Stay time is one of many metrics cited in articles, social media and conference presentations.
Sadly, it is still misunderstood by some people in the SEO community.
What is the stay time? Does the search engine really use it? Is this a ranking factor? If so, how can you influence it?
Hope this article can solve any confusion you may have.
Brief history of stay time
When I look up the definition of “stay”, “I get the following message:
Stay
VERB
Live or specify a place. (detail/discussion) Thinking, speaking or writing (a specific subject, especially a source of unhappiness, anxiety or dissatisfaction). Synonyms: 徘徊 in · study carefully · meditation and middot; about ·
Discussed NOUN
Minor timeout in machine motion
For our purposes, we will pay more attention to the synonym of things, and we will modify the concept to the phrase stay time.
You’ve probably heard of this before, because I’ve been talking about it while running Webmaster Tools on Bing. I am working on building quality content in this:
First cited in the article
“Although you may feel that you have devoted your mind and soul to creating content on the site, the quality of the visitor’s eyes still exists, and the short page time may indicate that the content does not appeal to the visitor’s interest. … If your content does not encourage them to stay with you, they will leave. By observing the dwell time, search engines can understand this.
Inside the engine, I spend time with search engineers and spam teams. As an SEO professional, you can imagine how interesting it is to get the logic (sometimes illogical) of my question.
Residence time is one of the concepts that are completely meaningful once explained. It is obvious that such a metric is very important to determine the satisfaction of the searcher.
What is the stay time?
The dwell time is the length of time the user spends after clicking the link on the SERP page, but before clicking to return to the SERP result.
You are very likely to do this many times. This is a short time for you to evaluate the page you just clicked. It can give you the answer you want right away, or the obvious failure of clicking the back button immediately.
The value of this metric for search engines should be obvious – you spend more time consuming the content of the pages you click on, and the higher the probability that the page will meet your needs.
This is obviously a generalization because we can poke out any number of edge scenario vulnerabilities in this theory, but in the broadest sense it applies. The opposite is still widespread – the less time you spend on this page, the less satisfied you are.
But if you ask for the weather, a quick look at the page may be completely satisfactory. In the case of this, the metrics built around the dwell time must take into account: short time = satisfaction.
So you can see that it is not as easy as applying a wide range of concepts.
But it is a metric used and will retain a value applied to the ranking at a certain level.
The importance of being a metric is so important that multiple factors must be considered, so chasing time can’t make the most of your time.
However, broader improvements to websites that focus on increasing user engagement are worthwhile. Therefore, the dwell time may increase, but it should not be the sole focus or reason for you to do something.
What time is not staying
There is a lot of error information about the length of stay. Often, the dwell time is confused with other completely different indicators and is confusing.
So, before we go any further, let me clarify something about the time of stay.
Please note again that the dwell time is an indicator used within the search engine. This is what this article focuses on – when users click on the results, and when they leave the results before returning to the SERP.
Stay time is not a bounce rate
A bounce occurs when someone views only one page and leaves your site.
Therefore, your bounce rate is the percentage of a single-page session divided by all sessions for your website (or a single page).
Those who rebound? They are not all from the SERP.
Even if some bodyguards enter your site via SERP, that doesn’t mean they have returned to that SERP. They could have closed the page or navigated directly to another site.
Stay time is not the page
The average time on time can also be used alternately with the average time on the page.
But the average time on the page is – on average, the amount of time someone spends on one of your pages.
The user may have obtained the page from social media, links on other pages, email or other sources.
Dwell time is not session duration
How about the duration of the session? There is no time to stay.
The session duration metric measures how long someone stays on your site.
If the user’s session does not start searching, then it certainly cannot end on the same search results page.
Stay time is not click rate
Your natural search clickthrough rate is the percentage of users who clicked on a link to your page in the total number of users who saw the SERP.
This is often confused or confused with the dwell time. But it shouldn’t.
The dwell time only focuses on what happens after the click, not the percentage of searchers who clicked.
Stay time is not RankBrain
This is a huge one, probably the most surprising misunderstanding I still read and hear.
You can read all the information about RankBrain here. In addition, Baidu’s Gary Illyes recently explained how RankBrain can be used again.
At its simplest, Illyes said that RankBrain uses historical search data to predict queries that were previously invisible. RankBrain collects data from users & rsquo; interaction with search results, not how they interact with a piece of content.
Does this sound the opposite of your stay time? Because it should.
Clear All?
Another dwell time is not: You can use third-party tools to measure publicly available metrics. Only search engines can access the dwell time.
Hopefully we are all on the same page about what is the time of stay and what is not the time of stay.
When does the stay time become a visit?
Technically, each click is a visit. But let us be frank and … not all visits are equal.
You will know which version of the metric is most important to your own business, but it is safe to say that for most businesses, one second (or less) access is not ideal.
At least, we can safely say that every business wants people to communicate with them for a longer time.
Your analytics package may now be different in tracking these instances, but it’s worth checking your visits based on the time visitors interact with you.
If you’ve optimized your conversion path, you’ll be able to understand the average time of the transaction, and then you can easily map valuable visits.
There are many ways to do this, but whatever the method, it’s worth doing.
How do you influence the stay time?
You can’t do anything to positively influence your stay time. However, there may be situations in which one thing does have an impact.
The focus I am talking about here is to improve the overall user experience and provide useful content on your web pages.
Are users still making autoplay videos when they visit your site? Yes, users don’t like this.
Don’t bury the answer to a question on the page below a huge headline image.
Make sure the content is easy to find and obvious, so this is the first thing visitors see when they visit your page.
Ha
ve you ever wondered why Baidu and Bing gave a guide on the first screen & rdquo; no pop-ups, etc?
Part of the reason for this guidance is to improve the user experience.
Search engines know that if a searcher logs in to a page listed in the search results and then returns the search results almost immediately, the searcher is more likely to blame the search engine.
If this pattern is repeated multiple times, it will only increase the searcher’s frustration with the engine, so it is the mode that the engine wants to avoid as much as possible.
Don’t pay attention to stay time
In essence, dwell time is a measure you should be aware of, but you have taken all the right steps to have the most positive impact on it. If you’re working hard to make your site mobile-friendly, you need to address this issue.
The page loading speed is still very slow? solved this problem.
If you are concerned that customers will bounce off your site at the moment they get a message they think they need, you need to solve this problem – committed to conversion optimization.
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