How Engaged your visitors are on your site is important for SEO now and well into the future.
I discuss Engagement SEO in great detail in the video below. I give some strong free recommendations for engaging your website visitors better in the video.
Full Video Transcript below:
Hi, David Hood here at the Dallas SEO Geek and this video is about Engagement SEO. This is actually very important for SEO now and into the future. Google has been tracking this for a while and they’ve been integrating it more and more and I think ultimately like what they see with it a lot because it can dramatically affect the results. Google can see a lot of what the traffic on the internet is doing, even if they’re not on a Google site.
A lot of sites have analytics installed so they can see not only every visitor that is on that site, but if a visitor comes to that site, most of the time that site will pass a reference field, essentially saying, “Hey, this visitor came from Facebook.” Google sees that, but they definitely also see if someone clicks out from a site to another site. They’re watching that.
Then also, the most important thing that they’re watching is how visitors respond to the search results. If they click on your site, do they come back really quickly and look for more results? Or do they stay a long time? Or even better, not come back at all and find their answer on that website? That brings me to Google’s primary goal.
Their primary goal, what they ultimately want to do is to give the query or the searcher for a certain query, the answer that they’re looking for. If a website does that, then that is quality content and they highly, highly want to rank that. This is actually a trump card for other parts of SEO. You have to do the on page, and the off page, and engagements is a kind of on page. It can be looked at from a higher level standpoint, but that’s a little bit outside the scope of this video.
Basically, it’s kind of its own thing in terms of how Google looks at it and how it does trump other things. In fact, a site could be penalized, but if its engagement SEO is good enough, if it highly engages the visitors, or it answers a very specific query very well according to how Google measures that, then it trumps it. It trumps any negative thing that Google might think about your site. You could have the worst site in the world in terms of all the Google metrics, if Google knows that its highly engaging and it answers the queries of the visitors, they will not care.
You can’t start necessarily with engagement SEO because you have to get people there in the first place and you have to get ranked for what you want to rank for, at least a little bit and get a little bit of traffic going there. This is not necessarily where you start, other than to make sure that you’re building the right foundation to where you can have engagement SEO done to where it’s not that hard, or it’s built into your processes, and much simpler, and very inexpensive, and very powerful is what I’m going to talk about in a little bit.
There’s really one big metric that we’re going to use to measure engagement. There are several metrics, but the one I think matters the most is ultimately how long people are on your site. Time on site, that’s something really huge. If a visitor is searching for something and they come and they spend 10 seconds on your site versus six minutes, okay that is a huge, huge, huge difference.
Google, even if they come back to the search results, if it’s after six minutes of browsing around on your site, that’s very good. There are other metrics like bounce rate and stuff like that, but ultimately to keep it simple, we can think of things in terms of how long we can keep people on a site. How long can we keep them engaged with the site. Especially again, if you’re ranking for something.
If you’re not ranking for something, it’s not quite as important that you have this perfect, but if you’re high up on the first page, or on the first page at all for a big search phrase, at that point you definitely want to make sure everything is all set up right. With my processes, it’ll already be there and your engagement will already be largely taken care of.
I can’t stress how important engagement is going to be. Not just for now, but into the future. There’s just no point in which Google is going to say, “You know what? We don’t really care what our visitors do.” They’re just not going to do that. Ultimately, that’s what they want. Again, back to their primary goal. They want to serve up the results that answers the queries of their visitors.
That is their job and when they do that really well and they’ve done that much better than other companies for a very long time, that’s why they stole the market share and never really gave it back because they provide very high quality results. They answer our queries. Google does an amazing job for our world and in terms of just a major development that everybody gets to take advantage of.
Think about how easy it is to look something up with Google versus encyclopedias 20 years ago. It’s just astronomical. You can find an answer to just about any question that’s factual in seconds and Google is largely responsible for that. I digress. How are we going to work on this engagement SEO in kind of a simple way? There’s more to what I’m going to talk about but this is kind of the basis for it.
Video. Why video? Well, first of all video can be very inexpensive and easy to make. You can see right here, this is actually a smartphone on a tripod. This is not my tripod, but I bought a tripod that fit with my smartphone for like $20 or $30 off Amazon. You already got a smartphone and it shoots HD video. You really don’t have a whole lot of excuse not to have video. Not only that, but there’s software out there that costs $20 a month that can make really awesome videos in five or ten minutes. Really cool looking, if you’ve ever seen those animation ones, that’s what I’m talking about that.
Now, even further. It’s so easy to make videos that you can hire people for $5 on the internet to make you a pretty good looking video. There’s a lot of different ways to approach this, but ultimately this is the best and most engaging form of content, video. I would consider anything really rich media is more engaging. A picture is very engaging as well. Instagram, Pinterest … The reason why Pinterest took off is because it’s heavily focused on being visually pleasing. It does that very well.
Not just video. Video is the easiest to make. Video actually is easier to make the images but also from video, you can get images. You can take a video and create images out of it. If you make videos, you have images. Not only that, but you can make text out of videos. Ultimately, it comes down to anytime someone can click and press a button, and sit back, and be entertained or educated without putting any effort into it, people are just going to gravitate towards that. They’re going to spend more time on that.
Again, this is why Google bought YouTube, and they own YouTube, and they keep YouTube, and they love YouTube. That’s another great thing about making videos. You an use YouTube and YouTube videos can rank by themselves or they can just be an authoritative channel that builds the authority of your site. Not only that but it makes it very easy and free to upload and hold your videos, and also to embed your videos on your sites or your other properties.
You can share these videos very well and there’s really … It’s very safe and very powerful. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. It gets searched more than Bing and Yahoo. YouTube is extremely, extremely useful and having a handful or a bunch of YouTube videos uploaded onto your own YouTube that you control is an extremely valuable business asset from an SEO standpoint and from other standpoints as well.
To circle back around, when we put videos on our site and Google sends a visitor there and they click on the video, first of all if it’s YouTube that is embedded on the site, they see that and that’s a good sign not just for the website but for the video. Again, they kind of build each other, but they click on it and they kind of sit back.
If you just get them there for 90 seconds, a lot of times that’s good enough because really bad sites … This is what you definitely don’t want is when people spend 10 or 15 second or less on a site, that’s when you could really be in trouble. If Google is sending you visitors and they’re bouncing back very quickly, they’re not going to send you visitors for very long and so it’s going to be difficult if you get a lot of traffic that bounces very quickly. That’s not what we want and video is one of the best ways to do that.
Not only that but you don’t even have to use your own videos. You can embed somebody else’s video, a non-competitor but that still kind of talks about something that you’re markedly interested in. You can use somebody else’s video as part of the YouTube creative license or whatever their license information is. You can embed another person’s video on your site and that’s totally legit. There’s nothing wrong with that and it helps your site.
If you don’t have your own videos, you can use other peoples. It’s much better if you have your own, for sure. There’s several pieces of this that ties everything together that I can’t really go into in this video that I’m creating, but if you want to know more about how to make your site very engaging and create a very safe barrier around your site. If you have a highly engaging site, it’s pretty hard to be penalized at all even if you have somebody spam you or do some negative SEO on you.
Not only that, ultimately that is what Google wants. Sending people to your site and getting them to spend at least a few minutes on there, preferably with videos. If you want to learn more about how to do that, or where your opportunities for engagement SEO are, shoot me an e-mail or fill out my discovery form, which you can find on my website. Or get free SEO analysis, or you can just click on ‘Discovery’. Either one will be fine and I will take a look at your site and give you a free analysis.
Thanks for watching. Let me know if you have any questions. Bye.
