Subject: dwell times & SEO

Author: John Lang

Date: 15/09/2025

In this in-depth article, we are going to discuss how a business’s dwell time can have a direct bearing on your business’s organic rankings on Google. We are going to detail how writing engaging content marketing, having a fast website and improving the U.X (user experience) can help to improve your businesses search engine optimisation.

Here’s a startling statistic: Roughly 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a webpage.

This means that your copywriters, web designers, and your on-page SEO strategists could be working very hard to roughly haemorrhage half of the visitors in a very short matter of time on your website.

This is why content marketing today today needs to be superior, have a very high “Google E-EAT score” and be helpful (Google Helpful Content Updat) if its to have a high dwell time and rank high on Google.

Therefore, when improving any business’s search engine optimisation, what we are really doing in 2025 is competing for shoppers’ attention.

 

Dwell time and ranking at the top of Google’s organic results

For pages ranked 7-10, average dwell time drops to about 2 minutes and 20 seconds

It’s actually been reported through reliable statistics that for businesses ranked in positions 7 to 10 on Google that the dwell time drops dramatically to around 2 minutes and 20 seconds. This means, that there does seem to be some direct correlation between businesses that rank at the top of Google in Bristol, and those pages having a very high dwell time.

This suggests that the futher you move down Google’s SERP’s, the less the dwell time is for each result.

As you fall further down Google’s organic ranks, the dwell time decreases even more.

This therefore reinforces the points that businesses must be ranked as high as possible on Google’s organic results. One of the ways of doing is adding content marketing with high Google E-EAT to improve dwell times.

Businesses ranked at the top of Google’s

There is data to support this point, it has been widely reported, with statistics published by SEMrush, that for businesses, which are ranked at the top of Google, these pages have very high dwell times.

It’s actually mentioned in the statistics, and there are businesses which are ranked in the top three organic results, on average, managed to retain the interest of the shopper roughly three minutes and 10 seconds in terms of the average dwell time.

Therefore, you can quickly appreciate why top SEO experts across the world read that dwell time is an important ranking factor.

 

What is the average dwell time for most businesses?

You might currently be staring at your Google Analytics account and you might be seeing that the dwell time is much lower than the stated three minutes that we mentioned earlier.

The good news is that reliable statistics indicate that the average time on page across most industries is just 54 seconds.
However, it’s essential to note that whatever you can do to increase that dwell time will start to improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

Top tip from our SEO agency would be this: we have noticed that if a business embeds a video into, say, the homepage or other key pages, that this can increase the dwell time sometimes dramatically for those pages.

So, for example, why not create a YouTube video, of say your team at your dental practice?
Then when this is embedded into a key page on your website, the dwell time should increase, which can help to improve the ranking for that page.

 

What would you therefore deem as a good dwell time?

Two minutes to the four-minute range

Many digital marketing agencies strongly agree that this is a relatively healthy dwell time- that’s between the two and four minute range. If you’re managing to retain the interest of all shoppers over this period, the shopper will have shown a strong interest in the products or services you have to offer.

Google’s algorithm, namely Google’s RankBrain will detect overtime that those pages are obtaining a high dwell time.

Therefore those pages, will start to rank higher in Google’s SERP’s in Bristol.

Above four minutes

If you’re keeping the average shopper for this length of time, then you do really well! Give yourself a pat on the back!

You’re managing to retain that shopper’s interest for long periods, and therefore, this can be reflected normally with higher organic search engine results.

Under 30 seconds

If the average dwell time of your website is below 30 seconds, then simply put, you are not holding the shoppers’ interest for long enough. This if sustained for a long period, could result in a drop in terms of where your business ranks in Google’s organic results.
What this actually reflects is that the shoppers visiting your company are disinterested in the website, and are therefore leaving after a short period of time.

How can I improve my business’s dwell time?

As we mentioned a little bit earlier on in this article, when you start to add, say, infographics or perhaps you add a YouTube video, we found that in our experience, this can massively increase the dwell times.

Consider, for example, a complex service- let’s say you’re an employment solicitor- well a friendly solicitor offering a short explainer video on how the process works, can really help to keep a shopper on your website for longer, improving dwell times for your solicitors’ practice, and helping your business to start moving up Google’s ranks.

It’s also possible to build rapport with the customer through adding embedded YouTube videos, as the shopper can gain a sense of what your staff is like, the personality of your business, for example.

 

Improve the technical performance (improving page speed)

Many of us today are massively impatient, which is understandable, given that for most of us we often don’t have much free time outside of work.

Therefore, if you are looking to buy a product or service, you are often not willing to wait an extended time for a page to load.
Therefore, as business owners, we have to make our company website as fast as possible- this means that purchasing super-fast hosting for our Bristol businesses is important.

There are several ways to make your website faster, reduce bounce rates, and increase dwell time, which can positively impact the business’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

Compress images

Compress images on your company website, as high-resolution photos can sometimes significantly slow down the page’s speed. You may also want to think about adding lazy loading to some pages?

For example, you might have a product page where there are seven pictures of say a single item of clothing, like a shirt that you are selling, by improving the page speed by compressing images of the clothing item you are selling, you can help sometimes to improve dwell times.

 

Enable browser caching

Discuss with your web designers how to enable browser caching to enhance page speed.
Minimise unnecessary code

Sometimes a website is designed and its just too slow, there might be for example too many WordPress plugins slowing the website down.

Or there might be too much unnecessary code that is badly written, or the website just is too slow because of hosting issues. Therefore, make your website as fast as possible, whilst still offer a good U.X (user experience).

Reduce server response times.

You can also change your hosting to reduce server response times.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

Talk to your SEO agency about whether a content delivery network, or CDN, could benefit your business.?

 

Internal links

Sometimes, when we think about improving a business’s dwell times, we often think that this will involve a considerable amount of work to implement this, right?

However, sometimes it’s the simple things, such as adding internal links between related content marketing in your blog section, that can help to improve your business’s dwell time.

It’s actually been widely reported that if you intelligently use internal links to link up pages, such as articles on your website, then you can increase the dwell time by upto 40%.

 

Mobile friendly

If you have ever used a website that was difficult to use, you often leave it immediately and go to a competitor’s website.

This could be because the website is too slow for a smartphone, the text is difficult to read, or you just tried numerous times to click on the menu and it simply doesn’t seem to take you to the page you want!

It is therefore imperative that if you want to improve your dwell times, the website is effortless, simple to use, and logically laid out.

Our best advice for you is not to go with an overly complicated and clunky web design.

It might look impressive initially, but if it is full of glitches and is simply slow, this will be detrimental to your website SEO.

Grab attention

What’s important is that you grab the attention of a shopper with visual offers. This could be a current sale you are running, stating fast delivery times, or perhaps just a rotating banner with the latest feedback from your customers.

What you most definitely want to do is to grab your shopper’s attention and then to retain it for as long as possible.

This often involves something high-impact; for example, running a sale banner, which has a large banner that promotes a specific item. This can give a shopper a reason to start browsing that section of products that are on sale. Even if they are not particularly interested in the product range, they might still have a reason to browse if you are running a sale. This increases the website’s dwell time.

 

Use Google analytics

What you can do is use Google Analytics to spot pages that need improvement- such as improve pages which have a high bounce rate.
This might mean that your spot pages have particularly high bounce rates. Your copywriters can improve the content marketing on those pages.

 

Come to the best SEO agencies in Bristol.

We have some of the very best SEO minds working for us across Bristol; therefore, do have a chat with us today to see how we can improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.