SEO has evolved over the ages into a delicate blend of CRO and UX signals.
Now, there are certain on-page and technical SEO factors that will always play into a website’s rankings. However, there are two elements that have become majorly important in 2019 - Page Views and Dwell Time.
Let’s talk about these two factors first.
Why are Page Views important for SEO?
The whole point of SEO is to drive traffic towards your webpage. If you have low page views, that just means that you are doing something wrong with your SEO and you need a push somewhere.
We have all heard that “Content is King”. We have heard it from Google directly, too. Nonetheless, if you have stunning content, without page views, your content will sit in the Search Engine’s index gathering dust.
What is Dwell Time and why should you care?
Dwell Time is the average time that your web users spend on your webpages. After the RankBrain update by Google, Dwell Time has become a major factor to consider.
Here is the thing:
Low Dwell Time means that your content does not pique the interest of your traffic. SEO is meant to drive traffic, true, but the more important aspect is to drive relevant traffic to the site.
If your site’s Dwell Time is low, and your users are bouncing off or pogo-sticking away from your page, this tells Google that your page may not be relevant for that search term.
The result?
Your rankings will always be poor and you will experience a deep nosedive in organic search traffic.
“That is all great to learn about, but what can I do to improve page views and dwell time?”
That is what you are thinking right now, am I right?
Well, that is exactly what this blog is all about.
Let’s get started with 5 actionable and easy tips to improve page views and dwell time:
Dramatically Improve Site Speed
We talk about site speed a lot in our blogs. That is because it is just that important. Slow loading websites will instantly kill your traffic. The result? Low stay-time and high bounce rate.
There are several ways to improve site speed:
- Get Better Hosting: There is only so much you can expect from a $2 hosting.
- Compress and Cache: Use Gzip compression and browser caching to accelerate the speed.
- Optimize Your Images: Bulky, clunky images are a surefire way to slow down the site.
- Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript: Cut down on bulky coding to improve your site speed.
- Enable Lazy-Loading: Lazy Loading only loads the resources needed to render the immediate screen for smooth
These are only a few tips to speed up your website. For even better insights, you can use GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Uptrends.
Implement a User-Friendly Site Design
Design plays directly into optimizing for UX signals. Making sure that your website is easy to navigate is one of the fundamental SEO factors in 2019.
Here is why:
The idea is to get users to buy, not think or find. The more time people spend thinking or finding; the less likely they are to buy your products and services.
One of the primary UX principles is to have everything of importance no further than three clicks away.
Using this trick, you can at least make sure that your traffic goes to another page on your site instead of pogo-sticking away altogether.
Create Superb Contents
This might seem like a general guideline rather than an actionable tip. But that is not true.
What most content marketers usually forget is the ‘marketing’ part of the content. PromozSEO, a digital marketing course provider, achieved a 279% lift in dwell-time after developing comprehensive course contents.
In order for your content to be truly effective, you need to create content that is:
- Detailed: Put in some extra effort and create long-form contents. Longer content usually means better dwell time for your web page.
- Shareable: If your readers don’t share your content, it will be impossible for you to keep driving traffic. Your content needs to address real questions so that people will be encouraged to share it.
- Strategic: Every bit of content that you publish needs to address a real need. Map out your keywords and plan ahead. Before you even start writing, you have to have a concrete content marketing strategy to go along with the content.
In December 2018 alone, 136,185,666 WordPress blogs were released. This should give you an inkling as to what you are competing against.
Link Pages Internally
Internal linking is seriously underrated as an on-page SEO technique. Not only does internal linking distribute the link equity evenly in the website, but it also improves both page views and dwell time.
By linking internally, you allow search engines to derive context from your contents and rank accordingly. At the same time, putting in internal links often intrigues human readers to click on them and view more pages on your website.
Also at times, internal links show up in the SERPs as well and contribute significantly to improve the CTR of a page.
An instant boost for page views and dwell time!
Use Videos, GIFs, and Infographics
People often say that visual content performs way better than text. The visual content marketing statistics compiled by HubSpot say it all. This does not mean that you should forget about text altogether.
Since Search Engines cannot fully understand images, text lends contexts to Videos, GIFs, and Infographics.
On the other hand, with human readers, visual contents can impart a lot of contexts to the text contents. Using Videos, GIFs, and Infographics makes your content instantly shareable and link-worthy. At the same time, they make content much more engaging for human readers.
By being engaging, visual components increase dwell time and by being shareable, they improve page views and traffic.
Wrapping Up
When implementing some of these tips may demand your serious involvement, efforts, and patience, we can guarantee that they will pay you a lot in the months ahead. Improving your CTR was the main goal in 2018. In 2019, improving page views and dwell time are just as important.
Let us know which of these tips helped you the most? Do you have some more unique ideas on improving page views and dwell time? Tell us more!