How To Rank In Google

Lesson #5: Engagement & Traffic/Query Data

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We're at the half-way point of your Google-ranking education. By now you know a lot about what it takes to rank in Google. In fact, what you know so far is enough for you to get your pages ranked -- at least initially.

But you don't want to stop there, because getting ranked and staying ranked are two different animals. We'll discuss the second beast today.

The top 9 most important factors for ranking in Google:

  1. Domain-Level Link Features
  2. Page-Level Link Features
  3. Page-Level Keyword & Content-Based Features
  4. Page-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features
  5. Engagement & Traffic/Query Data
  6. Domain-Level Brand Metrics
  7. Domain-Level Keyword Usage
  8. Domain-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features
  9. Page-Level Social Features

This lesson will cover Engagement & Traffic/Query Data
 

Engagement & Traffic/Query Data

What is it?

Engagement and Traffic/Query Data is just an overly-technical way of asking "Are people sticking around and interacting with my site?" and "Am I making the most out of my presence in Google?"


How important is it?

According to the 150 experts surveyed, engagement and traffic data scores a 6.5 out of 10 on the scale of importance for ranking in Google.
 

What can I do to improve it?

You want your pages to really catch and hold people's attention so that they don't show up on your page and immediately click the "Back" button, and you want the way your pages are listed in Google to also catch people's attention so you get a high click-through rate (CTR) from the search engine result pages (SERPs).
 

Detailed Explanation [Engagement]

Let's say you're driving through a new town and decide you need a few items from the store. The first store you see looks great from the outside, so you pull in, park and go inside -- only to find that the store is poorly organized and doesn't have much of what you need.

What would you do? You'd leave quickly and go to the next store.

You don't want your website to be like that store. Remember: it's possible to get the right kind of links and make your page content technically perfect so that Google thinks the content must be quality. 

But Google can't understand what it extracts from your site. It can only guess at the quality of a page based on the signals it finds there. So what will happen next is Google will put your pages into the search results because they appear to be good on a technical level, and watch to see what people do after they click-through to your site.

If a lot of people click-through but immediately click the "Back" button and return to Google's search results, Google makes the assumption (and rightly so) that the searcher didn't find what they were looking for on your page. That is, your page wasn't a good match for the search terms they typed into Google.

You can probably guess what Google will do if that continues to happen -- yank your page from the search results for those keywords.

That's why it's easier to get your pages to rank initially than it is to keep them in the rankings long-term. You can fool Google because it's a machine, but you can't fool real people, and people's failure to stick around on your site means you won't fool Google for long, either.

Having a lot of people hit the "Back" button quickly is called having a high "bounce rate". The "bounce rate" is the percentage of people who leave immediately after landing on your page. You want that number to be as low as possible.

To accomplish this you need to make sure your site is engaging and keeps people around for as long as possible.

A few ways to do this are:

  • Use informational images: charts, graphs and infographics
  • Use engaging video
  • Use "related pages" links below the primary page content
  • Encourage user participation with comments or feedback
  • Use interactive elements on the page

Let's get into each one of those a bit:

Use informational images: charts, graphs and infographics

Informational images are a fantastic way to keep people around. People are generally very visually oriented. If they see a long article with no images they will go cross-eyed and say "no way I'm reading all that!" That results in a high bounce rate.

But if you break up the content with large, informational images, suddenly it's a different story. Showing people what you want them to know rather than just telling them makes it much easier on their eyes (and brain).

Charts, graphs and (especially) infographics are wonderful teaching tools and keep people eating up your content.

Liberal use of subheadings are good for this, too, since they break up the page, making each chunk of content appear smaller and more easily digestible. Just make sure the subheadings use a larger font or a different color (or both) so that it clearly defines segmented areas of the content.

Use engaging video

Note the word "engaging" here. If you have video on the page, make sure it immediately grabs people's attention and keeps it all the way through.

I know it annoys some people, but especially on product sales pages I like to have the video start automatically. People can't help it -- they're drawn into watching the video even if they don't want to be. The human brain is wired to pay attention to movement, and video is all movement.

But there are limits to how much of this people will take, too. While you want to captivate and engage them, if you make the video too long people will click away after a while. Even if on a technical level the bounce rate stays low because the visitors stuck around for the first couple of minutes of the video, you will have lost what could have been a repeat visitor and potential customer.

Short, punchy videos work best -- 5 to 10 minutes at the absolute most. And only do 10 minutes if the video is broken into segments that cover different subtopics.

Use "related pages" links below the primary page content

When your visitor is done reading the content that kept their attention, give them somewhere else to go on your site that's related to what they just saw. Provide links to other pages of your site that cover a different aspect of the topic they are clearly interested in.  That's a great way to lower the bounce rate and increase a user's time-on-site.

Encourage user participation with comments or feedback

Good or bad, people love to share their opinions--just read the news on any website that allows comments to see how true that is! So give your visitors a way to do just that. Encourage commenting (even if it needs to be moderated). Give them a feedback form to fill out or a short survey to take about what they just read.

Use interactive elements on the page

By "interactive elements" I mostly mean tools. If you have a page on getting a mortgage loan, include a calculator on the page that lets the visitor see what their monthly payment would be at certain interest rates. If your page is on weight loss, give them a Body-Mass-Index (BMI) calculator.

If you load these tools using javascript or an inline frame (HTML IFRAME), then you can copy the tool onto all of the pages that are related to the same topic and only have to make changes to the tool from one place. 

To quote Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek (and show how much of a geek I am), "ENGAGE!"
 

Detailed Explanation [Traffic/Query Data]

If engagement is what your store is like on the inside, the traffic/query data tells you what your store looks like on the outside. You may have a wonderful selection of goods that are well laid out and the friendliest staff in town, but if your store doesn't draw people's attention from the outside, few people are going to stop in to see how awesome it is.

Again, your site is the store, and how it appears in Google's search results represents the outside look of that store to the people searching.

Google Webmaster Tools will show you the queries that your pages are showing up for and what your click-through rate (CTR) is for those keywords. CTR is just a measure of what percentage of people who see your page actually click on the link in Google's results to visit it.

Naturally if your page shows up for a lot of keywords but nobody ever clicks on it, that does you no good. Even worse, if that happens for too long Google may decide to pull your page from the results for those keywords because it's not improving the user experience.

This again is where hitting all of the signals that Google is looking for isn't enough. You may have your keywords at the start of your page title and in the meta description of the page (which Google will often show as the site description in the search results), but if that title doesn't grab a human being's attention you're not doing yourself any favors.

So make sure that you work hard to improve your page title (primarily) and meta description. Use catchy wording, not boring technical language. Taking the time to study the art of copywriting will do you a world of good here.
 

How To Check Your Site For All These Factors

Keyword Canine 3.0 doesn't yet have a tool that ties into Google's Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics -- but that's slated for a future upgrade. I'm very eager to get that into the tool soon, so I don't think it will be too long. And of course upgrades are free to all users, so if you happen to be one you'll get it at no extra cost.

For now, though, just make sure you're monitoring Google Webmaster Tools [WMT] and Google Analytics [GA] and keeping track of your Bounce Rate [GA], Time-On-Page [GA] and query CTR [WMT].
 

In Summary

Being technically awesome at ranking pages in Google is a fantastic skill to have, but you can't just stop there. You need to appeal to human beings at least as much as you appeal to Google's algorithms, because it's the people that will be buying from you or making your advertisers happy.

Lesson six will discuss Domain-Level Brand Metrics, a metric that in years past Google's algorithms had little interest in but that has become increasingly important.

 


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