How Influencer Campaigns Improve Dwell Time and Bounce Rates for SEO

Although it’s a rather fresh phenomenon, at least in the form as we know it now, influencer marketing has seen unparalleled success lately. Its market size is multiplied by x3 between 2020 and 2025. And it continues to evolve. And more people recognize its value in the process of expansion.

At the moment, influencer marketing campaigns are already actively used by brands and marketers for multiple reasons. Apart from the obvious opportunity to get in front of a larger target audience, such campaigns are used to boost trust and improve the coreline engagement metrics such as dwell time and bounce rate.

In this article, we are going to explore how working with influencers can help you improve these metrics and what effect it can have on the most important part of your online visibility – search engine optimization (SEO).

Understanding Dwell Time (DT) and Its Role in SEO

DT is a behavioral and psychological metric used in a variety of fields, including computer science, cybersecurity, marketing, and beyond. According to the general definition, this metric is used to analyze the total time spent interacting with or looking at a specific area of interest.

In marketing, for example, you can measure DW of a:

Website—How much time a person spends on it before they hop back to search engine result pages (SERPs).
Particular page—How much time visitors spend reading the content and otherwise interacting with it.
Ad—How much time do people spend watching your advertisement.

In SEO, this metric matters a lot. Although it’s not a direct ranking factor, DT indicates how much time people spend consuming your content; respectively, it signals to Google that it’s valuable, engaging, and meets users’ search intent. Hence, the higher the DT, the better you can potentially rank.

Understanding Bounce Rate (BR) and Its Role in SEO

Bounce rate is pretty much the opposite of DT–a metric that shows how many users are unengaged. It analyzes the percentage of visitors who go back to SERPs from a website instantly, without having additional interactions, such as visiting pages other than that they landed on, clicking on a link, etc.

Just like DT, BR is not a direct ranking factor. Yet, it has a massive indirect impact on SEO by helping measure content relevance and symptoms of deeper problems on your site. Simply put, when it’s high, this signals to Google that people don’t find your content useful or engaging enough to stay and interact with it or that the site’s technical performance is so bad that they don’t want to stay, which can lower your rankings.

Okay, but what is a good bounce rate? It’s hard to determine the overall average bounce rate as this metric can vary significantly depending on the type of channel, content, etc. Since we're talking about the impact on SEO, a good benchmark for BR in organic search is 43.60% or lower.

Top Benefits of Influencer Marketing for DT and BR

So, how can this form of marketing help you get higher in SERPs while also securing better engagement? Let’s look at the top four benefits that explain it:

1. Driving the Right Type of Traffic

Influencers typically operate within a well-defined sector to keep their efforts focused. For example, some of them have occupied the fashion sector, whereas others focus on delivering health-related content. Having specific niches ultimately means that they accumulate a specific kind of audience over the years–an audience that’s genuinely interested in a particular topic and wants to learn more.

So what happens when you team up with a blogger within your niche is that you amplify your brand’s reach and get in front of a highly targeted audience.

In terms of SEO, this affects you in a number of ways. First of all, social media influencers typically link back to your website, encouraging a large number of people to visit your website and learn more. Their ads can also create an organic surge of searches that people perform on their own, which will also boost your traffic. As a result, you will have a large number of visitors who are potentially interested in your brand or product. Respectively, they might stay on your website for longer, improving DT and BR.

2. Enhancing Engagement

Influencer-generated content now tends to have higher engagement rates compared to content created and delivered by a brand. Why? Because content delivered by a “regular person” feels more personal and authentic. Besides, a personal connection now matters more than ever. Prospects want to see real people instead of faceless companies.

So when you launch a campaign with a popular blogger, you receive content that drives more likes, shares, and comments. And if users are more willing to engage with the content about your brand delivered by a blogger, they also will be more likely to interact with your own website.

Besides, there are a few extra perks. If your campaign runs on social media, this will bring you social signals, which also indirectly improve your rankings. And if you team up with a conventional blogger who runs a website and refers to you, you will also gain backlinks, which act as trust signals. You can analyze the quality of these backlinks using free backlink checker tools and further enhance your SEO strategy.

One more reason why influencers are considered one of the best digital marketing channels today is that they create trust. To consumers, bloggers appear to be “regular people” like themselves. Yet, with expertise (or experience) in a particular field. People easily relate to them and thus find them and their recommendations trustworthy.

So, when you team up with such a trusted blogger and ask them to recommend your brand or product, this will create trust and social proof for your brand. As a result, people who are genuinely interested in your niche and are confident that you are worth trusting will be more likely to explore your website for a longer time. This can eventually help you reduce bounce rate and enhance your rankings.

Worth a note: Clearly, the follower count is one of the first things you look at as it affects the success of the campaign and the price as well. There is a common misconception that the more followers, the better. And it is—for the outreach. However, when we speak about generating trust and social proof, nano (1,000 – 10,000) and micro (10,000 – 100,000) influencers tend to feel very relatable and personal, which is why people trust them and are very willing to engage with brands they recommend.

4. Boosting the Quality and Relevance of Your Content

Influencers understand what kind of posts resonate with audiences, helping them consistently create engaging content and earn so many followers across platforms.

So, how can you use it? By tracking influencer marketing campaigns. Campaign analytics can let you draw valuable insights into what kind of content is the most relevant for your target audience, what drives their engagement, and so on, which will let you improve the quality and relevance of your own content in the long run.

A Powerful Combo of SEO and Influencer Marketing for Business Success

Influencer marketing has been around for some time and has shown steady growth and a wealth of benefits. As you now know, even your SEO and rankings can improve thanks to it. However, the most benefits can be obtained if you use it alongside other innovative SEO strategies. Not instead.

How would that work? It can let you span most of your target audience!

Think of it this way—a recent study shows that the level of trust in product and brand recommendations made by influencers is huge among the representatives of Gen Z and millennials (one-third of each generation expresses full trust). Thus, creating campaigns with popular bloggers is a great way to capture these groups of prospects.

The majority of Baby Boomers (over 40%), on the contrary, express complete distrust in such recommendations. They tend to trust more traditional social and other forms of proof, such as reviews, ratings, rankings in SERPs, product quality, the diversity of features, etc. SEO is great for capturing them.

Conclusion

When your dwell metric isn’t high enough or you are far beyond the recommended level of bounce rate, these things can tell Google that your website performs poorly or your content isn’t relevant and good enough to serve users’ needs. Respectively, your rankings will likely be lowered, which can influence a variety of other success metrics, including trust.

Fortunately, there is a way to solve all these issues at once with the help of influencer marketing campaigns. As you now know, influencers can help you drive highly targeted traffic, ensure greater engagement, facilitate social proof, and provide you with insights on how you can improve content relevance.

By offering all these benefits, influencer marketing can help you significantly improve your dwell and bounce metrics for better rankings. And if you combine it with SEO, you will get a powerful combo that drives growth!