How Website Visitor Behavior Affects Your SEO

When people discuss search engine optimization, the conversation generally begins with improving a website’s metadata and ends with building links.

Where’s the love for how people use your site? – There is ample evidence to suggest that website visitor behavior affects your SEO. Search engines want the best content to rank, and if your website’s visitors aren’t sticking around very long, that’s a sign to search engines that your content isn’t all that useful.

And for content creators, that can be especially intimidating. – Luckily, there are a few metrics that display how visitors are using your website. And with a little tweaking, you can create content that’s attention-catching and boosts your SEO.

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Clickthrough Rate

Clickthrough rate describes the searchers who click to your website from the search engine results. When a high percentage of search engine users are picking your listing from the results, it can send a signal to the search engine that your page is highly relevant for that particular search query. The more relevant you are, the higher your ranking will climb.

Improving your clickthrough rate is requires having a good understanding of the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. What answers are the searchers looking for? Your meta titles and descriptions should entice the searcher and clearly show that you have the answers they need.

Time Spent On Page

Google and other search engines have the capacity to track the length of time a user spends on your web page. In fact, marketers have a term for the metric: long clicks vs. short clicks. A long click is a search who clicked on your search result and stayed on your page for a longer period of time. On the other hand, a short click is someone who chose your result, was dissatisfied, and quickly returned to the search results.

Depending on the relevance and usefulness of your content, your percentage of long clicks can be a huge boost to your search results. And there’s plenty of methods that marketers use to increase the amount of time that visitors stay on a website. It helps to provide visual content that intrigues as well as making sure your writing is easy to skim.

No one wants to read a wall of text, after all.

Pages Per Session

Search engines want content that engages its users. And to that end, there’s no better metric to track engagement and interest than seeing how many pages a user visits while on a website.

Pages per session can be improved by creating relevant content and providing clear calls to action for website visitors. Make it clear what they should do next. Have the just read an article? Give them options for further reading or direct them to call or sign up for a newsletter. Make sure to also hyperlink to other pages of your website within the body of your content.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate goes hand in hand with pages per session. It’s the measurement of people who visited one page of your website and did absolutely nothing else. It’s a scary topic for marketers because it’s essentially a vote by the visitor that they have no interest in anything else from you.

But with that said, the average bounce rate is higher than you might think and varies amongst industries. In general, a bounce rate of 50% is completely normal – and it’ll be even higher for blog pages and news events.

In general, a clean, organized website that doesn’t suffer from any compatibility issues will have an acceptable bounce rate. But if you ever see your bounce rate spike, it might signal that there are some technical issues with your website.

Visitor behavior will paint a compelling picture of your website. If visitors are sticking around and looking at multiple pages, the search engines will reward you.

If you are interested in even more technology-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.

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