Time on Page is a funny metric. Who cares how long someone spends on your website, right? As long as the people find what they are looking for, make a purchase, fill out a contact form, or call, why does it matter? While there is no concrete proof that the amount of time people spend on your site will cause your rankings to improve, there is reason to believe that it does make a difference. According to a Google spokesperson:
“As we’ve commented on before, we use interactions in a variety of ways, such as for personalization, evaluation purposes and training data. We have nothing new or further to share here other than what we’ve long said: having great, engaging content is the right path for success. We’d encourage site owners to focus on that big picture,” a spokesperson said.
That can be interpreted in many ways, but the most direct line of thinking is to make content that keeps a person on the site longer than someone who is in your industry competing for your traffic. Google is not know for giving straight answers and, at times, can be very vague.
What does that mean for my site?
We recommend a number of things to keep people on your site.
- Videos
- Blogs
- Long-Form Content (over 1000 words)
The benefits of these suggestions are two-fold. First, it is giving more meat to the search engines to place your site where it needs to be in the results. Secondly, it is giving your visitors a reason to stay longer and browse the site. This, in turn, helps fulfill the requirement stated by Google when they say: “having great, engaging content is the right path for success.”
