Analysing engagement for SEO ranking

Although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that this search engine giant does reward sites with strong user engagement with higher page ranking. This makes it a key area to understand for your SEO strategy.

Ranking Factors:

  • Search Visits – organic traffic from search engines
  • Total Visits – the total sum of visitors
  • Direct Visits – visits from people entering your company URL into their browser
  • Global Rank – position in search engine calculated in comparison to the competition
  • Time on-site – usually calculated by the average time a visitor spends on your website
  • Bounce rate – a percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away after viewing only one page.
  • Pageviews – the total amount of pages viewed

Google’s reasoning is that if a user spends more time on a page, it’s probably because they found the page useful. And since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages.

How can you improve your site’s engagement?

Here are five ways you can use to give your existing content a boost in search engines:

Format Your Posts for Easier Reading

Good formatting can instantly improve your page’s readability. This, in turn, can improve your engagement rate. According to eye-tracking studies, the following four formatting tactics can help increase your content readability:

  1. Shorter paragraphs: Limit each paragraph to 2-3 sentences at most. It’s even okay to use one-sentence paragraphs if necessary, but use them sparingly or your post will look like a bullet-pointed blog without the bullets.
  2. Shorter sentences: Longer sentences are hard to follow onscreen. When possible, break long sentences into multiple shorter sentences.
  3. Sub-headers: People don’t read on the web; they scan. To make scanning easier, use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page.
  4. Bullet points: When you have a lot of data stats, facts, ideas, packed into one paragraph (like this one!), it makes it easier to scan when you list them with bullet points.
  5. Focus on topics: Having a strong intention of what you are talking about on your page, will automatically keep attention on your page.

Use Bucket Brigades

A “bucket brigade” is a copywriting technique designed to keep capture a reader’s interest and keep them on your page.

It essentially involves breaking an idea into multiple sentences, using a trigger word or phrase (as simple as “Look.” Or as lengthy as “The secret to great copywriting is this”) and then ending the sentence with a colon.

Use Images Throughout Your Content

Think about adding professional, high-quality images throughout your content is an easy yet powerful way to increase engagement. For one, images help you show an idea, not just tell it (a picture tells a thousand words, right?).

Secondly, images help you break content into different sections. And finally, people just like pretty pictures.

Infographics are a great way to summarise your whole article and have the added benefit it may be shared or used as a source. Some writers use comical GIFs to break down their paragraphs.

Remember, as with everything on your website to always use SEO in your images.

Write in the Inverted Pyramid Style

If you went to journalism school, you know all about the inverted pyramid style of writing.

This method means giving away the most valuable information at the top of the article and following it up with less important information. If readers tend to scan and rarely make it to the bottom of an article, it makes sense to give them what they want as soon as they land on the page.

Improve Your Bounce Rate

Writing well, delivering value, and proper formatting only goes so far. Another key part of engagement is lowering your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave without interacting further.

Excellent: 26 – 40%
Fair: 41 – 55%
Poor: 56 – 70%
Bad: > 70%

Bounce rates can be raised by a number of factors, from incorrect implementation to poorly designed landing pages.

More often than not, however, high bounce rates result from poor usability and awkward user experience. While these problems vary from site to site, with analytics you can understand what visitors are doing.

The fastest way to achieve high engagement, is use a reputable website developer to structure your website. Webbage, is an SEO company in Norwich with expertise in this area,

every website is unique

A website should be as unique as the business it represents. At Webbage, we take the time to get to know what makes your business tick. This way we can build a website based around you, your business and your customers.