Dwell time
Let’s talk about one of the things for on page SEO that you can’t control but you can influence. This is called dwell time and it is how long somebody spends on your home page or on your website once they find you for a certain keyword.
For my friend Luke who makes church websites, you would want somebody to search for “church websites,” or “church website design,” or whatever is related to your thing, and then you would want them obviously to click on your domain in the search results page. Then you want them to stay on your domain for a long time.
If somebody searches for you, or searches for your keyword “church websites” and they click on it, and then 12 seconds later they click back to Google, Google knows they did not find what they were looking for. That’s call the bounce rate.
We want to have a very low bounce rate and we want to have a very high dwell time on a page.
One of the ways that we can do that is by adding video, by making the homepage long so that you must scroll through it, and by giving lots of text for people to read.
One other important tip is to do this – on the home page, above the fold, put a link that people want to click for more information. Google sees that click that the visitor has gone to a second page. That is a huge factor. It’s a much larger factor for high volume, high traffic websites than it for local service businesses, but it is a factor.
If 90% of the people leave your website after 5 seconds, it’s an indication to Google that they’re not finding what they want and Google is not going to serve you for that keyword. If they stay and they go to 12 different pages and they’re there for 2 or 3 minutes chances are they’ve found what they’re looking for. That’s a strong on page signal to Google.
If you need help with your SEO, please call Nashville Marketing Systems at 615-738-8964.
