How ‘Dwell Time’ and Quality Content Work Together to Improve SEO
When you’re writing content for your website, you should be focusing on quality content rather than just quantity of content. Just because you’ve slapped together 25 blog posts in a month, if they’re low quality, then it’s not doing you any favors towards building a solid content or SEO strategy.
So what is quality content?
It’s well-written, well-constructed, well-planned out content that brings value to the person reading it. It’s content that informs the person and answers whatever question brought them to your piece of content in the first place. It’s content that’s well-formatted and stylized so that it’s pleasurable to read.
In short, it’s value-based content that someone actually wants to read, absorb, and would even enjoy.
β Β You can learn more about auditing and building your existing content strategy through a quality vs quantity approach in this post right here.
Quality, well-written content is really important to keep the person reading it engaged and coming back, but from an SEO perspective, their are 2 main reasons why quality content is important:
- Your content is more likely to be found in a search result when someone is looking for an answer to a question.
- Your content is more likely to help with your dwell time and clickthrough rate.
Let’s talk about why the second point is so important. What exactly is dwell time?
Dwell time is the amount of time someone spends on your website, after finding it in a search result, and then returning back to the search result to choose a different result (or closing the browser all together).
Dwell time and quality content really do go hand in hand because if you produce quality content that the person that finds it actually reads, enjoys, and then perhaps even clicks through to some additional content, your dwell time will be higher.
And that matters because a higher dwell time can improve your SEO strategy because it tells the search engine that you have quality content that answered the question the person was trying to get answered.
Here’s a bit more about how that works:
As far as search engines go, their primary goal is to return the best results for the person performing the search. Period.
To be valuable and useful, search engines want to create a good search experience that returns good results for the person; and the quality of what’s on the other end of that search has quite a bit to with that.
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For example, if someone performs a search for: how to buy a house in houston, and they click the first search result, but once the page loads, they see a website that’s ugly, difficult to navigate, with content that isn’t very good; so after a few seconds, they click the back button to try another search result. That tells search engines that the page the person visited is not a good search result for that initial search because the amount of time they stayed on the website is so short.
But if on the other hand, someone does the same search, clicks a different result, and the website they arrive on is beautiful, informative, and easy to use, and they then stay for several minutes and read every word (and perhaps even click through some additional pages), it tells the search engines that the results is exactly what the person was looking for. The result is a higher dwell time for that website, and if a lot of people have the same overall experience, it will boost the page rankings and benefit the overall SEO strategy.
There’s a lot of reasons to invest in the time it takes to write quality content that’s easy to read on a website that’s beautifully built, but the key reasons are that it’s not just because it’s useful for people, but also, because it works towards building a content strategy that ranks in organic search results and brings in more people to know about you, your brand, and your business.
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