User Behaviour and SEO: Understanding the Link

Optimizing your content for users is imperative in order to improve your search engine rankings. In fact, user behaviour is now one of the most important factors for content marketers to consider, when developing an SEO strategy.

If you want to stay at the top of major search engine rankings, you need to optimize your page content to appeal to user behaviours. In fact, recent studies have shown, that 70% of users will leave a site, if the content has not been optimised. Clogging your page content with keywords and links will only leave you sliding down the search engine rankings, if it affects your users experience. Read on to understand the link between user behaviour and SEO, and why your digital marketing agency is is quickly curating user behaviour data on your website.

How Users Search

SEO has changed dramatically since it first became an established ‘digital science’ many years ago.  With exciting new technologies and methodology, search engines have been able to steadily improve the quality of their search results, to suit the demands of the modern user. This has made a dramatic difference in how users complete their searches, and what makes content causes webpages to skyrocket up the search engine rankings.

Users are no longer simply typing keywords in search engines. In fact, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, voice control and mobile dependance, have all dramatically changed how users are seeking their information. For example, voice searches are much more conversational in nature. This pushes sites with longer keyword trails up the search engine rankings.

Many major search engines are released index updates to better align with changing user behaviour.  In early 2018, Google released a new indexing update to prioritize mobile user experience in their organic search listings. This comes after the steady increase in mobile searches, now making mobile the most prominent platform for internet searching. This means that if you fail to optimize your websites for mobile content, you’ll find yourself slipping down the rankings very quickly.

User Experience

When you visit any website, you unknowingly leave an incredible amount of feedback about your experience. User behaviour data that can be gathered from a website session include the duration of your visit, the frequency of your visits, how you navigated the website and how you accessed the website. Search engines can then utilise this data, in order to gauge the user experience of the webpage.

One major metric that search engines use to measure a users experience on a webpage is the click-through rate’. The click-through rate is the number of users who click on a search result. Whilst pages can climb the rankings through page titles and keywords in their meta descriptions, if the description does not capture the users attention, they will not click on it. It is therefore integral to understand your consumers needs, and capture their attention in your description.

Another major metric used to measure a user’s experience is known as ‘dwell time’. This is the amount of time between a user clicking on a link from a search result page to another website, and when they return back to the search. This timing is a clear indication of whether the result was valuable, or if the user has had to return to find the requested information again.

While trying to get ahead of the trends and keywords, it can be easy for content marketers to forget who they are targeting. The user. As search engines advance and adapt to the needs of the modern consumer, user behaviour should be at the forefront of every content marketers SEO strategy.