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Video Summary
Today, I’m uncovering the secrets behind how user behavior can silently skyrocket your rankings.
What is User Behavior? Basically, it’s the way people interact with your website — the pages they look at, how long they stick around, the links they click, everything they do before leaving.
Understanding these things helps you figure out how people use your site. And that helps you improve your content and boost your SEO. The two numbers you should start with to understand the big picture of user behavior are Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate.
Once you understand these numbers, what can you do to increase your Click Through Rate and decrease your Bounce Rate? Here are some tips…
Video Transcript
Hello, Jeffrey Kirk here.
Today, we’re digging into the mysterious world of SEO and uncovering the secrets behind how user behavior can silently skyrocket your ratings.
Did you catch that? Your audience affects your search results! It’s not just the other way around.
Before I get into the details, I have to give you the answer to last week’s photo question. I took that picture at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It was kind of a trick question because the petrified trees were hard to see.
I’ll give you a zoomed in view. Those logs scattered around are solid rock now. And here’s another for you. These pieces still look like wood, but all the cells have been replaced by minerals. These are solid rock now.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Let’s get back to today’s topic, how user behavior affects your SEO.
How User Behavior SECRETLY Boosts Your Rankings!
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a process that makes your site more appealing to search engines, with the goal of bringing in more visitors and, ultimately, more money.
But, there’s more to SEO than just using the right words and tweaking some technical stuff. Believe it or not, how people behave with your site plays a big role in SEO.
So, what is User Behavior anyway?
Simply put, user behavior is what people do when they interact with your website. It includes the pages they look at, how long they stick around, the links they click, basically everything they do with your site up until they leave.
Understanding these actions can help you improve your content and boost your SEO.
Understanding User Behavior Metrics
So, how do you keep an eye on user behavior? Well, that’s where user behavior metrics come into play.
These metrics are helpful clues telling you how people use your website. They show you things like how visitors move around, what they like, and how they react to your content.
By paying attention to these metrics, you can make your website better, get more people to take action, and even climb up the search engine rankings.
So, let’s look at some of the important user behavior metrics that you should focus on. I’m going to talk about two big ones, Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate.
How does User Behavior affect SEO?
First up is Bounce Rate.
The bounce rate tells you how many people come to your webpage and then leave without doing anything.
No clicks, no peeking at other pages on your site. They hit the page and then leave. That’s why it’s called bounce. And rate just means it’s given as a percentage of visitors who bounce.
If a page has a high bounce rate, Google thinks your page failed to provide a good experience for the visitor. Or, that the content did not match the search. Either way, Google likes your site a little bit less and they may want to offer a different choice next time.
So, what’s considered a high bounce rate? Well, it depends on what your website does.
If you’re selling stuff online, like an e‑commerce site, a bounce rate between 20% and 45% is pretty normal. For a site focused on getting leads, like sign-ups for a mailing list, a typical bounce rate could be somewhere between 30% and 55%.
For blog posts, a bounce rate might be 65% or higher. Maybe even 90%. But that doesn’t always mean people don’t like your content. It might mean they got exactly what they wanted, so they read it and then bounced.
And that means Google isn’t going to just look at the bounce rate to determine your search results positioning. It has to look at time spent on the page as well. Someone bouncing in 5 seconds is much different than someone bouncing in 2 minutes.
If possible, you should compare your bounce rate with your competitors. This helps you see how you’re doing in your industry and you can figure out where you can make things better.
What Can You Learn from Checking Your Bounce Rate?
If you discover your bounce rate is higher than it should be, it could mean that people aren’t finding what they want on your website.
So, if you see a page with a high bounce rate, the first thing to do is check the content. Does it properly match what the person was searching for? Make sure the page is helpful and gives the info or the solution that searchers want.
If all that is good, then look for other factors that can cause bounce. Here are a few:
- Slow Page Loading: If a page takes too long to load, visitors may get impatient and leave.
