Is Dwell Time a Ranking Factor or Not? Everything You Need to Know About Dwell Time

It seems like the digital marketing community started to rave about “dwell time”. There is a lot of controversy on forums, blogs, and social media about whether it is one of the search engines’ ranking signals. Should you care about it? We have to admit that nowadays it is becoming increasingly important to understand your users. This is what makes Search Engine Optimization so interesting. You have to adapt, you have to continually change. But “dwell time” seems to cause a bit of confusion even amongst SEO specialists. There seem to be divided opinions about whether it is important for ranking. Some say it is critical and shouldn’t be overlooked, but not everybody shares this belief. If it is a ranking factor, it means that everybody should rush to optimize it for getting the most out of it. Let’s see what it really is and what the search engines’ representatives have to say about it as well.

There is a lot of turbulence around the exact dwell time meaning. What we tried to do is bring some light into the subject and clarify once and for all everything you need to know about the dwell time data and its impact on your business.

What Is Dwell Time?

Putting it simply, dwell time is the amount of time that elapses between a user clicks on a search result and returns back to the SERPs.
More generally talking, dwell time is the time spent in the same position, area, or stage of a process. However, in the context of the digital marketing niche, dwell time is defined as a user-based metric that combines the user’s engagement, session duration, and SERP click-through rate.

Although we might tend to say that dwell time is similar with session duration, bounce rate or pogo sticking, it seems that dwell time is slightly different. It is more of an amalgam of bounce rate and time-on-site metrics. As dwell time is a data point that is not publicly available (but may still affect a site’s rankings), we can only speculate around the concept or its impact on rankings. What we do know for sure is that dwell time does impact one’s website.

A simple search on Google about dwell time might lead you to some sophisticated concepts, such as dwell time radar or dwell time mass spectrometry. However, even if, due to the complexity of the concept, we cannot offer you the exact definition of dwell time, what you need to know is that dwell time combines but is not equal to time on your site, session duration, SERP CTR, bounce rate, and exit click.

Can You Measure Dwell Time in Google Analytics?

Dwell time has stirred the waters among the SEO community and has been in the headlines of industry news and numerous blog posts. As it is still a concept with much confusion around it, we cannot say for sure what the ideal dwell time is. No significant research has been written on this matter yet, and there is no beginner’s guide that would tell you what the average dwell time influencing one site’s rankings is. On the Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools), there is no specific data available for dwell time (yet).

What we can do is to track the user’s engagement with Google Analytics.

To fully understand the concept, you first have to know that the user experience which starts from clicking on one link on SERP may involve more than a single page. This is especially true for online stores, for example. A customer usually goes from a landing page to other inner pages before making a decision or returning to SERP. There are certain concepts that we have to comprehend first, such as Time on Page, Exit Rate, and Bounce Rate. According to Google, here’s the difference:

For all pageviews to the page, Exit Rate is the percentage that were the last in the session.
For all sessions that start with the page, Bounce Rate is the percentage that were the only one of the session.
Bounce Rate for a page is based only on sessions that start with that page.

As mentioned before, dwell time is not the same as time on site or bounce rate, as link building is not similar to link earning. However, measuring these metrics in Analytics can give you an idea of your users’ engagement.

Time on Site

The Time on page or session duration is the average amount of time all visitors spend on a particular page. It essentially shows you whether visitors actually spend time reading and/or interacting with your content. As Neil Patel mentioned, dwell time is a metric that calculates user engagement, time on page, and Click-through rate (CTR) on the search engine results page (SERP). Therefore, being aware of the sessions’ duration on your site might be of significant help.

Bounce Rate

Another source of confusion is “bounce rate,” which is a different metric as well. Dwell time could combine these two — time duration and bounce rate. Some people consider pogo sticking to be the same as dwell time. Let’s put it like this: according to Internet Marketing Ninjas, a bounce can be good or bad. If a visitor clicks on a search result and then quickly returns to Google, that’s a very bad bounce. That’s what we call pogo-sticking. Others consider that CTR does not influence it and that we can impact “Dwell Time” only by increasing “Page on Time” and decreasing “Exit Rate”. Knowing your bounce rates can only help you in figuring out more about dwell time.

Is Dwell Time a Google Ranking Factor?

What is mandatory to know is that Google wants searchers to be satisfied with the first search result they click on. The best search experience is one that immediately lands the searcher on a page that has all the information they are looking for, so they do not hit the back button to return to the SERP searching for alternatives.
During a live stream Q and A on the 23rd of March 2016, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, revealed that the No. 1 and 2 Ranking factors were links and content. But let’s take a look back at what Matt Cutts said when he was working at Google:

As we get better at understanding who wrote something and what the real meaning of that content is, inevitably over time, there will be less emphasis on links.

That is right. It seems that as Google’s search engine comprehends natural language better, links will play a less and less important role.

But what is the future of SEO, if it is not links? It will be the users’ engagement.
And how can we measure user experience? By measuring dwell time, of course. We are not saying that links are not of paramount importance. They truly are. Yet, without a doubt, user experience plays a major role among Google’s ranking factors, as their representatives mentioned.

