Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 16/04/2026

 

Introduction

It can sometimes feel like you are on a bit of a hamster wheel when it comes to writing and publishing content marketing.

It feels like an endless cycle, and it’s very hard work.

Businesses, therefore, naturally have to question at some point, ” Is this content marketing working?

Is it helping to generate more sales for the business?

Well, the fact of the matter is, some content marketing is simply a waste of time to write.

The reason is simple: sometimes that work doesn’t even make its way onto Google.

It’s not indexed; the quality is therefore deemed not high enough for it to even make its way onto, say, the first 10 pages.

Therefore, what we thought we would do here at Walsh & Partners is to pour our 10 years of knowledge and expertise into helping businesses generate more sales and create this helpful guide.

 

In this guide, you are going to learn the following:

– Why is it important to only put your energy and time into writing quality content
– What Google EEAT means
– What influence dwell times have on where your business ranks on Google
– What bounce rates are
– How to write winning content marketing for your business

 

Are the pages even getting indexed?

We found a statistic published by indexcheckr.com to be really interesting. An in-depth study of over 16 million pages basically found 61.9% of pages are not indexed by Google at all.

This means that the overwhelming amount of content marketing being published is not deemed high enough quality to even appear in Google’s index.

Therefore, this should serve as a really good illustration that you can totally and utterly waste your time and marketing resources, publishing work that will never appear in Google’s results.

Therefore, you have to take a step back, publish less, and instead publish much higher-quality work that Google will approve for inclusion in its index.

For those who know what we are talking about, Google’s algorithm will not index, which means it places results into the first page that it deems as low quality.

Dwell times

What’s considered a good dwell time for a blog post, plus offer a relevant statistic and a link to that page:

You may not know what dwell times mean.

As this is a metric that some agencies don’t discuss all that often, it’s massively important to keep in mind when writing content marketing for your business.

Basically, the dwell time indicates how long a visitor spends reading the page.

It’s widely thought that if you’re keeping shoppers’ interest and getting them to stay on the page longer, then the work is interesting and answers the query. Therefore, it’s widely thought that dwell time is part of Google’s algorithm when determining where a page should rank.

 

What’s considered a good dwell time?

And you don’t need to subscribe to some expensive marketing tool to check your business’s bounce rate; you can do this by using Google Analytics

 

Below 30 seconds: Poor (user likely bounced quickly)

Therefore, when you open your Google Analytics account, you see that the main pages’ bounce rate actually is.

It’s considered poor if a bounce is below 30 seconds. However, do bear in mind that bounce rates can vary across industries. For example, if a shopper is buying an item that’s offered in many stores, they may bounce around many pages to find the lowest price.

However, if you’re a business which offers a service, well, the bounce rate shouldn’t be so low. You will therefore perhaps want to work with a web designer and the marketing team to figure out how you can reduce that bounce rate.

 

2–4 minutes: Good/healthy benchmark

Now, if you are holding the shopper’s interest for much longer, let’s say over 2 minutes, this clearly shows that the shopper is interested in at least reading part of the page.

They are at least considering the information, such as the product description, or reading part of the blog post.

This therefore shows some interest in the work.

 

4+ minutes: Excellent (strong engagement)

Now, this is what you want to aim for: really high engagement, with a dwell time far in excess of 4 minutes.
This sends out a crystal-clear signal to Google algorithms, such as Google RankBrain, that these pages, with high dwell time, are really engaging the customer.

They are therefore finding the work really interesting to read; you’re basically offering high-quality, helpful information.

Now, in terms of Google’s objectives, in supplying a quality answer to a query, that’s the content marketing that they want.

They therefore want to rank pages with a very high dwell time. These are the pages that our winning agency writes every single day of the working week.

 

Bounce rates

What’s an average bounce rate for a blog post? Offer a relevant statistic and a link to that page.

A typical blog/article bounce rate sits around 60%–80%. This again depends on the business sector and whether it’s a main page of a blog post.

However, based on our research, bounce rates are generally as high as this.

