On-page and technical SEO
Hey, everyone its john here, and today we're going to be going over off-page SEO. One thing that most people don't think about when it comes to SEO is to dwell time. Dwell time matters when it comes to SEO and rankings. And if you're not sure what dwell time is, don't worry about that. Dwell time is a metric that calculates user engagement, session duration, and SERP CTR. So how do you measure dwell time? Its Session duration, you know, is someone staying on your website for a long time. Bounce rate. Are they just bouncing off and going to a different website or going back to Google or somewhere around the web because they're not happy with what they're seeing? And the click-through rate.
A click-through rate is when someone's doing a Google search, they find a keyword, are they clicking on your listing more than the competitors? Because if they're clicking on your listing more, it tells Google that hey, you're more relevant. People like your site more, so it should rank higher than the competition. The last thing you want to do is having people just come to your site and be like, "Hey, it's time to exit, let's get out of this site" Now, of course, you're not going to keep people on your website forever. But there are things that you can do to keep them there as long as possible. The main way is to measure and checks to see if your customers are happy.
And even your visitors. Because if people are happy when they're coming to your website, and they're happy with the content, they're happy with the images, the product, the service, they're more likely to stick around. If they're not happy, they're going to bounce away. The way you do this is you go to Google Analytics, and you sign up. Once you enter in your URL. It'll give you a tracking code and you want to place this tracking code onto your website. If you're not sure how you can always email your developer or you can ask my team and we'll tell you feedback on how to do this. If you have WordPress, there's a Google AnalyticsWordPress extension. And most of the platforms that CMS' out there have little plugins easy way for you to install your Google Analytics code. Once you add it to your website, you can view it in your source code.
And then over time, not right away. But within a day or two, sorry you have to be a little bit patient, you'll end up starting to see data. And you'll start seeing it for future dates. So if you put on the code today, you're not going to see your traffic stats and your data from a month ago, but you'll see it from today onward. And what's cool about Google Analytics is it can show you session duration, this is how long people are going to be on your website, and then navigation, go to the audience. Then click on behavior, and then click on engagement. And you'll get data all the way from time on site, page use per session, bounce rate, these are all very important metrics. What you ideally want to shoot for is people staying on your site for at least two minutes. Two minutes is a really good number. As per the bounce rate, the lower the better. And here are some examples, of some other sites and their bounce rates. So from retail sites, they have roughly 20 to 40% bounce rates, landing pages 70 to 90.
When you're looking portals like MSN or Yahoo, there's some around 10 to 30%. Service sites, anywhere from 10 to 30%, content websites 40 to 60%, lead generation sites 30 to 50%. So look at the graph, see what website of yours is closest related to it, could be retail, could be landing page, if from B2B is probably service or lead generation. If it's a blog, it's a content site. And look at this and try to get your bounce rate somewhere in that range. That's what's good. And I'll show you how to do that over time. The first thing you want to do is within the navigation of Google Analytics, go-to behavior, then site content, and then exit pages. This will show you all the pages that are causing people to leave your website. If you can fix this and cause fewer people to leave your website, what you'll find is your bounce rate will decrease over time.
These are the pages to focus on. Put yourself in the visitor's shoes or customer shoes. Why would they leave during this web page? Do they not like it? Is there something wrong? How can I make it better? Now some pages will have a lot of exits, like your thank you page. well someone already buys and you're shipping them a product, then they're good to go. And those pages are okay to have a lot of exits. But if it's an informational page that's educational, well, hey, maybe you should be linking to other articles on what they should do next, after they read this one article. That way I can keep them on my website and keep educating and helping them out and provide a better user experience. You also want to look at your site speed. The slower your site loads, the worse your bounce rates going to get. So go to Ubersuggest.
And in Ubersuggest, goto the site audit report in the left-hand navigation, once you load up Ubersuggest. And then I want you to click on-site audit, in there, not only does this report show you all the errors you'll have when it comes to SEO, when you scroll down a little, you'll see a graph that looks like this on the screen, and it'll show you your overall site speed. You want to aim for green, green is good, red is poor. And it maps it off for both desktop and mobile. That's really important because google ranks mobile websites differently than desktop sites. And I know your website has both a desktop and a mobile version. In most cases, it's the same, but they still will rank your website differently on mobile devices than they will on a desktop.
