If you are a regular visitor to our website you may well have heard us talk about Search Engine Optimisation and the efforts you can take to help improve your websites ranking in search engines like Google.
Trying to tick all the boxes with Google can feel like a never-ending task, particularly as Google change their search algorithms between 500 – 600 times a year!
Google uses to measures when determining the search results for different keywords and queries, these are Rank Brain, Click Through Rate and Dwell Time.
Rank Brain
Rank Brain sounds complicated, but it really isn’t, Google is simply measuring how users interact with search results, to make sure that they deliver the best results to people and uses this to improve the search results for other users looking for the same or similar content.
Rank Brain monitors how users interact with the search results and ranks websites and web pages accordingly.
An example of this would be if you were searching for a great cake recipe, my go to example, if I select a website from the search results that is ranked first, I land on that page and find the content is terrible and not what I am looking for and leave after only spending a few seconds on the page, Google takes notice. Likewise, if I were to then select a website further down the list and find it is full of great pictures and in-depth content and I spend a few minutes on the page or browse more of the site, Google will see this interaction and if enough people bounce from the top ranking page and opt for another in the same way then this will affect the rankings.
Click Through Rate
The click through rate, or CTR, is basically the number of people that click on your entry in organic searches (searches not stimulated by AdWords). Google wants to show people the best results for their search term and if your listing keeps coming up and no one is clicking Google will interpret this as your listing being not relevant to that keyword or query.
Dwell Time
Lastly Google looks at Dwell Time. This is how long a person spends on your website after clicking through from the search results. This is something that Google sets a great store by as it believes that if a user spends a lot of time on a single page of your website then that page must have lots of great content and that it is relevant to their search term.
A recent industry study by SearchMetrics found that the average Dwell Time for a top 10 Google result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
This may sound like a long time for someone to spend on one page, and that’s because it is! Most users say they actually spend less than 30 seconds on any one page of a website.
What now?
So how can you take steps to help improve your websites performance? Knowledge is power and knowing what it is that Google is looking for in a well performing website can help you to think of ways to make changes to your website that will lead to improvements in search engine results.
Every month we will be sharing a top tip for how you can make 2018 the year you achieve your search engine goals!
February’s topic will be focusing on Video Content which will be a big trend in 2018.