But dwell time isn’t the only indicator of how time spent on a specific page or in a particular website affects search ranking, so let’s get a few other metric definitions out of the way before I get on to explaining the relationship between blog headlines and dwell time and how this relationship can affect your page’s ranking in SERPs.
There’s a difference between an “actual” bounce, where someone arrives on a page and leaves almost immediately (indicating that the quality of the content on the page is either poor or irrelevant), and a “standard” bounce which may apply even when a visitor spends a great deal of time on the page:
This is why some pages that rank highly and have excellent content may seem to have high bounce rates. They don’t have high actual bounce rates, but high standard bounce rates.
This is especially true of websites that don’t focus on long-form content but rather on fast delivery of precise information, and apparently Google is highly adept at figuring out whether low session duration in conjunction with a high bounce rate makes sense for the type of site it’s assessing. For example you wouldn’t expect people to linger on pages in a dictionary website that provides word definitions, or an e-commerce website with many product pages – if their original search query was for something very specific, like the current temperature in a particular city or the price/availability of a product.
So, since the bounce rate is not always an accurate indicator of the quality of the content on the page, Google can’t (and therefore doesn’t) rely on bounce rate alone to determine whether the content on a page is “good” or “bad”.
If your content does not encourage them to remain with you, they will leave. The search engines can get a sense of this by watching the dwell time. The time between when a user clicks on our search result and when they come back from your website tells a potential story… And while that’s not the only factor we review when helping to determine quality, it’s a signal we watch.
If there is no interaction other than just reading the page, or if you don’t have events set up in Google Analytics to record interaction events, then the time spent on the last page of the session isn’t counted towards the total session duration, even if that’s the only page the user sees during that visit to the website.
If your avg. session duration is low, it could be because –
- Your content isn’t interesting enough for the people arriving at your website
- The site is poorly designed so people can’t easily find what they’re looking for
- Your content isn’t engaging enough for users to want to explore more content in other areas of your website.
Another effective way to increase session duration is to link from a page in your site about a particular topic, to other relevant content in your website. If a user finds your content relevant and engaging, and is presented with other content in the site they may want to check out on the same visit, it will increase their session duration. The more consistently your users are compelled to check out more than one page in your site on the same visit, the higher your average session duration will be, which will indicate to Google that your site is interesting to all those people who were interested in the same or related search query, and help towards boosting your site’s SERP ranking.
But Google Analytics can’t tell if you’ve moved on to a different open tab in your browser and are not technically still viewing the page it’s measuring, nor can it measure the time users spend on the last page of their visit to your site, if they exit your site by closing the window, closing the tab, or typing another website into the URL bar.
This means that neither average session duration nor average time on page are statistically significant representations of the real time a user spends on your site, so both metrics should be considered together with other key Google Analytics metrics to get a more accurate understanding of user behavior.
As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.
So logically, this means that mismatched blog headlines can damage dwell time, because if a headline implies readers will get content that satisfies a particular search term or phrase but in reality once they’ve clicked through to the page, the content is not at all what the headline implied – they’ll bounce right off.
As it turns out, positive user experiences aren’t just a priority for Google.
If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted.
If you write headlines that are not a true reflection of what your blog posts actually contain, or if you resort to misleading click-bait tactics just to get more pageviews, people will catch on to this tactic very quickly and consequently spend very little time on the page, which will in turn impact badly on your overall blogging efforts: Not only will your online credibility be ruined the more your readers recognize you as a repeat click-bait offender, but you will also be penalized by the likes of Google and Facebook.
That’s why it’s so important to perfect each headline so that it’s not only as appealing as it can possibly be to the target audience for that particular post, but also so that it’s bang-on accurate in terms of what visitors will actually see on the destination page.
- Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List (2021) (via Backlinko)
- Dwell Time: Is it a ranking factor? (And if so, should you care?) (via Ahrefs)
- Google Analytic’s Average Session Duration (via Quietly)
- Understanding Google Analytics’ Average Time on Page (via Quietly)
- Dwell Time: The Most Important Metric You’re Not Measuring (via WordStream)
- A Look at Google’s 200 Search Ranking Factors (Infographic)
- What is Google RankBrain? (via MOZ.com)
- Optimizing for RankBrain, Whiteboard Friday (video presented by Rand Fishkin)
- The 10 Essential SEO Ranking Factors You Need to Rank #1 in 2020 (via OptinMonster)