They have two different indexes. You also want to compress your images. When you compress them and make them smaller and file size, it'll improve your load time. It's the number one reason for slow load time and you don't want that. General benchmarks. The zero to 40% bounce rate is good. 40 to 60 is fair. 60 to 100% is poor. When you're starting out, you'll also find that your bounce rate is going to be higher. And that's okay. As you get more traffic, you get more age, you've been around on the web longer, your bounce rate should decrease. If you have a brand new website, you'll find that your bounce rate is extremely low. And that's probably because you're visiting your own website a lot. And when you visit your own website a lot, you're probably not going to bounce as much because you're going between page and page and spending a lot of time, so you're skewing the results.
But once you start getting a few hundred visitors, a few thousand visitors a month, your bounce rate will probably skyrocket and be in the poor range and overtime you want to get into fair and then good. Another way to make your metrics better is to improve your click-through rate. Remember, we talked about Meta tags that are your title, Meta description. If everyone does a Google search for the best dog food, and everyone clicks on the second result instead of the first result because the second result has more appealing text. That tells Google hey, we should make the second result and move up to the top. And because it's more relevant people are clicking, and the one that was at the top, we should move it down because not everyone cares about it and they're not clicking on it.
So you want to use appealing text. So for your title, I broke down in the previous lesson on how to create amazing titles, follow that. In your meta description. Make sure you include keywords. And you can use a site audit report in Ubersuggest to make sure you're avoiding long meta descriptions or long title tags, duplicate descriptions, or duplicate title tags. By following all of that, you'll end up doing better and getting more clicks, which will improve your rankings. Here's an interesting stat for you. And this is from word stream. for long-tail phrases, assuming that's what you're going after, and that's what I recommend at the beginning, you'll find that you can end up getting many more clicks than if you go after a head term. So focus on the right terms.
If you're going after broad terms like credit cards, well, someone searching for credit cards may want to figure out how to refinance their credit card debt, or they're looking for credit cards for bad debt. Or they're looking for business credit cards, or they're looking to figure out how to cancel their credit cards. It's so vague, they're going to have a lot of people bounce off and not even click through onto your website. That's what you want to go after long-tail terms. And it'll improve your overall metrics, not just from your click-through rate, but the people sticking on your site. So its the time-on-site, and it will also decrease your bounce rate as well. And you can see a lot of this information within Google Search Console.
When you go into search console, if you already haven't, go sign up for it, It's free. It's a free tool by Google, helps you track your data. And you want to click on search results on the left side, and it'll show you data on how many impressions you're getting and how many clicks. Your goal is to get more impressions over time because the more impressions you get, that means you're ranking higher and higher on Google. And more clicks means that you're getting a better click-through rate, so you want to improve your impression count, but you also want to improve your click-through count as well. And it breaks down the percentage, average, click-through rate 2.2%, you want to get that better and better. So that way your numbers just improve over time.
You also want to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. If it's not mobile-friendly, you're not going to rank well in the long run. Remember, I said there's two different indexes on Google, one for people on mobile devices, and another one for people using laptops or desktop machines. So you want to make sure that your site is mobile compatible, you can do this through responsive design, and that helps quite a bit. Page speed is super important with mobile because these mobile devices even if they're on 5G or LTE, it doesn't mean they're going to get that connection everywhere. If I go into the middle of Missouri on our ranch, I may only have a 2G connection and things can load really really slow.
You also want to avoid using a flash. You want to have a simple design and UX that way your page loads fast. You also want to consider using the AMP framework. It's a framework by Google. And that ends uploading your mobile content much quicker, especially for your blog based articles. Site structure is very important too, this will help with the click-through rate. If you have a lot of pages on your site in your interlinking right. Over time, when someone searches for your brand, you're going to see an indentation. These are site links. This helps you get more clicks. And it also helps Google understand your website. So make sure that you'reusing internal linking because if you're not, you're not really going to see too many site links on your site, if any at all.
And that's it when it comes to your site structure. Yes, you have your homepage, where your homepage should link to maybe category pages, and those category pages could link to deeper pages, and some of them may even link back up to your homepage or other category pages or other blog posts. In other words, you should see a really tangled web, think of like a spider web. That's how your website should be when it comes to linking together. But of course, when you're doing this only link relevant pages to each other, don't just link for the sake of linking, it has to be the ideal user experience. Don't do stuff just for Google, but the user first because google in the long run will rank the websites at the top that are best for users. So action items for you before we finish today's lesson. I want you to download and complete the SEO factors worksheet. I want you to download and complete the SEO factors worksheet. I want you to export your top 50 CTR pages from Google Search Console and we'll show you how to do this in this Excel sheet. I also want you to export the page speed of 10 or more of your popular pages on your website, and we'll work through with you on this worksheet on how you can improve all of them. Thank you for reading. I look forward to teaching you how to audit your website next when it comes to SEO.
Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.
0 comments:
Post a Comment