From a marketing perspective, that basically tells us one thing: you have to work hard to keep shoppers’ interest. When the bounce rate is as high as these figures, it shows that most people quickly land on a page and then leave without visiting another page.

Therefore, as businesses, we have to work incredibly hard to retain that interest, perhaps through internal links, adding visual elements, as well as using basic on-page SEO to split the text up using different titles/

 

Google EEAT and how you incorporate this into your work

Another really interesting area that businesses need to read about is Google EEAT. Therefore, rushed content marketing, which is written quickly, without offering valuable and helpful information, no longer works.

It’s, in fact, a complete waste of time.

Therefore, regarding your written work and blog posts, read carefully the advice Google has provided on Google EEAT.

Generally speaking, the pages with much higher engagement, such as low bounce rates and high dwell times, normally offer really good advice.

Simply put, they are normally written by experts on that particular subject.

 

Word count

What’s the average word count for a blog post? Offer a relevant statistic and a link to that page.

A widely cited study by Orbit Media found that the average blog post length is around 1,333 words (2025)

Just take into account a really interesting statistic from Marketing Profs.com: the average word count is around 1333 words.

That’s high, don’t you think?

We remember that when we first started our winning marketing agency, most copywriters were writing 500 words or fewer.

However, as businesses are now fiercely competing with each other more and more to get more customers, it’s now a competition not just for the quality of the information being offered, but also for how in-depth the advice is.

The advice often needs to be long form, and especially for evergreen content marketing, the word count needs to be high.

 

How often should we be writing blog posts?

How often do businesses write blog posts? and offer a relevant statistic, and also a link to that page?

Most businesses publish 2–4 blog posts per month.

This brings us back to our original point, that businesses often publish a lot of content marketing.

Some businesses post 4 times every single month. However, what you have to keep in mind is the point we made right at the start: how much of this work is getting indexed?

Remember when we said that about 61.9% of all pages don’t get indexed? Well, this shows that writing some of this work is a complete waste of time.

Therefore, marketing agencies often have time allocated for a copywriter to complete the work.

They have perhaps less than 2 hours to write a piece of content marketing.

What happens then?

Well, they are often in a total rush to write up to 4-5 pieces of content marketing a day.

Google can see that the work is often “content thin” and doesn’t offer any real advice or anything new to add to the conversation regarding, say, how to choose a product or service, such as a lawyer.

The result is a mass of pages that just, well, don’t get indexed. Therefore, in a business’s Google Search Console account, there is often a large number of pages that are crawled but not indexed.

This means that, well, the pages won’t appear in Google’s organic results.

 

Helpful

It’s also worth keeping in mind that a significant Google update was rolled out; it was called the Google Helpful Content update.

Basically, if businesses and organisations went the extra mile and offered helpful information, their work would rank higher in Google’s index.

 

Kept up to date

It’s worth keeping in mind that when you’re writing your content marketing, it’s not just a matter of clicking the publish button in WordPress and then that’s it.

No, the work needs to be updated.

The reason is that a blog post that’s offering the “best products to buy in 2026” will be outdated as the years roll by.

Therefore, some of the content marketing will need updating from time to time to ensure the information remains relevant. If it’s not relevant, then you can bet that other businesses will be writing advice and articles that are perhaps more up to date and relevant.

And because those answers are deemed more accurate, more relevant, Google serves them rather than a page which hasn’t been updated for perhaps the last 5 years.

 

Backlinks

You could be writing superb quality content marketing.

It might actually be one of the best answers out there that a shopper could read.

However, it might still not rank on page one of Google, and why is that?

Why is that quality answer not surfacing on page one of Google?

Well, often it’s because there are so many businesses answering that query that it often comes to off-page signals, such as backlinks, to determine who’s offering the best answer.

For example, imagine a bunch of businesses all answering the same query.

How does Google differentiate which answer is best when all the information being offered is good quality?

Well, this comes back to our point about user engagement, for example, dwell times and bounce rates.

However, how do you raise the authority of the DA score of a page, so that it even starts to gain readers in the first place?

Well, this is where backlinks come in. If you have a page that has a significant amount of quality links, or flowing an abundance of really good link juice to the page, well, this could help to get that page on page one.

