Dwell time
The term dwell time is about the time visitors spend on a website until they return to the search page. The longer the dwell time lasts the better your website is going to rank in the search engine. When visitors spend longer on your website it means to search engines that you have a nice website to navigate on. What the dwell time looks at is:
- The quality of your website in navigation and cross linking
- The relevance of your website in content and back linking
Not only the first page a visitor arrives at counts in the dwell time, but also other pages of your website. To ensure that visitors spend longer on your website, it is smart to make the best use of cross linking on your website.
How does dwell time work?
There are several ways a visitor can arrive at your website at dwell time. A visitor can arrive at your website through backlinks from other websites and through search results. When a visitor comes to your website, you don't want them to leave the website again within seconds. The time the visitor spends on the website is recorded at dwell time. This is measured from the first page the visitor visits and the other pages visited in the same session. The recording of dwell time stops from the time the visitor leaves the website. So it looks at the total time a visitor "wanders" on the website.
Dwell time is often confused with average time on a website. Session time also counts direct URL typing where dwell time does not. Dwell time looks more at the relevance and quality of the website and not so much at findability.
