Stay time: A very important indicator that is not always taken into account. Stay time: A very important indicator that is not always taken into account Analysis of Internet activity over the weekend

Stay time is one of the most important metrics on a website and one that is often misunderstood. Many marketers focus too much on Time on Site when evaluating traffic. But this indicator not entirely reliable and can be misleading.

In this article, we'll look at what time on site means, whether search engines use it as a ranking signal, and how to increase average time on site.

What does "stay time" mean?

Three years ago, Duane Foster wrote blog article how to create quality content. It was the first time that the concept of “stay time” was mentioned.

In other words, the residence time is is the amount of time (real time) a visitor spends on a page before returning to search results. Theoretically, the longer the dwell time, the better, as this indicates that the visitor absorbs most of the content on the page before returning to the search results or moving on to other actions on the site.

Failure Rates and Actual Failure Rates

Before continuing, it is worth noting that there is a difference between bounce rates andvalid failure rates. The concept of "stay time" is closely related to them.

In analytical platforms, including Google Analytics , it takes two clicks to get the Time on site - click to go to the site and click to exit the page. Even if a visitor clicks on a link, stays on the page for 25 minutes, and then leaves, that time will be included in the bounce rate statistics. Although, in fact, visiting a page for such a long time is not, in fact, a “bounce”. This is why failure rates can differ from actual failure rates.

Obviously, a page visit that lasts for 6 seconds isreal"refusal". The visitor arrives, decides that the content doesn't match what they're looking for, and leaves. But if a visitor spends half an hour on the site browsing the page before leaving, then thisNotwill be a valid failure indicator. This is why some pages that rank well and have quality content have higher bounce rates.

This is why dwell time is a more reliable indicator of page quality than the bounce rate that most mistakenly pay attention to. internet marketers. But what do search engines do with time spent?

Time of stay - a ranking signal?

Among SEOs, the question is very often discussed: is the time spent on the page a ranking factor or not. And although Google is silent about many of the components that affect rankings. The fact that this setting was first added and then removed from Google suggests that time spent is a ranking factor. This setting allowed you to block all results for a specific domain.

Google determines whether to block a domain in the SERPs or not based on the length of stay. If you visited a site and quickly left it, the next time for the same request, this site will be located much lower in the search results.

Another proof that time to stay is a ranking signal in Google is the presence of the “More by” option in the SERPs.

This feature is closely related to authorship. The blogs of the authors of verified content were encouraged by search engines — links to other articles of the author appeared under the main link. And while authorship remains one of the most important ranking signals, both “More by” and domain blocking have been removed from Google.

So on this moment it is not known whether the time spent on the site is a ranking signal. But we think it is.

How to increase your time on site

We know what time of stay is and why it is so important. How to increase these figures?

In truth, you should be doing these things for the site anyway, whether you want to increase your time on site or not. There is no magic here, just the right methods at the right time.

Create quality content

Whether you're writing blog articles, creating infographics or videos, good content should be:

• Useful (this is a manual for practical actions or theoretical knowledge)
• Entertaining (funny, unusual, amazing)
• Accessible (easy to read, interactive, well designed)

If you're not sure you can blog, explore different sites. This will help you find ideas for creating killer content. The better your content, the more likely it is that visitors will stay on your site, which means longer stays.

Do a relink

Since the dwell time is calculated from the moment of visiting the page until returning to the search results, it makes sense to add some kind of button or link (i.e. goal) so that after reading the content the user takes some action. As a result, the usability of the site will improve.

Of course, internal linking is important for increasing SEO performance. Without strict and logical linking, your site may rank poorly, as search robots will not be able to index your entire site.

Use Effective Strategies

By offering relevant articles to readers, you encourage them to stay on your site. This method is very effective if done correctly. The closer the topic of the recommended article, the higher the chance that the user will follow the link to read it. If a user can learn more about a topic that interests them, why would they want to return to the search results page?

Use a scrolling site structure

Another way to increase dwell time is to develop a site on one page (to view the entire site, you just need to scroll down the page).

In terms of usability, infinite scrolling of the page is good. But from an SEO standpoint, this can be harmful if not done well enough. Search robots are not very smart and they cannot always reproduce user behavior: clicks or scrolls. Dumb robots.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem, which does not involve complex actions. To help robots index content on a scrolling page, the page must be broken up into several "pages" - sections. Each section must have the same tag