If you want to rank top Google search and keep it, make your brand famous, first of all you need to understand your users. Website optimization is a best way to collect and use data of the user behavior to improve your search engine ranking.
In the spring of 2019 Google updated the patent “Modifying search result ranking based on corpus search statistics”.
Most SEO specialists and marketers often do not investigate user data. They focus only on keywords for search engine queries or on Off-Page SEO before launching a website. In fact, less than 5% of user behavior data is used. The best way to track the behavior is to use a special tool Google Analytics, that is built into the code on each page of your website.
Modification of search engine algorithms have led to greater user orientation. Of course, keywords and the meta description are still important, since search engines use them for initial ranking. However, not only keywords are important, but the intention that stands behind the keyword, since it relates to the algorithm. In simple words: search engine needs to satisfy user’s request by showing the most useful websites in the search results. “The usefulness of the website” can be also additionally determined with the help of user behavior on the page.
If a visitor came to your website from search engine and stayed, started studying the information, read articles, search for goods, bought something that means Google’s, copywriter’s, SEO expert’s and a lot of more other specialists’ work is well done. But what to do if a visitor came to the website and leave it right away back to Google? That means he didn’t like something on your website, he was searching for some other information and now he needs to continue his search on other websites. Data about user behavior is kept modifying all the time.
This in-depth article will help you get an idea of data and user behavior, how they influence the ranking of major search engines and how you can use this understanding to improve your search engine optimization strategy.
How search engines collect and analyze user behavior factors
Search engines use sophisticated search algorithms to rank web pages. SEO experts may not fully understand search engine algorithms because they are not engineers, and also because major search engines are not going to give up their competitive advantages. In fact, there are more than 200 search ranking factors, all of them point to one important metric: user behavior factors.
How search engines collect and analyze user behavior factors? It can be more than one particular question of SEO, but it’s worth considering, because the long-term sustainability of organic ranking depends on your knowledge of modern SEO.
Despite the fact that the search algorithms themselves are proprietary, Google has focused several times on how the search engine works and how the company collects user data. There are small tricks how seo specialists collect data about algorithms.
Besides SEO community, forums and SEO-practitioners who willingly (or not so) share their valuable experience, we can also track Google patents. These are the same patents Google cuts off competitors with trying to be the number 1 search engine in the world.
How search engine works
Let’s take a look how almost each search engine (Google, Yandex, Bing, Satellite and even Baidu) works nowadays. Although I don’t have much data about Baidu, we haven’t done SEO on China’s closed Internet yet. The process begins with search spiders (search bots) that crawl and index web pages. Google has an index (just like a database) where it stores updated information about these individual pages of a website that search spiders find. To store this data, Google requires the equivalent of about 1000 terabytes, and might be even more.
When you enter a search query on Google, you submit it to the Google index. But before he shows the desired result, he must first run the algorithm, which in essence is just a step-by-step procedure of problem solution. You get millions of results shown to you in a ranked list, while it all often takes less than a second.
Google is trying to figure out what exactly the keyword is. Not just the literal meaning, but also what the user actually meant. Initially search triggers a flowchart that Google uses to evaluate the quality of the content.
If I enter a keyword into a search engine, it means that I have some level of knowledge or information about it, although I still do not understand everything that I want to know. For example, if I am looking for the “best acoustic guitar”, maybe I am not a professional guitarist, but I know that this is a musical instrument in which I can master the practice of the game, or I’m just interested to read about it.
The algorithm checks the spelling, synonyms and understanding of search queries in the field the keyword belongs to. In other words, the keyword “renting an apartment in Odessa” refers to real estate. The search engine will search for website content in this area, rather than in an unrelated field such as entertainment or healthcare.
Freshness, relevance and quality are the new SEO rules that Google uses to determine which page should come first in regular listings.
The moment the search engine is confident in your needs, based on the meaning, intention, context or field associated with the keyword, it will receive relevant search results.
