Rankings based on User Behaviour

Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate of your site is one of the more important factors. It is specified as a percentage and is determined by the number of people visiting your site and immeadiately clicking the back button in the browser window.

For example when you search for something and you click a result but find it is not quite what you are looking for you click back and visit another search result. Well, you just created a bounce!

If 100 people visited your site and 75 of them clicked back you would have a bounce rate of 75%. A bounce rate of 25% - 50% is very good. A bounce rate of 50% - 75% is average and a bounce rate of above 75% is poor.

A bad boucne rate tells search engines that your site is not very good which causes Google to make an automatic adjustment to the search results and thus lowers your ranking. On the other hand if you have a very low bounce rate your site will move up the SERPs.

Average Number of Pages

The navigation that a site visitor undetakes when they visit a site is important too. Search engines want to see that your site is quality and engaging. If a user clicks one page and then goes away and leaves your site (termed as an exit page) it will be detrimental to your site. This is why you want to make sure your site keeps visitors. If you notice a page with a high exit percentage that means you need to do something about that page.

The more pages a user clicks on the more useful your site is seen and thus receives a boost in the SERPs. The average number of pages viewed is determined by the amount of page views divided by the number of unique visitors. This is specified as an integer value.

Average Time on Site

Just as the average number of pages viewed is important so is the time that people spend looking at pages. If someone just quickly clicks through your site and leaves it is clearly not fulfilling its requirements. The longer a user spends on a site the more benneficial it is seen and thus receives a boost in the SERPs.

The average time on the site is determined by the total amount of viewing time the site has received divided by the number of unique visits it has had. This is sepcified as a time value.

SERPs clicked

There is a structure that shows how much traffic you receive from a search term as a percentage click through rate. The first postion gets roughly 40% of the traffic for one term whilst 4th gets only around 12%. The 10th result gets somewhere around 3% of the total search volume. But some well written Titles get clicked on more often because they captivate the searcher more. This means if a lot of people click on a particular result rather than one above it, the title with the higher click rate will start to move up the search results.

Make things clickable and obvious

In order to keep people on your site you need to keep them interested and keep them clicking. I find one of the most annoying things is where there is an image for a particula r section with a text link under it. I go to click the image but it isn't a link. Make anything that is relevant a clickable link. This keeps visitors engaged and interested.

Headings and Sub Headings

It is important to remember that people scan when they view a web site they don't read. So if you have a very lengthy paragraph people won't read it. You need short sharp sections of content with lots of relevant sub headings. People simply fish out the info they want then read it.

NOTE: People view the web very differently to how they would read a book or magazine. You need to adjust your content writting to suit.

Short readable sections of text

For general content pages you should have 300 - 400 words per page. Each relevant section should be broken up into short paragraphs so people can scan through what they are looking for. This is why it is also very important to bold keywords of particular relevance and interest.

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