How Usability, Experience and Content Affect Search Engine Rankings
Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to provide the best search results possible. By keeping data on user clicks, applying math formulas and filters, search engines are able to determine what kinds of websites and pages their search customers desire most. As a profile, these websites have several distinguishing characteristics in common:
- They provide information connected to the search query
- They are easy to use, navigate and understand
- They are professionally designed and accessible by modern browsers
- They deliver high quality credible content
What are the Search Engines Looking For?
Despite the technological advances, search engines cannot understand text, images, or video, the same way a human does. In order to understand the content on a web page, they rely on meta information contained within the web page and how “real” humans interact with the web page. This data is analyzed and the “quality” and “authority” of the page is determined.
Determining Factors
According to SearchMetrics’ latest search engine ranking factors, the most important ranking factors for high-ranking Google.com search results are:
- User experience has moved beyond the desktop
- Keywords are becoming obsolete
- Backlinks are becoming less important
- Social signals are becoming more important – especially for organic rankings
There are only a few on-page factors that search engines incorporate into their factors: content, keywords, navigation and site structure – these are the only factors that you have complete control over.
If you focus on creating a great user experience with unique quality content designed specifically for your audience, you can ensure that your website is recognized positively. This will encourage sharing, bookmarking, return visits and links. All of these signals will be factored by search engines and contribute to high rankings.
These off-page factors (sharing, bookmarking, return visits and links) are the second component of website rankings. Search engines analyze linking patterns, user engagement and machine learning metrics to determine trust, authority and identity. User engagement influences website rankings. These metrics can provide a measurement to the website popularity which search engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. After all, no one will link to a bad website – they link to “authority” websites.
How Does this Impact Web Page Rankings
How Does this Impact Web Page RankingsWhen a web page receives attention (linking) and excitement (user views and clicks), these metrics translate into an algorithmically valuable collection of data. Timing factors such as views, anchor text, the speed of new links (link velocity) and the source of the links to a new page are all factored into its ranking for a for relevant query at the engines.
Quality Content Signals
1. Engagement Metrics
As search engines deliver query results, they measure how you engage with the web page supplied. Do site visitors click the “back” button immediately after landing on the page? This indicates a failure by the search engine – they returned the wrong search results. This metric is tracked and if happens frequently, the web page will drop in rankings for that specific search term. Given the millions of search queries performed daily, search engines are able to amass good data to judge the “quality” of their results.
2. Trust
Google has developed the technology to emulate human searches, changing the way it judges websites for spam. It started with human’s evaluating 1,000’s of websites for “low quality” content. This data was then incorporated into machine learning algorithms to emulate the humans and predict how humans would judge a website.
The first use of this emulation was in 2011 with the panda update. The result was a dramatic shift in search results which rearranged over 20% of all of Google’s search results.
READ: When Google released the Panda update, the result was a major shift of global search results. The update directly affected millions of websites and their rankings. In order to understand the changes in search technology, it’s important you understand past events. Here are two resources concerning the panda update I recommend you read: 1) Google’s Official Blog post and this article by Vanessa Fox published on Search Engine Land.
READ: Despite all of Googles’ updates, their message has remained the same – create quality websites. This post, More Guidance On Building High-quality Sites, released on the Google Webmaster Blog back in 2011 is still relevant and will help you understand the areas you need to focus on in order to have online success.
3. Linking Patterns
Search engines employ link analysis algorithms to determine website popularity – quality sites with great content will receive more links than sites with weaker content.
Content = Success
By now, you’ve heard about “quality content” and “user experience” repeated dozens of times. In fact, content is considered the single most important element in the SEO industry. Remember, every search result begins with the words typed in a box.
READ: The easiest way to to keep your website ranking is too avoid Google penalties from the beginning. This article, 6 Ways to Make Sure You Never Get an Algorithmic Penalty from Google, by Neil Patel posted on QuickSprout will explain step by step how you can avoid an algorithmic penalty, stay in Google’s good graces, and keep your revenue sky high.
Create Content for Specific Searches
Search engines place web pages in their results to satisfy a query. How you rank for these queries is up to you. If you create content that provides high quality writing with plenty of examples, images and multimedia that perfectly answers the search query you will satisfy the searcher and be rewarded with engagement with your content and ultimately high rankings.
READ: Nathan Safran published this great article on content creation. He suggests you create content for users – not search engines. This shift in mentality will benefit you will with significantly better content and ultimately a better audience.
READ: Sometimes we need a little help on creating content… In this excellent article published on Copyblogger by Brian Clark, he demonstrates how to repurpose existing content in different media formats to get more out of your creativity with a detailed infographic.
Other Ranking Factors
As you publish quality content and your site visitors become “engaged” with your website, search engines will keep track of all of these interactions and develop metrics for your site – trust, authority and identity.
Authority
Is your site the recognized leader in your niche? That should be your goal. There are (probably) dozens of metrics in determining your websites authority… The types of links and quality of links you receive, the social references, and user engagement are all considerations in determining a websites authority.
After Google’s Panda update, Amit Singhal (head of Google’s search) published a post aimed at helping webmasters whose sites were affected by the massive update. In the post, Amit suggests asking yourself some key questions to understand “why your site was affected.” These are the questions you should be asking yourself every time you publish content.
History
As search engines crawl your website, they keep records of “how” your site looks during each visit. This historical data is analyzed to determine the changes you’ve made and other differences connected with your site.
- Has your linking profile changed?
- Are you publishing “different” content than normal?
- Who are you linking to?
- And dozens of other questions are asked and answered with each visit.
Severe changes in your profile might require further scrutiny into your actions.
Identity
In addition to keeping track of your websites’ history, search engines also try to determine “who” you are.
Search engines are becoming more concerned with who’s who so that they can provide the right data. Amit Singhal (head of Google search) made this distinction clear:
“A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content.”
Google’s Authorship program (released in 2011) was designed to combat this very problem, but was abandoned by Google in late 2013. Instead, Google has shifted their focus on structured markup as the standard way to annotate content. Structured data allows search engines (Google’s Knowledge Graph and Bing’s Snapshot) to index your content better, present it more prominently in the search results and incorporate in it in news platforms like maps, voice answers and Google Now.
READ: Adding rich snippets is becoming more popular with large-scale SEO applications and can alert search engines to the relevancy of your content. Check out this article by Barbara Starr: Examining Real World Uses of Rich Snippets & Markup.
READ: Google has been quietly adding more support for rich snippets since their introduction in 2012 including a snippet markup tool for less savvy webmasters. Find out more with this article by Barry Schwartz: Google’s Data Highlighter Now Supports Movies, TV, Articles, Products, Local Biz & Apps.
READ: For an in depth review of structured data, how to customize your data graph, promote your events, provide actions, and enable rich snippets, I strongly suggest you go through this Google tutorial: Promote Your Content with Structured Data Markup.
READ: Semantics is the study of meaning in language… You can’t expect search engines to understand language like humans do – search bots are not that smart (yet). As an SEO, it’s in your best interest to help them understand and this article: A Beginners Guide to Structured Data: How to Use Schema Markup for better SEO by Yauhen Khutarniuk will explain the importance of structured data as well as walk you through the steps of implementing a solid structured data policy.