SEO User Experience: Key Data Points

After the long quarantine, more and more businesses have returned to brick-and-mortar operations in the Philadelphia-area and nationwide. However, the recent shutdowns have taught many business owners a simple truth: the indispensable value of a strong online presence. 

To optimize your online presence you must first understand your online data--the rich analytical statistics that detail the performance of a website. This data is available to all websites for free from Google Analytics or for a fee from enterprise SEO platforms. Unfortunately, most website owners do not use (or understand) this data. Most ignore it in favor of intuition and guile.

An intuitive understanding of your audience is crucial to your website's success, but the combination of intuition and analytical knowledge is the surest path to online success--especially now, in these strange pandemic days. 

Website data can tell you precisely how people discover and interact with your website. With the help of this data, you can tweak your content to focus more specifically on the browsers who truly want or need your service. More importantly, you can perfect your "user experience," a term used in the SEO world to describe the experience of browsing your site.

Is your content easily discovered and shared? Do your pages load quickly? Is your website structure seamless? If so, your site will be viewed favorably by search engines and browsers. 

As Moz notes in its Beginner's Guide to SEO:

"Usability and user experience are second order influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a site's external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality."

Improve User Experience--and SEO--By Optimizing These Data Points 

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is a term used in AdWords to describe the difference between the number of people who see your ad and the number who actually click through.

Yet SERP CTR can be a helpful metric, too. SERP (search engine results page) CTR is the difference between how many people see your results in the rankings and how many people actually click-through to your page.

In either case, a higher CTR means that your website intrigues browsers by name and/or description alone. A lower CTR means that you're not successfully marketing your brand on the most basic level--you're not creating, as SEO guru Neil Patel says, "a sizzling title or an appealing meta description."

Even then, CTR viewed by itself can be misleading. Once a browser clicks through, you want to make sure your content convinces him/her to stick around.

Optimize Click Through Rate: "13 Ways to Improve Your Organic Click-Through Rate"

Dwell Time

"Dwell time" is a bit of SEO jargon coined by Bing's former webmaster, Duane Forrester, to describe how long a user dwells on your site before returning to the SERP.

As defined by Moz, dwell time is "an amalgam of bounce rate and time-on-site metrics."

When viewed in combination with SERP CTR dwell time can be a stupendous technique for evaluating your site.

Bounce rate 

Bounce rate is a Google term for the percentage of your visitors who only visit your site for a brief time before navigating away. Unfortunately, Google's definition of bounce rate "time" is somewhat vague:

"Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page)."

Since Google's definition of bounce rate is vague, some in the SEO world combine bounce rate with time-on-site to create the seemingly more accurate "dwell time." Time-on-site (AKA: session duration) is a measurement of the total time a browser spends on your site.To Google, bounce rate is a signal that the SERP did not adequately fulfill your needs--after all, you clicked on a result, then clicked away. A certain result might rank high on a given SERP, but if the bounce rate is high the site will inevitably decrease in the rankings.

Neil Patel combines dwell time with CTR to create an even more durable representation of website performance. His description is easy to understand:

If a user is spending time on a site, interacting with it, not bouncing, and going deeper within the content, it’s evident there is something of value on the site for that particular user. As this happens, SEO improves. SERP CTR and dwell time converge in the nexus of SEO for this reason. A CTR is not alone an accurate presentation of user behavior. High CTRs can merely reflect a sizzling title or an appealing meta description. CTR is not an indication of the quality of the content on the page itself. That’s where dwell time comes in. If dwell time is low, then the high SERP CTR is discounted in the algorithm’s calculation. If, on the other hand, the dwell time is high, then the CTR receives its due value.

Website Audits

Many SEO firms offer SEO audits that target these data points. If your website is under-performing, an audit will clarify the exact elements of your website that require improvement.

As apart of the audit, you will likely receive a detailed report showing you how many people have visited your website for a specific period of time, how many of those visitors are unique, the time visitors spent on your website, and other information that will help you convert visitors into potential customers.

With this information and more, you learn your website visitors in depth. However, the key is using this data to improve your online offering. 

SEO Sparta: Use Your Data in the Right Way

SEO Sparta helps clients in the Philadelphia-area and worldwide to use the rich analytical data provided by Google and other enterprises to create customized marketing strategies.

We know how to improve user experience. To learn more about our offerings, please browse our main site today: SEO Sparta.

Cover Photo Source: "How to use SEO Data in Your Social Media Strategy"

If you are interested in transforming your website into a money-making tool or are interested in exploring opportunities to outperform your competition, we encourage you to contact SEO SPARTA.

We combine traditional marketing methods and organic SEO--emphasizing natural website optimization--to design thoughtful, inspiring, and effective marketing campaigns.

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