including video content, where appropriate, provides the customer with a more active way to interact with your website. 80% of marketers say video has increased dwell time.

By providing content that connects with the reader’s business and speaks their language (think keywords!), your rankability gets a boost from search engines AND customers are more likely to share your content with their audience. With shared content comes things like social referrals and backlinks—both of which also help with your placement on SERP.

Embracing Rich Media is the Only Way

One of the best ways to increase a customer’s dwell time is simply giving them a reason to stay on your site. Enter rich media. Rich media is described as anything on the site that is bolstered through user interaction. Examples of rich media include:

Along with being an engaging way to capture your audience, rich media is adaptable and very mobile-friendly. Furthermore, including rich media in your copy and on your landing pages makes search engines look favorably at your website. Properly tagged videos or images hosted on your site, relevant to your brand and industry are more likely than plain text, to appear on SERP. Thus, adding rich media boosts your brand’s authority in your industry and consequently your rank.

Let’s work together to keep your customers engaged with your website

The goal of any website and brand owner is to keep an acquired audience interacting with their site for as long as possible. With the inclusion of organic and adaptable SEO, appropriate rich media, content that converts, and easily digestible navigation menus, your customers will stay engaged long enough to get them through the buying funnel. In turn, helping your website rank higher on SERP and bring you more traffic to turn into customers.

Feel like your website is not getting you the amount of business you want? Want to increase your search rank via onsite factors, like dwell time? Let us help out! Contact us today about how we can help your business.

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About the Author

Phil Dinovo

Phil Dinovo is the driving force behind Adpearance’s digital advertising solutions. As the digital marketing team manager with a special focus on lead generation activities, he’s a nerd at heart. When he’s not overseeing campaign strategies, coding scripts, or running ads for clients, he’s testing out new recipes and exploring PNW trails with his wife and boxer.

Adpearance is the digital marketing company obsessed with generating quality leads. Our solutions combine cutting-edge technology, premium tracking, and an expert team to transform business results.

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