Behavioral Factors of a Website
Contents:
Behavioral Factors of a Website
Which parameters are used to analyze behavioral factors?
Google’s system (for example) is guided by these 3 parameters
How do visitor behavioral factors affect your site’s ranking?
Where do the data for a normal search of necessary information come from?
How to promote your site using behavioral factors (white and black methods)
How to optimize behavioral factors for your site?
Step #1. Snippet Clickability.
Step #2. Website Loading Speed.
Step #3. Mobile Traffic.
Step #4. Content Completeness and Relevance.
Step #5. Usability.
Step #6. Content Updates.
SEO Hacks on Behavioral Factors by Mikhail Shakin
Behavioral factors refer to the overall number of actions taken by each specific person visiting your website. Thanks to such data, search robots evaluate the quality of your online resource, and you can directly develop the correct strategy for further site promotion.
Which parameters are used to analyze behavioral factors?
Both Google and Yandex analyze behavioral factors essentially the same. The difference may only lie in the priorities they assign when evaluating each of the site’s visitors. It’s important to remember not to rely solely on one metric – it’s better to choose a “golden mean” and focus on both.
Google’s system (for example) is guided by these 3 parameters:
- CTR (Click-through rate) – clickability of site snippets in search results.
- Dwell time – the time each specific visitor spends on the site.
- Pogo-sticking – a quick return to the SERP to continue searching for the necessary information.
Comparing these parameters with Yandex’s system, pogo-sticking (also called “bounce rate”) is common here – it indicates the bounce rate, as well as CTR – a measure of the time each specific user spends on your site.
Unlike Google, Yandex is constantly improving its searching and ranking principles for online resources. Also, links play a significant role in the promotion of sites for Google. Some of the recent innovations by Yandex have included taking into account the depth of views and what they call “recirculation” (user navigation through the site + the number of all materials read on it). Most interestingly, Yandex also analyzes the time a user spends on each specific page of the site (so-called “completeness” of information).
Yandex also focuses on goal-oriented actions and secondary actions. Target actions include filling out applications and other forms, downloading materials, and clicking on phone numbers. Secondary actions include bookmarking the web page, copying information materials and photos, as well as user interaction with social media buttons.
The last click by a user on your resource is a very good behavioral signal for search engines – if they ended their browsing session on your page, any search engine considers it the highest quality.
It is also separately considered that bounce rates (exits from your site) should be as low as possible. However, this (again) is a big misconception. Agree, if you don’t have the service or product that a person is looking for, they will not find it on your site and will start searching elsewhere precisely for what they require!
To reduce bounce rates, Google’s and Yandex’s systems have their own wizard programs like “zero-block” or others aimed to satisfy your request.
It’s crucial to remember that there are no good or bad behavioral factors on every specific site! It’s simply physically impossible to satisfy all user requests! In other words – if the typical behavioral factors inside your online resource did not “work out”, there is nothing terrible about it. Perhaps someone couldn’t find what they needed at that moment.
Improvements or deteriorations (unlikely) in your users’ behavioral factors can only occur after regularly filling your website with useful information. No one will fill a project with bad information (only useful and most needed), so any changes to it will only “work in your favor”. You can evaluate the usefulness of each article both by the number of visits (views) and comments. Agree, a useless article will neither be looked at much nor, more so, read.
How do visitor behavioral factors affect your site’s ranking?
No search engine can precisely determine the influence of visitor behavioral factors on your project. The thing is, any statistics system is not oriented toward an individual but works strictly by template.
Each person is uniquely individual and searches for only what they specifically need. As many living people as there are, there are just as many opinions and behavior variants. Agree, no program can account for the desires and demands of each individual!
Thus, the conclusion: of course, you should consider general behavioral factors, but we do not advise focusing solely on them. Statistics are statistics, but no robot can replace a living person! Correspondingly, no robot or program can consider all subtleties inherent to your potential clients.
Don’t believe? Well, then let’s listen to the Google developers. And they focus precisely on the fact that their search engine cannot consider and analyze user behavior for which they haven’t amassed enough information. Here you have your behavioral factors! If there isn’t at least a 1-year “history” of browsing for a specific user on the internet, the search engine cannot do anything at all “say” about them. Hence, ranking will not have any sense here either.
Speaking of Yandex’s system, the situation isn’t much better despite them positioning their search engine as a Site for People (SDP) and constantly implementing various sanctions against loop program tweaks; they also cannot properly assess the impact of behavioral factors on the “output” during their search.
Where do the data for a normal search of necessary information come from?
Everything here is relatively simple and straightforward. Both Google and Yandex use their proprietary browsers and a variety of extensions for them (bookmarks, browsing history, and so on) to collect information.
- Own browser tools and various extensions (bookmarks, browsing history, etc.).
