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Content marketing

Dwell Time

Dwell time is the duration a user spends on a page after clicking through from a search result, before returning to the search results page — used as a proxy for content relevance and quality.

Google has never officially confirmed dwell time as a direct ranking factor, and the precise definition varies across analyses. Still, a long-standing pattern shows that pages with shorter dwell time and quick returns to search (pogo-sticking) underperform pages where users stay and engage.

Practical dwell-time killers: slow page load, intrusive ads or pop-ups, content that does not answer the query in the first paragraph, layouts that bury the answer under marketing copy, and walls of text without scannable structure.

Improving dwell time is less about extending content and more about delivering the answer fast. A well-structured 800-word piece that gives the user what they came for usually outperforms a 3,000-word piece padded out for word count.

Related terms

  • Core Web Vitals

    Core Web Vitals are three Google-defined page experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — that measure loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

  • AI Overviews

    AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers that appear at the top of Google search results, synthesising information from multiple ranking pages and citing them as sources.

  • E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

    E-E-A-T is Google's framework for evaluating content quality, standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — used by human quality raters and incorporated into search ranking signals.

← Content GapE-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) →

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