SEO has always been an integral part of marketing strategy of any SME of major enterprise because of the importance it holds to beat your competitors down and to stay on the top.
Search engine optimization has made people’s life easy and difficult at the same time since few years back when SEO wasn’t a common term, it was much easier for businesses and websites to rank better and gain more attention online and eventually end up getting more customers for your business. When compared to the situation now, one thing is clear for sure and that is the amount of competition businesses receiving due to more complex and tougher process to rank your website better on search engines.
This article is an initial step towards a series of blogs which will cover some major outbreaks of SEO and how are they going to behave in 2018. In short, HOW SEO IS GOING TO AFFECT OUR LIVES IN 2018.
SEO is tricky and requires a lot of hard work to gain better visibility on search engines. Let it be Google or Bing or Yahoo or any other search engine from the list of famous search engines, you should improve your research skills to attain good transformation of your website and hit the bulls eye.
It all started with few factors on which search engines wanted your website to excel and in return they would favor you with better rankings. But now it is way more than that and the first thing that we are going to discuss about is the current google algorithm and how it responds to queries from the users.
Google’s current search engine algorithm, RANKBRAIN, is a masterpiece of human invention since it purely works on AI (Artificial Intelligence).
RankBrain is a machine learning system that helps Google sort their search results.
That might sound complicated, but it isn’t.
RankBrain simply measures how users interact with the search results…
…and ranks them accordingly.
For an example, let’s say you searched for “continental food” on Google.
The #3 result looks appealing. So you quickly click on it.
And when you get there…wow! It’s the best blog about continental food you’ve ever read. So you check it from top to bottom with patience.
RankBrain is going to take note…and likely give that #3 result a rankings boost.
On the other hand, let’s say that you do the same search. But this time, you click on the #1 result without even looking.
But the content is TERRIBLE. So you bounce from the page after a few seconds. And you click on the #3 result to find something about food that’s actually worth reading.
RankBrain will also notice this. And if enough people quickly bounce from that result, Google will demote it from the #1 spot.
As you can see, RankBrain focuses on two things:
1. How long someone spends on your page (Dwell Time)
2. The percentage of people that click on your result (Click Through Rate)
Let’s have a better look on both of these terms.
Dwell Time=how long a Google searcher spends on your page.
As it turns out, RankBrain pays A LOT of attention to Dwell Time.
In fact, the head of Google Brain in Canada recently confirmed that Google uses Dwell Time as a ranking signal. He stated that RankBrain measures when:
“someone clicks on a page and stays on that page, when they go back”
And a recent industry study by SearchMetrics supports this statement. They found that the average Dwell Time for a top 10 Google result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
If you’ve spent any time digging through your Google Analytics, you know that a 3+ minute Dwell Time is legit.
And it’s no coincidence that pages with awesome Dwell Time tend to rank best. In fact, RankBrain is upranking these pages for that exact reason.
This makes sense if you think about it:
If you spend a long time on a page, you probably like the content on that page.
And if enough people feel the same way, Google will uprank that content to make it easier to find.
Google Engineer Paul Haahr caused a stir in the SEO world when he put up this slide at a conference:
This slide basically says:
“RankBrain sometimes ranks pages higher up than they “should” rank.
And if that page gets an above-average CTR, we use that as a sign that the page should get a permanent rankings boost.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, if no one clicks on your result, why would Google keep it on the first page?
And if your site is getting clicked on like there’s no tomorrow, why would Google keep it buried in the #9 spot?
And here is an amazing infographic by Brain Dean of backlinko and Larry Kim from Mobile Monkey which explains few simple strategies that you can use to boost CTR.
Enjoy!
Hope you have learned something of interest with this article.
FYI this is just a start to a series of informative articles which covers up various aspects of how SEO is going to affect our lives in 2018.
That’s all for now folks. Keep reading weblizar blogs.
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