The Basics Of User Behavior Metrics

User behaviour metric is all about having a knowledge of how your users interact with your page. What you know about your website users will determine how satisfactory your website will be. Studying your users can help you to be better equipped to make smart and relevant choices about your website. User behaviour metrics help you to understand user interactions on your website. It helps you to monitor how many people interact with your site and to determine the particular pages that users engage in and are able to interact with the most.

User behaviour metrics provide you with helpful information about user interaction on your website. It is usually a standard metric of the number of users interacting with your website, the number of sessions they create and the web pages or screens that they visit.

Beyond user behaviour metrics helping you to learn about how users interact with your webpage, it also affects your ranking on Google. It’s a major dictator of how Google ranks your webpage in the SERPs. This ranking is a factor of the relevance of your page (relevancy ranking). Google puts into consideration your relevant pages to award you a rank.

Before your webpage can be ranked, Google makes use of user data metrics to determine the relevance of your page. If users interact with your page well, it shows that you’ve got some relevant contents in there.

How Google determines your ranking is highly dependent on user behaviour. If a particular page on your website gets more clicks and witness higher engagement and interaction than competing pages, Google gets signalled that users are finding the page very helpful. Google then ranks the page higher because the user behaviour metric indicates that the page is more relevant than other pages.

Google’s ex-search quality executive, Udi Member said “Google ranking is affected by click data. If Google discovers that 80 per cent of people click on Result 2 and only 10 percent click on Result 1, that indicates that Result 2 is more relevant than Result 1, so we switch it”. A page that meets the need of users will definitely get a higher ranking.

User Behavior Metrics That Matter Most

Now that you know how user behaviour can affect your ranking, it means you have to work on how to monitor and improve your user behaviour if you intend to excel in modern SEO. The number of traffic your site is getting doesn’t matter. You may be getting great traffic without engaging your users. No matter how much traffic on your website, your users won’t be able to engage with it.

Google takes note of every one of these activities and the effect shows on your ranking. In order for you to understand your grace with Google, you need to get familiar the specific metrics Google is using to determine user behaviour & relevance. The following are tips to improve on your user data;

Click-Through Rate

The Click-through rate or CTR for short is a measure of the number of people who click a link vs the number of users who saw the page. CTR = clicks/impressions. Google’s Udi Manber went forward to confirm that clicks are a great way to determine the ranking of a particular page. Google take clicks as an impression or vote of confidence for a page to get ranked.

When a page gets more clicks than other competitive pages, it means such page is relevant and it is meeting the needs of many users. This simply means such a post is the best match for any information about the search topic.

• How to know Your Click-Through Rate

Knowing your Click-through rate is not a difficult process. Login to Google search console, look over to the block of numbers at the top. The third one shows the average Click-through rate for your website. Right below that, you can see the CTR for individual pages/ URL and their metrics.

• How to improve your Click-through rate

Optimization is important

Sites with higher ranking have higher CTR. For example, on the first page of Google Search results, the first five search result takes 67.60% of all clicks made while the other 6 -10 results take just 3.73%.

It is important to improve on optimizing your website, from writing original end engaging contents to keyword research, link building, and effective technical SEO, everything has to be optimized.

SERP features

SERP features can help to generate organic results. They include improved features like snippets, breadcrumb links, stars, knowledge graph etc. They usually appear at the utmost top of the result page. You will need to look into your SERP features, they need to be optimized to give your content the boost it needs.

Title tag and Description

Title tags and descriptions are also a determinant to how a page gets ranked. Meanwhile, they are also important for CTR. If you can’t generate enough CTR for a page that has a good ranking, then you may consider changing your title tag and description. Title tags and description can be of a great tool to improve your Click-through rate. You can also consider any paid media data that have phrases that can help with getting high clicks.

Time on page

This is the average time a user spends on a page. It is used to determine the relevance of a page. Users spend more time on relevant pages. A low time indicates that the page couldn’t meet the need of the user, thus it isn’t relevant.

How to know it: log in to Google Analytics account, click on Acquisition and select All Traffic> Channels. Then select Organic, and a landing page view. Ensure that you set a large data time range for you to return enough data. The following are ways to improve user’s time on your page;

Make your page more interactive: an interactive page has the power to hold users down on your page. Make use of images, videos, FAQS, comments,  and others.

Consider the goal of the page: Some pages do not require much time, especially in a case where you only intend to generate conversions. Just make sure the content is effective, engaging, and relevant.

Bounce Rate

Quite similar to time on page but still differ in some ways. Bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site without checking other pages. A bounce rate of 60% means you have 60% of people who did not bother to explore your menu options or other pages. There are two factors that determine your bounce rate:

1. a) The engagement power of your website
2. b) Wrong visitors.

How to improve your bounce rate

• Make your content skimmable. At a glance, users should able to determine if your content is what they need.
• Stay on the topic. Avoid diverting to other things that do not relate to your topic. Ensure that you don’t include what doesn’t match with your topic.
• Check your site speed. Users don’t like sites with low speed. An average person will wait for 4 secs and if your page hasn’t still loaded, they bounce back to find another page.