user engagement factor SEO

User Engagement – A Massive Ranking Factor 90% SEOs Ignore

Table of Contents

After my first blog anniversary, it feels fresh to come up with something important. So here, I have picked up quite an interesting topic that can help you improve your ranking indirectly and massively.

Working hard for a long term blog to get it ranked for all the possible keywords you target is not an easy task and moreover if you somehow manage to get your site ranked for a particular keyword, there’s no surety that your post will remain on number 1 position forever.

 

Well you can’t be sure of anything when it comes to search engines, specifically talking about Google which after so many recent updates resulted in massive change in rankings. Talking about the SEO factors, you may list dozens of factors but what if I say you still don’t know one of the biggest factor that plays a key role in search rankings ?? Or even if you know, You just overlook or ignore it.

 

So recently, I was going through MOZ.com Whiteboard Friday videos and I found a video on the same by Rand Fishkin. As I already had planned to cover this topic, the video added a delight to my knowledge and I have come up with a Massive Ranking Factor that most of you overlook!!

 

If you work on it and perfect things accordingly, you will be able to witness some positive effects on your rankings and overall traffic.

 

User Engagement – Massive Ranking Factor Often Ignored

Ahh!! Enough of the description. Let me take you straight to the points, keeping it simple and easy.

 

So, the Factor I’m highlighting here is “Engagement”. Yes, User engagement!!When it comes to engagement the various factors that may come up in your mind would be Bounce Rate, Time-on-Site, Navigation, Design UX, load time, etc etc and yeah Content of course.

Site Engagement - A Massive Ranking Factor 90% SEOs Ignore
Image from www.deehoseo.com

 

Now, I just want you to have a small thought on each of the following questions:
  • When was the last time you checked up your Time on Page stats ? 
  • What is your Site Load Time ? 
  • Where does your traffic go after visiting your page ?? Back to Google or ???? 
  • How well is your Site Navigation ? 
  • When was the last time you worked specifically to improve your Bounce Rate ?
  • Do your readers really love your content ? 
  • When was the last time you checked “Pages per session” stat on Analytics ? 
You might be confused or a bit lost!! All these stats are up in Analytics !! Do have a look once, if you haven’t.

 

The point is almost many new bloggers and not to mention some SEO experts never take these things seriously. Most of you spend hours doing different stuffs like link building, content marketing etc for boosting your blog rankings but you totally ignore this Massive On-Site factor.

 

And that’s what I want you to take care of as a blogger, as a site owner, as a SEO practitioner…

 

Wait wait wait!! 

 

The reason why such things gets ignored is that we just work and focus on the algorithms that directly influences the search results which is good to some extent but Boy this is 2015 and search engines are now very much evolved having hundreds of algorithms and measures to rank a page on Google. And what would you do if everyone (I mean the competitors) are also following and working on all the direct ranking factors as correctly and efficiently as you do. There must be a way to outrank them!!!

 

And that’s when Indirect ranking measures comes into account. You have to get comfortable working on such factors, factors that affect your rankings indirectly in some way or the other. I will try to cover an article on all the indirect factors.

 

We are going to have to get comfortable in a world where the ranking factors are indirectly influenceable, not directly influenceable” ~ Rand Fishkin from Moz.com

Interesting huh??

I can now sense that you are really thinking of the points mentioned so far!! Well good for all and that’s what this article is meant for.

 

What Comes under Engagement ??

To start working on improving Site/user Engagement which in turn will improve rankings, you must know the factors that comes under it. There are many things to consider when it comes to taking care of user engagement. Here I’ve listed some of the most important factors that you must start with:

 

  • Bounce Rate
  • Time on Page
  • Time on Site
  • Pages Per Session
  • Recurring Visits
  • Page Navigation
  • Pogo Sticking

 

I could have listed Article Quality, Keyword Density, Image Optimization, External Linking, etc but I have avoided such factors since you and many other experts cover them while doing ON-PAGE optimization.

A Quick Step on How to Do!

One question that I expect from many people is that “How to get all these stats ?”

 

So my answer for this would be Google Analytics, it provides the best and the most accurate stats of your blog. There are many more tools available online that will provide you the same info for some monthly charges. So I will recommend to stick with Google Analytics.

 

  • So after having all the data from Analytics, go for a study of all the stats, check up the stats for last one month, 3 months and so on.
  • Keep a look at the posts that are working well, the posts that gets the least bounce, posts that gets converted into further pageviews etc.
  • This way you will be easily able to detect all the places and spots where you have to work on. The task then is quite simple as you just have to apply some tweaks and voila! you will see improvements in your stats.

So the work is quite simple, all you have to do is just don’t overlook this factor. Once you get a hold on engagement, you will surely be seeing stats going up!

user site engagement

 

Note: You can take the Red Font Content as a checklist on how to improve engagement

Here I would also like to add some extra resources that will help you take care of your site engagement:

How To Increase Lead Conversions With Visitor Engagement
25 Ways to Boost Community Engagement on Your Website
17 Great Tips for Boosting Website Engagement

 

I have done my work, now its your turn to implement and share your results!!
About The Author
Iftekhar Ahmed
Iftekhar Ahmed is the owner of iftiSEO.com and writes on various topics like Online Earning, SEO, Blogging etc. He has worked on many blogs and also works as an SEO Analyst.

2 Responses

  1. I just come from your nofollow backlink post to this. No doubt you highlighted a very important ranking factor which must be considered while writing a post or while doing SEO of site

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