- Unclear or Missing Calls-to-Action (CTAs): If users don’t know what to do on your page—where to click or what action to take—they might bounce.
- High Image-to-Text Ratio: Too many images without valuable content can be overwhelming and drive users away.
- Poor Page Design and Structure: A messy or confusing layout can discourage users from staying on your page.
- Non-Mobile-Friendly Design: With people cruising the web on the go, a page that doesn’t play nice on phones can be left quickly.
- Excessive Ads or Pop-Ups: Intrusive advertisements or too many pop-ups can be annoying and drive people away.
- Auto playing Media: Videos or tunes blasting out of nowhere can surprise a visitor and lead to a not-so-great user experience.
- Unclear Value Proposition: If visitors can’t quickly grasp what your page is about and how it benefits them, they might leave.
- Non-intuitive Navigation: If users can’t easily find what they’re looking for due to confusing navigation, they’re gone.
- Outdated Content: Stuff that’s old news, irrelevant, or just not useful anymore can give users a one-way ticket off your page.
Fixing issues like these is like giving your website a makeover, it boosts user engagement and encourages visitors to stick around a bit longer.
Okay, that’s enough about bounce rate. Now let’s move on to Click-Through-Rate (often called CTR).
CTR is the percent of people who click on your link when it shows up in the search results.
For example, let’s say your link shows up in the search results 5,000 times, but only five decide to click. That gives you a CTR of 5 divided by 5,000, which is 0.1%. If, instead, 100 people click, that’s 100 divided by 5,000, which is 2%.
To see your CTR for any page, you can use the Google Search Console. Just log in, click on “Search Results” or “Performance,” whichever shows up in the left menu for you. Then be sure to select “Average CTR” to the right of “Clicks” and “Impressions”.
So how does knowing CTR help you?
In simple terms, if your page has a high CTR, it means people seeing your links in the search results think your page will be useful.
They won’t really know until they click, but the first impression is good. They see your page title and description in the results and that convinces them to click.
This means you want to make sure your title and description are clear, not too long, and match what users are looking for. Aim for titles around 45–60 characters and descriptions between 145–160 characters.
Getting these right helps you get the click. Then your content has to keep them or else they’ll bounce.
Improving User Behavior for Better SEO
Now that you understand a little more about bounce rate and CTR, the next step is to understand some trends.
It’s good to keep up with what’s happening in your industry and how people are behaving. These can give your website a real edge.
Here’s how you can take advantage of this information:
1. Include Trendy Keywords in Your Content
This helps your website pop up more in searches for things people are looking for right now.
You don’t always need to create new content; sometimes, just tweaking what you have works too. But don’t compromise on quality. Use keywords that match what your audience is searching for and make it sound natural.
2. Accept Changes in User Behavior
Just like people change, so do their online habits. To stay ahead of the curve, you should keep up with the latest trends and technology. You can even use smart tools like artificial intelligence to help you understand what’s going on and make your website even better.
Also, don’t forget about voice searches – they’re a big deal now. And people also love videos, so including a few on your website can be helpful too.
3. Make Your Website User-Friendly
I can’t emphasize this enough… Give your visitors a great experience on your site. Search engines really prefer websites that are easy to use.
Ultimately, user-friendly sites are fast, have great content, and work on all different devices from phones to desktop computers.
So, focus on the user experience. Then, when searchers see your site in the search results, they click, improving your CTR. And your page engages them to reduce the bounce rate. Then you’ll have a website that both users and search engines will love.
Up until now, users have affected your search rankings, but you didn’t know it. Now you know that your audience isn’t just watching; they’re actively boosting or ruining your SEO rankings!
To help you even further, I put together a content marketing checklist for you. It’s a FREE step-by-step guide to creating content that engages your audience, drives traffic to your website, and generates leads and sales for your business.
You can get it at upatdawn.biz/10content. Go get that now while you’re thinking about it.
Your business deserves to be seen online, and I will help you get there.
Thanks for watching and have a great day!
