Your website might have visitors in the thousands, but what if they leave the site after a 5 second scan? A crucial but often forgotten SEO metric is the dwell time -- essentially, how much time a user spends on your page.
Dwell time can be the deciding factor on whether your website ranks in the first few results of a search, or on the second or third page. Want readers to stick around for longer? Optimize your landing page copy for your specific industry, says landing page leaders Unbounce.
Unbounce’s 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report put a microscope to the conversion performance of 16 major industries, based on a machine learning analysis of more than 186 million visits and 19 million conversions on 34 thousand landing pages.
Colin Loughran, Content Marketing Manager and Editor-in-Chief at Unbounce, illustrated the effect of landing pages on dwell time using SaaS:
“Let’s take a specific, common example: SaaS companies trying to sell their software online. The basic tip for them: simplify.
“Why is that? Software as a Service (SaaS) landing pages are the most difficult to read of all the ones we analyzed, while pages for catering and restaurants had the simplest copy overall.
“It’s hard to get people to stay on your page if they can’t follow what you’re trying to tell them. And that complexity could be a reason why SaaS pages convert 10% lower than the overall industry median (eg. compared to online media, business software, cybersecurity, etc).”
So it’s not just what you write, it’s how you write it. If your content is difficult to read, positive and negative in all the wrong places, you’re going to lose readers’ interest fast. Avoid jargon. Engage casually. Conversion rates rise alongside readability.
The minimum optimum dwell time? 2 minutes. 30 seconds or less and your content isn’t up to scratch. But before you try and diagnose the problem, take a closer look at the context. What’s the average conversion rate in your industry? What kind of language works best for your audience? Discover industry insights to level up your landing pages.