To better understand if Google considers dwell time as a ranking factor, let’s take an example detailed by Brian Dean, regarding an article from his blog. The article was meant to rank as well as possible for the keyword “high quality backlinks.” And it did, straight to Google’s first position. Nothing weird so far.

However, the mentioned article ranked not only for “high quality backlinks” but also for the keyword “how to get high.” As interesting and as comic the situation was, we believe that the author didn’t intend to compete for this keyword, yet, there it was ranking among strange recommendations of getting high, with or without drugs.

So what happened next? Is that page still ranking for the keyword “how to get high”? The answer is no, and the key in this question might be dwell time. As you can see in the screenshot below, the average session duration for the article is very low compared to other similar pages. Why? Because we are pretty sure that people searching for methods to get high were not that interested in quality backlinks. This led to a high bounce rate and a very low time spent on the page.
What did Google do? It dramatically de-ranked this page for the “how to get high” keyword. Did dwell time have something to do here? We believe that yes.

When asked if it is true that Google considers the pogo stick effect and CTR when ranking results, Gary Illyes, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst said:

Clicks in general are a very noisy signal. I worked on trying to make observations from click data. It’s like a Gordian knot. Because there are tons of people who are scraping the results and trying to fetch ranking data, for whatever reason, they also decide to click on things automatically. Links. It’s just a huge mess. When we have controlled experiments, then obviously we look for long clicks, short clicks, and so on. But in general, as I said, it’s a huge mess. When it comes to personalization, we like to use click data because it’s clearer.

Because we wanted to find out more about dwell time, we had to look at some of Google’s patents. We discovered that there is some effort put into using the duration of user visits as a ranking factor. Some patents rank certain pages for certain search queries and also take into account the click length when the engine determines a domain score. This means that dwell time can influence the ranking of a website or specific pages as well.

A measurement of the duration of time that elapsed between the time the user clicked on the search result and the time the user navigated back to the search results web page.

Is Dwell Time a Bing Ranking Factor?

Duane Forrester, who was a Senior Project Manager for Bing, first mentioned “Dwell time” in a 2011 post on the Bing webmaster blog:

Dwell time is the time between when a user clicks on our search result and when they come back from your website tells a potential story. A minute or two is good as it can easily indicate the visitor consumed your content. Less than a couple of seconds can be viewed as a poor result.

Building quality content is more important than only building content. He further adds that there are two main measures for good content: first is the user and second is the search engines themselves. The users have to feel the content made by you as being of high quality. You have to make sure they engage with the content and be certain that you are not missing telltale signs of quality being not quite what you think.

Is Dwell Time a Yahoo Ranking Factor?

It seems like Yahoo believes that clicks can be a flawed metric for user engagement and interest. There is a full research made by Yahoo scientists about dwell time, which can be accessed here. They believe that this is a better indicator of what people enjoy online. According to Marketing Land, clicks on a page don’t mean as much as the time spent there. This is because people can be tricked by click-bait headlines or because they can randomly click to a page before immediately taking off.

More discoveries that Yahoo scientists made include:

Users have less dwell time per article on mobile or tablet devices than on desktops.
Users spend less time on slideshows than on articles.
Users dwell more on longer articles, up to 1,000 words. Beyond that, there is very little correlation to article length.
Users dwell the most on articles in the topics of politics or science and the least on articles on food or entertainment.

Should You Measure Dwell Time?

The question remains: should you measure dwell time even if you don’t have a direct statistic to help you do this?

1. Possibly Replace Bounce Rate

Yes, there is the possibility for dwell time to replace actual bounce rate. Visitors can bounce for various reasons, making it hard to tell whether they had a good or bad experience from the metric alone.

2. Good Indicator of Relevance and User Intent

The dwell time metric helps you better understand the relevance of your content and your users’ intent.

3. It Doesn’t Work Well for Simple Question Queries

Dwell time might not work well for simple question queries as users already find answers quickly leading to low dwell times, which could affect rankings.

4. It Doesn’t Work Well When You’re Searching for a Specific Page

Dwell time might not work fine when searching for a specific page as the first pages might have low dwell times but still be of good quality.

Steps to Improve Dwell Time

We believe that it is good to be proactive and ensure that your website has good dwell time. The next steps that we will mention help your site maintain a good session duration, a small bounce rate, and better dwell time.

1. Add High-Quality Content

Content creation is very important. The key here is to always add high-quality content to your website.

2. Target the Right Keywords

Use the right keywords for the right topics by understanding your target and putting the right keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, and more.

3. Improve Page Load Time

Ensure that you have a fast website. More consumers use mobile phones for browsing and purchases, expecting fast sites.

4. Use Internal Linking

By adding more actions that keep visitors busy, you will improve the session duration.

5. Have a Good Website Design

Ensure that you have a simple layout that is easy to navigate through.

6. Remove Some of Your Ads

Google penalizes mobile sites with intrusive ads. A good user experience is essential.

Conclusion

Dwell time is a quality signal. It may not be a widely discussed concept, but increasing the user’s engagement on your site can only be beneficial. Google aims to provide the best experience for its users, and it is up to us to give our customers the attention and content they need.