Leadgenerering
19. februar 2020
Onsite metrics are becoming increasingly important for rankings
Google updates its algorithms more and more frequently, which determine where your website appears in the search results. With their 500+ adjustments each year, it can be difficult to keep up.
Why even care?
Technical factors are important in SEO, but what the customer actually thinks about the content they find is, in reality, the most important thing. That is what Google wants to rank content by, and they are getting better and better at it.
Time on site and bounce rate
How long the user stays on the page, and how often they click back to Google and choose one of the other results, often has a very direct impact on rankings. You can see this information in Google Analytics.
I have run a number of tests both on my own sites and for clients, which often show an uplift when these two parameters are improved.
How do I improve these factors?
It largely comes down to understanding what people are actually searching for, and then having the very best content.
It sounds very basic, but we often get lost in technical details such as keyword density and headings, and forget to focus primarily on hitting the mark as accurately as possible with everything from graphics, text, readability, external links, video, etc.
It is a good idea to see what is already ranking. Google is king of big data, and even if they miss the mark sometimes, a closer look at page one for your top keywords will still tell you quite a bit about what people are looking for.
What is the intent behind searches on Google?
What is the intent behind a search for “Pizza”? How do I find out?
If you are on a mobile device, it will often be because you want to find the nearest pizzeria. If you are on a laptop, on the other hand, Google will often try to find an address, but there may also be other intents behind the search.
Perhaps you are looking for recipes. Perhaps you are looking for the history behind pizza and searching for articles about stone ovens and Southern European culture.
Often there are multiple intents behind a search, and when you are the one who best understands the user’s needs and serves the best content, you have a very good chance of moving up in Google.
Example #1: A computer store
I helped Refurb.dk provide visitors with a better on-site experience, which resulted in a lower bounce rate and therefore better rankings.
We have worked extensively with the laptop category page, where the goal is to guide the customer to find the most relevant computer.
The challenge is that there are many different needs because customers vary widely, but what they have in common is that they want to get good value for money. So one of the most important things we decided to do is always to select a primary product based on the filter settings the customer chooses, thereby highlighting the best search result.
Previously, we sorted the computers on the page in roughly the same order, but we have now highlighted the first result, as it is the best option for the price.
This means that people actually find the right product faster, and therefore spend less time on the page.
Note that “time on site” does not always need to be as long as possible if the alternative is that the visitor actually finds what they are looking for.
Example #2: A blog
On a blog, the goal is almost always to keep the visitor for as long as possible, unlike a shop, where it can be a quality signal that the customer quickly finds the right product.
That way, as many people as possible click through to more content, and the visitor therefore stays on the site longer.
My first attempt was to place “most read” articles on the right-hand side, which many blog systems can handle. The problem is that it is a static element, so when the same person comes back again and again to read more, they have presumably already seen these posts.
Now I have had it coded so that all content on the page is analysed and indexed, so the visitor is shown similar articles in prioritised order.
Everyone wins in the long run
Personally, I am pleased that the top results in Google are increasingly primarily good articles and strong content.
The best SEO strategy has not always been to create good content, but we are getting to the point where it is the only strategy that can get you to the top.
