Content Marketing
9 Tips on Optimizing Content for Dwell Time SEO
Discover best practices for optimizing your content to improve dwell time SEO metrics. Keep readers engaged and improve your content’s SEO.
Dwell time is an important SEO metric that monitors the length of time a user spends on your page.
Specifically, it looks at time spent on a page between navigating to your website from the search engine results pages (SERPs) and before returning to the SERPs.
It’s an effective way to measure content engagement because a longer dwell time means that readers are finding high-quality content that matches their search intent.
Get insight into how you can make the most of this SEO metric and optimize your content to improve dwell time.
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So, how do you go about optimizing your content to maximize dwell time? Follow these nine tips:
The first few lines of your content will set the tone (and engagement) for the rest of the piece. If it’s bland or boring, a reader is more likely to leave.
Take the time to create a unique hook that addresses the reader’s query directly.
Add in statistics, ask interesting questions, or incorporate quotes or statements that will stop and make the reader think and want to learn more.
Readability matters. No one wants to read a wall of text with difficult sentences. You can check the readability of your content using Originality.ai’s Readability Checker.
Once you get a score across the different readability formulas available, you can take steps to improve readability across your pages, by doing things like:
Even a few-second delay, although it doesn’t seem like much, can result in users leaving a page.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to see where issues are, and then take steps to correct them.
This could be everything from image compression to browser caching or switching web hosts to a faster provider.
Thin or general often doesn’t answer a user’s questions. If that happens, they’ll leave.
Take the time to do keyword research, focusing on long-tail keywords and user intent to better understand what your users are looking for and how you can address their needs.
Then, craft high-quality people-first content that both Google and readers appreciate.
According to Exploding Topics, 60% of web traffic is from mobile. If you haven’t optimized your pages for mobile by making them responsive, take steps to do so now.
Videos, infographics, and other interactive elements can improve engagement on your pages and increase dwell time. Embed videos, charts, graphs, or other statistics where it makes sense to do so in a way that backs up your statements in your content.
When reviewing the facts in your content, easily streamline fact-checking with the Originality.ai Fact Checker.
Internal links encourage users to delve deeper into your site, so don’t hesitate to link to other pages internally. Include links to additional articles or other resources.
What happens when a user gets to the end of your article? If you don’t have a clear and compelling call to action (CTA), they may just go back to their original search results.
Include a call-to-action that encourages them to take the next steps such as:
Look for ways to simplify and streamline navigation on your website. If it’s too hard for them to navigate your site or find what they’re looking for, they’ll simply try their search elsewhere.
By putting these tips into action, not only will you be actively improving dwell time on your pages, but you’ll also be making sure that your content is more refined and more accurately matches what your ideal customer is searching for, and that’s precisely the kind of thing that search engines want to see more of!
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