- Own search statistics (CTR), bounce rates, pages viewed, and last clicks analysis.
- Own analytics systems, namely the well-known “Google Analytics” and “Yandex.Metrica”. Though Google claims to not use analytical tools, how then can we determine with their help what’s known as “Dwell Time”?
Apart from these main ways of collecting statistical information about user behavior on our sites, search engines don’t disdain turning to various assessors for assistance.
How to promote your site using behavioral factors (white and black methods)
Increasing behavioral factors can be achieved through only 2 methods: natural (white) or manipulative (black) methods.
As you might understand, a manipulative method is the so-called “boosting” of website visitors, whereas a natural method involves developing the online resource and filling it with quality useful information for any “live” visitor. And if “boosting” can sometimes be a forced necessity for new sites in the first few months, later on, you cannot do without their quality content.
Though manipulative “boosting” provides quick results in increasing site positions, it has a very significant downside—it can easily result in penalties from both Google (up to 6 months) and Yandex (from 6 months up to 1 year).
Undoubtedly, increasing behavioral factors naturally is a long and often costly work, but this is indeed the most reliable way not only to secure a rightful place in the search results legally but also to guaranteedly increase the website’s conversion rate. For business structures, conversion is exactly what means stable calls, increased orders, and, consequently, profit growth. For informational sites as well, a normal conversion will ensure not only due to attention to advertisements and their traditional clickability but also attract stable clients for advertising article placements.
How to optimize behavioral factors for your site?
Everything here depends on the meticulous work over the content of the online resource itself. Breaking it down step-by-step, the recommendations would be as follows.
Step #1. Increase Snippet Clickability.
To ensure the ratio of impressions to clicks is maximally close, you will need:
- Have fast links (instructions for them can be viewed in specific sections on Yandex and Google).
- Normal readability and attractiveness for visitors of your “title”. It should be noted here that Yandex sometimes uses subheadings instead of the “title” tag if their relevance perfectly matches the visitor’s query. However, relevance should always be remembered, as visitors should clearly understand that your page is exactly what they have been long searching for.
- The meta-description should also be attractive to visitors. Although our main search engines often ignore site descriptions (especially regarding Yandex), Google, however, often provides it during a search. Therefore, it’s worth working on this topic properly.
- Internet project micro-markup. If correct micro-markup is made, addresses, phones, ratings, and a “carousel” of your products/services will be displayed in the snippet (all this depends greatly on the online resource direction).
- Emojis. Colorful arrows, checkmarks, and more won’t hurt you at all. The main thing is to stand out favorably against the backdrop of your competitors!
Step #2. Monitor Your Website’s Loading Speed.
This is extremely important because once a user clicks on your developed snippet, they want to quickly get the desired information and not wait for it to load for a long time. Experiments have shown that nearly half of the visitors leave sites where pages load for more than 3-5 seconds. Therefore, we advise you to work well with your codes – minify CSS, JS, and HTML, use images in modern formats, load content asynchronously, and remove unused codes.
Using “Google PageSpeed Insight”, it will show you all the problems of your site. Utilize its recommendations to improve your online resource indicators.
Step #3. Pay Attention to Mobile Traffic.
It constantly increases, so it is necessary to adapt your site’s layout for smartphones. Especially since Google’s “mobile-first” indexing has already been launched. If you have an informational resource, you can’t go without AMP. A similar technology is also available for Yandex – “Yandex.Turbo”, which works quite well with online stores.
Step #4. Content Completeness and Relevance.
Don’t forget about the quality of the information on your website. Its relevance is very important. For this, at least one of the clusters of queries should definitely lead to one of the landing pages. The completeness of your content is equally important. If you are the owner of an informational resource, it is worth “monitoring” competitors and seeing what they have.
Make sure to look into services for collecting keywords (Serpstat, Semrush, Ahrefs, and others) to understand exactly what users are searching for. Also, note the hints in the search and sites where questions are asked. On “Yandex.Know” (for example), some questions are generated not by the users themselves, but through demand research conducted by the search engine’s specialists.
Step #5. Usability of the Internet Resource.
If you expect site visitors to make purchases, they should know exactly where, what, and how to order. And if they don’t find the product (or service) they need, they must know where to find out about it on your resource.
You should clearly understand that the convenience and speed of ordering influence not just visitor behavior, but also guarantee increased conversion. The Artemy Lebedev Studio (for example) was able to achieve a 15% increase in conversion just by working qualitatively on the cart.
Regardless of the type of information on your platform, you can’t do without clear navigation, eye-friendly design, and beautiful images. “Webvizor” will help you in this – it shows you (down to each mouse movement) how users interact with the site.
Step #6. Don’t forget continual content updates.
Without this step, your site will not gain popularity among users. Try regularly updating information and indicating where and what exactly has been updated in the online resource map. Search engines react very well to various updates.
