How does dwell time work

It seems logical enough: If you put more content on the page, people will have to spend more time consuming it. As a result, dwell time in SEO increases. While it might seem obvious, the utility of long-form content has only become widely recognized in the last couple of years.

Usually, a piece of content needs to be at least 2, words to be considered long-form. Quality is also critical. If your user reads one or two paragraphs of subpar content, they will quickly click away. This can then ultimately hurt your search engine rankings. Healthline offers a great example of long-form content success in action. They also provide a user-friendly experience by breaking up chunks of text with headings. Need help creating content that converts? Aside from breaking up your content with headings and subheadings, here are a few other steps you can take to make a page accessible:.

Scannable content : Format content with headings and subheadings and bullets, lists, and short paragraphs to make it scannable. Load time : Keep load time below five seconds. The best-ranking Google sites usually have a load time of three seconds or less. A drop-down menu may be preferable if you have a large website with many pages. Clean code : A great user experience starts with the back-end.

Coding needs to be clean and mark-up valid. Create mobile-friendly pages : Every webpage should also have a mobile-friendly version. Apartment Therapy , a decor and design blog, offers a compelling case study. Their homepage is streamlined and organized. Click on an article — like this one about easy-to-maintain house plants — and you get a welcoming mix of text and images, clear headings and sections, and a link to a relevant trending video. The sharing links for social media are placed at the top of the article, plus you get related articles at the bottom if you want to keep exploring.

Internal links allow you to keep users on your website for longer. Choosing relevant links that would logically be of interest to the user, based on the current piece of content they are viewing, is critical. This health and wellness blog for moms, Wellness Mama , shows how valuable internal linking can be. The target audience here is very niche, meaning that theoretically, it should be possible to develop a strong following. Wellness Mama has done just that, in part thanks to effective internal links within every content piece they create.

This one blog on natural kitchen cleaning features plus internal links. They have a purpose. Open up your content to comments. This puts users in an active role, allowing them to engage with your platform and keeping them online. The history of dwell time dates back to the early days of the war on terrorism, during which dwell time for active service members was reduced to a maximum of 12 months. In , however, the United States Department of Defense extended dwell time for active service members to 24 months for every year deployed to a war zone, signaling an important transition for the military and its service members.

So, why does the military have such long dwell times? According to a study of 65, service members conducted by MacGregor, longer periods between home and deployment reduced the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD. In this, this is believed to also reduce the number of mental disorders. A separate study confirmed these findings by revealing that longer dwell times were associated with a lower risk of suicide. Currently, dwell time is measured for active service members as the median ratio of time deployed against time not deployed.

Generally speaking, officials strive for a median ratio dwell time of The amount of time a user spends on a page before going anywhere else does not matter if it is back to the SERPs or another website. Guides Glossary Contact. Marketing Automation. Lead Generation. Growth Hacking. Customer Support. Social Media. Dwell Time.