The Importance of Visitor Engagement In Rankings and Blog Success

We are seeing signs of the importance Google and others are placing on “user engagement” as a major factor in ranking sites and pages.

Yesterday I posted a video about how YouTube can easily track user engagement by watching the average length of time people are willing to watch a video.  For YouTube, this is an easy thing to monitor due to the nature of the medium:  they can track something like average view time because that’s easily trackable.

For written content it’s never been so easy.

So Google uses things like link popularity (the number and quality of links pointing to a site or page within a site) to determine what people think of it.  Then they slap a level of importance on the page or domain based on what they glean from the number and quality of links pointing there.

This, of course, led to “gaming” the system with people using software to massively increase their links.  Google fought back by discounting where the links came from, mainly spammy directories.

Then SEO experts came up with more savvy ways to gain links quickly by using linkbait (still a good way to do it today and completely white hat) and other tricks to increase quality link popularity.

But the thing is, Google does not like to be tricked.

Google wants to really know the quality of a page from the perspective of the target audience for whom that page was created.

Google engineers know that robots and algorithms have limitations.  So they build into those systems a way to “cheat” off of real human beings by watching what people do on pages they visit.

This includes:

• Voting
• Commenting
• Length of stay on a page of content
• Who’s linking in and are they important enough sites to count the links?

…and other similar factors.

The Perfect Search Engine

The only way a search engine can work perfectly is if it can see content on the web just like we humans do and develop an opinion of it based on the same thing humans use to develop opinions of the content we find.  Since this is, as yet, impossible, the next best thing is to use the tools we use ourselves on social sites, blogs, and other types of sites to quickly gauge the quality of a page we’ve landed on.

By watching what real people do on sites and individual pages, a search engine can assign a value to the things surfers do or do not do and come up with a pretty tight way to gauge the value of any destination on the web.  That’s pretty much Google today.

Knowing this, it stands to reason that the level and depth of engagement visitors have with your blog will directly affect how you rank and how you sell.

The two worlds of SEO and business success are closer to each other than ever before when you realize that it all begins with the user experience.  The quality of your content.  The value placed on it by users, visitors, readers who engage with it in a measurable way.  Such as commenting, voting, and consuming the bulk of the content during their visit.  (Which is measured by the average length of stay, view, or listen depending on the content in question.)

People only stick around sites that entertain or inform them.

Google watches what people do on sites and can easily tell if the content is any good based on how long people stay on a page or whether they bounce right back to Google and do another search.

They watch how long you watch a video on YouTube and whether you rate it, comment on it, or embed or link to it from another site.

The perfect search engine is also the perfect business health meter

What Google wants is what you want to a large extent.  You want a site that is popular and profitable.  While Google doesn’t necessarily care if you make money or not, they do very much care what your visitors think of you and they watch for indications of high or low visitor engagement in every way they possibly can.

But isn’t that what you ultimately want for your site as well?  Which would be better for your business:  A site where users are engaged, active, responsive, and interested?  Or a site that sort of trick the engines into thinking it is important only to attract non-engaged visitors who leave as fast as they came.  No list signup, no sales, no positive outcome from a large majority of readers.

The bottom line is…

Google makes money partially from its reputation for having good results.  They have to get search right and continue to stay the #1 engine on the web.  They want to point to high-quality sites.  They measure quality by watching how we surf and gleaning what we really like from what we don’t like.

You want to create engaging content that people read, or view, or listen to all the way through.  Then you want them to vote, comment, subscribe, download or otherwise interact with your site in a way the benefits you.

This requires engaging content.

Automated and Aggregated Content

While automation and aggregation are still good ways to supplement your content, they are only effective to the degree that the content pulled from other sources actually engages your readers.

You can pull content to your site through many different tools, but that content had better be good and the source hard to find for the average person who benefits from your curation of that content.

SEO then becomes something more about how well your content is liked by your visitors than the simple math of how many links are pointing to a site.

Tagged as: algorithm, blogging tips, google, search marketing, search tactics, seo, visitor engagement