How does Google work out which pages should rank high on Google?

As we have described in this page in some detail, it’s often a combination of off-page signals such as links, the content quality in terms of whether it’s helpful or not to the reader.

Then there’s having good on-page search engine optimisation methods used.

And it’s most definitely worth discussing those, so we shall look at some of the more important on-page SEO elements below.

 

Page titles (H1-H6)

It’s a really good idea, before you start to write a rather hefty 3000-word blog post, to consider page structure.

This means, how are you going to split the text up?

Which headings are you going to use?

Then use your H1-H6 tags, and split the page up using the titles that you want.

Perhaps you would like to make all of the page titles questions, that is, questions that your customers frequently ask.

Therefore, your addressing questions and follow-up questions that your customer asks make it much easier for Google as well as the AI platforms to acknowledge that you are answering that query.

Then it becomes much simpler to extract a relevant answer from that text. For example, if you have written an article where you’re talking about the best bathroom suite items for a compact bathroom space, well, you’ve answered a question that many people will have.

Many people will have small bathrooms, and perhaps need some inspiration as to which products, in terms of compact toilets and wash hand basins, to use in that confined space.

Therefore, the best marketing agencies in the whole of the United Kingdom really spend the time to understand the buying journey.

 

What questions do the shoppers often have?

How can you address those questions and supply the best possible answer that you can?

 

Alt text

Alt text is just a simple text description of the picture. Now this is good for Google, because it confirms what’s in the picture.

For example, if your selling Roca taps, then label the alt text that name of taps, and add it to the alt text.

 

Keyword research

It’s important to understand which keywords you are optimising the e-commerce website for.

This is also relevant for the businesses’ local search engine optimisation as well.

A meta title and description that incentivises the click

A meta title and a meta description, just briefly in a few lines of text, describe the page. Therefore, it’s an opportunity to communicate why a shopper should choose your business. Is it because you are the number one supplier of that product? Is it because you offer free next-day delivery? Or is it perhaps that you run the most established business in that area?

 

Internal links

So, in order to keep a shopper browsing different products and blog posts on your website, you should use internal links.

Internal links are a great way of getting shoppers to read multiple pages, which therefore improves the engagement metrics.

Because let’s say that you have an e-commerce website, where on average the shopper only visits, let’s say, one page. This shows that the shopper is not that interested in the products on offer, otherwise perhaps they would browse more items.

But say, on the other hand, there’s a competitor website. On average, on the competitor’s website, the shopper is visiting, let’s say, over 7 pages, and they are interested in all of the different products, at different price points.

Marketing agencies refer to this as having more engagement, because the shopper has visited more pages, and is more interested in what the business is selling or the advice that you are offering as a company.

Therefore, this is how internal links can be really useful. The reason is when your writing articles for your business, its not uncommon to be

publishing over 100 articles.

Perhaps 200?

Sometimes even more over 300 articles, therefore, naturally because a business focuses often on offering one service or a range of types of products, normally there will be strong overlaps in terms of the areas you’re discussing.

For example, often dispense a lot of advice via their article section, therefore there’s massive opportunity to use internal links.
This allows Googlebot to understand which pages are the most important, because the most important pages often get internally linked to even more.

Then there’s the fact that internal links just make it convenient, they make it simple for a reader to simply click the link and perhaps read a bit more about that subject.

Therefore, your top marketing companies do use internal links and well written anchor text to increase engagement with the website.

 

Engaging writing style

It’s important to write with an engaging writing style.

The reason we say that is, your content marketing needs to have a high dwell time.

Now, if you’re making the text boring to read, it’s simply to complicated and this puts off the reader from reading more, then this can mean that the bounce rate increases.

Knows what they are talking about

Okay, perhaps the most important point of this rather comprehensive article we have left to the very end.

That is, simply because of Google’s Knowledge Graph, Google will know if the content marketing is written by someone that really knows a lot about that particular product or service.

How can we help:

If you would like our team to work on improving your businesses organic search engine optimisation, then why not call us.