At this point, Google is ready to showcase the search results, but first it needs to figure out how to rank all these pages. This is done on the basis of more than 200 ranking factors, including domain age, freshness of content, anchor text, meta tags, page description, user context, the previous search history (if any), geographical location and much more are also taken into account.
And then Google delivers the search results of the query. All this work is invisible to the search user, because the algorithm is classified and it is not disclosed to anyone. It is simply a collection of programs that are constantly updated to rank web pages in regular lists. It is done consistently and honestly.
The user behavior data, that Google relies on, includes click-through rate, time spent on a webpage, conversion rate, bounce rate, visit rate, navigation channel, and more.
Understanding relevance ratings: search engines, such as Google, use “relevancy ratings” to sort their results. The goal is to show the page that Google considers the most relevant to users at the top of the list.
When it comes to collecting data about user behavior, you need to understand the relevance, because this is the key to TOP 10. Let’s say you entered the word “Apple” in the search box. Do you want Google to rank your page for Apple products or you just want apples (fruits) and decide to search for them in English. Google will try to understand what you exactly you mean and provide the right information.
Using the right keywords and relevance, you correctly direct search spiders to your content. The search engine wants to understand the keywords that you use, and SEO specialists help the search engine find this information on websites.
Search engines are more willing to understand how users interact with your website when you regularly add fresh content. Content is the king and the life source of your online business. This is also the key to improving search engine rankings on Google.
Demand for useful content will only grow, that’s why experienced marketers invest money and time in creating new, interesting content. Creating engaging content is the key to survival in any competitive field.
In addition, recent statistics show that marketers who constantly create high-quality content using blogs generate 126% more potential customers, 97% more inbound links and significantly increase revenue.
Remember that there are no established rules for an SEO strategy. No matter how much data you extract from these indicators, they cannot be compared with the initial market research and a deep understanding of your target audience.
Let’s say you are a blogger whose organic traffic is constantly increasing. Perhaps more people will find out about you via social media. But you still lose time if your content does not solve your user significant problem. When people visit your web page from search results, they are looking for one thing: useful information and content.
Of course, professional website design can attract people’s attention. But what keeps them is the value of your content.
Let’s quickly explore the metrics that Google uses to collect data about user behavior on your website and how each of these metrics affects your search engine optimization.
The number of clicks on the page. Before you go any further, you need to understand that the click rate is a measure that Google uses to collect data about user behavior. When this data is collected, it is evaluated using an algorithm and then used to influence search ranking. This is equivalent to user behavior.
How heading CTR and meta tags affect website promotion
The search engine determines another important indicator. Such as CTR. CTR is a powerful search metric that measures the total number of search users who click on a link on the SERP page, compared to the total number of web users who saw this link but did not click.
In fact, if your web page is on the list of regular lists, and 15% of the search users who viewed this page of search results click on the link, this means that your CTR is 15%.
There are things you can do to improve your CTR, whether it’s search, paid advertising, or a call to action. This is an integral part of any SEO strategy.
Remember, the goal is to help Google retrieve the right user behavior data for your web page by increasing your click-through rate. Many SEO specialists still do not believe that CTR is a ranking factor. Instead, they focus on buying more links, rather than working on improving CTR.
Google retrieves data from users based on their behavior when they get to your web page from search results. Several companies and brands have placed a huge amount of data on user behavior in the Google index as a result of click-through rates.
I personally noticed that a new page with fresh content and a meta description will initially have a high ranking in the search results (say, positions 4, 5 or 7). After the first week, the article either slides down to organic positions or rises up.
The determining factor is the number of clicks generated by the search results per day, and the average time users spend on the website, upon condition that you didn’t bought a lot of links.
Since we cannot be 100% sure of user feedbacks that affect the ranking of major search engines, the best thing you can do for your website is to keep constantly creating content that will attract the right people and involve them to read or coming back to your website again.
By constantly working on the website, you will provide a lot of useful data on user behavior that Google can use to understand your website, your customers and your brand.