Dwell time is defined as the total amount of time an individual user spends on your page from the first click to their return to the SERPs. It shows how appealing your content is. At the same time, according to Small Biz Genius, 88% of online users will never return to a website after a bad initial experience. Subsequently, 70% of online businesses fail outright due to bad User Experience (UX).
This underscores the importance of the first impression because longer dwell time tells Google that visitors are interested in the page content. With that said, let’s take a look at what makes dwell time important, as well as how you can increase it on your WordPress website.
Why Dwell Time Matters
Let's discuss some of the evidence that longer dwell time correlates with higher search rankings. First thing’s first, however – we need to distinguish dwell time from bounce rates, as they often get mixed up and cause confusion.
Dwell time represents the amount of time an individual spends on your website after finding your link through a search engine such as Google. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who abandon your website shortly after visiting it, coming to the conclusion that it is irrelevant to them. Ideally, you want to aim for higher dwell time, lower bounce rate, as it will help rank your links higher with global SERP.
One of the ways in which most website owners optimize their content for higher dwell time is through written content optimization. You can do so by checking out a TrustMyPaper review and finding out how a professional editor can help you out. Once you have achieved better WordPress website optimization (via the below-mentioned guidelines), you will experience several important benefits going forward:
- Higher global SEO ranking
- Better visitor engagement and subsequent conversion
- Standardized content optimization across the website
- High ROI in regards to initial-time/resource investment
Increase Your WordPress Website’s Dwell Time
In this section, we'll discuss the best practices of increasing dwell time and improving user experience on the site. The best way to approach dwell time optimization on your WordPress website is to imagine being in the shoes of your target audience. Once you understand their expectations and emotional triggers, keeping them engaged should be an afterthought. With that, let’s jump right in.
Website UX Audit
We’ve touched on the notion of UX previously, but what does it represent in practice? User experience represents the actual way a user “experiences” your website, product, or app. According to Tech Jury, 79% of users who don’t find what they are looking for quickly will abandon a website in search of another.
This makes it important for you to audit the current state of your website before optimizing it for higher dwell time. How many clicks does it take to reach the checkout page? What about the nearest comments section or a subscription button? Make sure that it takes as few clicks as possible to achieve something on your site to improve its UX appeal across the board.
Original Content Production
At the end of the day, what carries a website is its content. Mainly, what kind of content do you intend to produce on a constant basis to ensure that your visitors are engaged? Do you intend to run a WordPress website based blog? Or do you intend to delve into eCommerce and offer exclusive items for global sales and shipping?
Writing and subsequently publishing original content for your audience is essential for success in terms of increased dwell time. Combined with the best paper writing site for editing and formatting, your content will achieve its purpose and engage users far more frequently going forward.
Internal Link Building
Once a user arrives at your landing page from SERP, they will likely be interested in exploring the website further. Depending on the type of website you will run, internal links can always be set up to increase dwell time in an affordable manner.
Internal links to different products, blog posts, contact forms, or case studies effectively build credibility for your brand. In addition, internal link building can help you reuse old content by linking it to newer content pieces. You can go a step further and produce content via topic clustering to achieve better link building once several content pieces have been published.
Engagement and Conversion
The best way to keep users on your website once they arrive from SERP is through calls to action and engaging content. Marketing strategies such as popups, FOMO offers, and the aforementioned CTAs all serve to draw your audience’s attention while browsing.
Likewise, you can enable comments and discussion on each of your blog posts or product pages to further engage would-be visitors. Don’t make your website “passive”, instead, encourage interactivity and dynamic browsing through the site. That way, users will organically convert into subscribers and customers without explicitly being placed in the sales funnel.
User Accessibility
Lastly, accessibility plays a major role not only for your dwell time but SEO ranking in general. The better your WordPress website’s accessibility, the more people will flock to it over time. Some of the things you can do to increase your website’s accessibility include:
- Alt-text for multimedia content
- Voice-enabled browsing
- Content localization into different languages
- Short load time and low bandwidth requirement
- Frequent website auditing for broken links and duplicate content
Dwell on It (Conclusion)
Make sure to always look for new and exciting ways to attract your visitors’ attention once they reach the landing page of your WordPress website. Many businesses just hire WordPress development services that take care of all of these tasks. The best way to increase your website’s dwell time is to take your own web browsing experiences into consideration. What do you like and dislike about the websites you visit? What would you change if you had the power to do so? Start with creative thinking first and move to content optimization after – your website’s dwell time will skyrocket as a result.
