[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]
Your organic click-through rate is ridiculously important. While it may not be a direct ranking signal that's even part of Google's core algorithm, I believe CTR is an indirect signal that definitely impacts rank. And if you improve your click-through rate, you should see your rankings and conversions improve.
Although having a high organic CTR is crucial, having positive website engagement metrics is even more critical. What value is there in getting hundreds or thousands of people to click on your brilliant headlines if those people don't stick around for more than a few seconds?
If Google values dwell time, is there a way to see it? YES! Today I'll share some data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings.
One important note before we get started: Please don't focus too much on the absolute bounce rate and time on site figures discussed in this article. We are only looking at figures for one particular vertical. The minimum expected engagement will vary by industry and query type.
Does Google measure dwell time? How is that different from bounce rate & time on site?
Yes. We know Google measures dwell time, or how much time a visitor actually spends on a page before returning to the SERPs.
In 2011, Google announced a new option that allowed us to block domains from appearing in our search results. If you clicked on a result and then returned to the SERP from the website within a few seconds, Google's blocked sites feature would appear. Clicking it would let you block all results from that site.
Google told us they would study the data and considered using it as a ranking signal.
Although that feature is no longer with us, we know it was based on whether (and how quickly) you bounced back. So we know Google is definitely measuring dwell time.
The problem is, we don't have a way to measure dwell time. However, we can measure three engagement metrics that are proportional to and directionally equivalent to dwell time: bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate.
Does Bounce Rate Impact Organic Position?
OK, let's get the official Google line out of the way. Google's Gary Illyes tweeted the following in 2015: "we don't use analytics/bounce rate in search ranking." Matt Cutts said similar in the past. Pretty clear, right?
However, I'm not saying that bounce rate is used as a direct ranking factor. And Google definitely doesn't need Google Analytics to compute dwell time. What I believe is that, in some Rube Goldbergian way, bounce rate does in fact (indirectly) impact rankings.
Does the data back that up? We looked to see if the bounce rate of the pages/keywords we were ranking for had any relationship to their ranking. Check out this graph:
This is very peculiar. Notice the "kink" between positions 4 and 5? In mathematical terms, this is called a "discontinuous function." What's happening here?
Well, it seems like for this particular keyword niche, as long as you have a low bounce rate (below 76 percent) then you're more likely to show up in positions 1 through 4. However, if your bounce rate is higher (above 78 percent), then you're much less likely to show up in those coveted top 4 positions.
Am I saying bounce rate is part of the core search algorithm Google uses? No.
But I think there’s definitely a relationship between bounce rate and rankings. Looking at that graph, it leads me to believe that it's no accident — but in fact algorithmic in nature.
My guess is that algorithms use user engagement as a validation method. Think of it more like a "check" on click-through rates within the existing algorithm that hasn't been quantified.
Undoubtedly, click-through rates can be gamed. For example, I could promise you the digital equivalent of free beer and have a ridiculously high click-through rate.
Image via Fox.
But if there's no free beer to be had, most (if not all) of that traffic will bounce right back.
Image via Fox.
So I believe Google is measuring dwell time (which is proportional to bounce rate) to check whether websites getting high CTRs actually deserve it and if the clicks are indeed valid, or if it's just click bait.
One other question this discussion obviously raises is: do higher rankings cause higher engagement rates, as opposed to the other way around? Or could both of these be caused by some a completely unrelated factor?
Well, unless you work at Google (and even then!) you may never know all the secrets of Google's algorithm. There are things we know we don't know!
Regardless, improving user engagement metrics, like bounce rate, will still have its own benefits. A lower bounce rate is just an indicator of success, not a guarantee of it.
Does time on site impact organic position?
Now let's look at time on site, another metric we can measure that is proportional to dwell time. This graph also has a "kink" in the curve:
It's easy to see that if your keyword/content pairs have decent time on site, then you're more likely to be in top organic positions 1–6. If engagement is weak on average, however, then you're more likely to be in positions 7 or lower.
Interestingly, you get no additional points after you cross a minimum threshold of time on site. Even if people are spending 2 hours on your site, it doesn't matter. I think you've passed Google's test — passing it by even more doesn't result in any additional bonus points.
Image via Fox.
Larry's Theory: Google uses dwell time — which we can't measure, but is proportional to user engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates — to validate click-through rates. These metrics help Google figure out whether users ultimately got what they were looking for.
Conversion rates: The ultimate metric
So now let's talk about conversion rates. We know that higher click-through rates typically translate into higher conversion rates:
If you can get people really excited about clicking on something, that excitement typically carries through to a purchase or sign-up.
So what we need is an Engagement Rate Unicorn/Donkey Detector, to detect high and low engagement rates.
Before we go any further, we need to know: what is a good conversion rate?
On average across all industries, site-wide conversion rate for a website is around 2 percent (the donkeys), while conversion rates for the top 10 percent of websites (the unicorns) get 11 percent and above. While absolute conversion rates vary wildly by industry, unicorns always outperform donkeys by 3–5x regardless of industry.
Remember, conversion rates are a very important success metric because you get the most value (you actually captured leads, sold your product, got people to sign up for your newsletter, or visitors did whatever else it was you wanted them to do), which means the user found what they were looking for.
How do you turn conversion rate donkeys into unicorns?
Image via Fox.
The way you don't get there is by making little changes. The difference between donkeys and unicorns is so huge. If you want to increase your conversion rates by 3x to 5x, then small, incremental changes of 2 or 3 percent usually won't cut it.
What should you do?
1. Change your offer (in a BIG way)
Rather than A/B testing button color or image changes, you might be better off trashing your current offer and doing a new one.
Ask yourself: Why in the world are 98 percent of the people who see your offer not taking you up on it? Well, it's probably because your offer sucks.
Image via Fox.
What can you offer that will resonate enough that +10 percent of people would be excited about signing up for it or buying it on the spot?
Be open-minded. The answer is probably something adjacent to what you're currently doing.
For example, for my own company, five years ago our primary offer was to sign up for a trial of our software. It was somewhat complicated, people had to learn how to use the software, and not everyone made it through the process.
Then I had an epiphany: Why don't I just grade people's accounts without having them do a trial of our PPC management software, and just give them a report card? That increased my conversion and engagement rates by 10x, and the gains persisted over time. There is much more leverage in changing the offer versus, say, the image on an existing offer.
2. Use Facebook Ads
You can influence users even before they do searches. Brand awareness creates a bias in people's minds which has a ridiculously huge impact on user engagement signals. We can do this with Facebook Ads.
You want to promote inspirational, compelling, memorable content to your target market. Although they'll consume your content, they won't convert to leads and sales right away. Remember, love takes time.
Image via Fox.
Rather, your goal is to bias them so in the future they'll do a search for your product. If it's an unbranded search, having been exposed to your marketing materials in the past, they'll be more likely to click on and choose you now.
Facebook and many other vendors have conducted lift studies that prove that Facebook ads impact clicks and conversions you'll get from paid and organic search.
You won't get away with promoting junk. You have to promote your unicorns.
For this, we'll use Facebook's:
- Interest-Based Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the things you're selling.
- Demographic Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the stuff you're selling, maybe within the next month.
- Behavioral Targeting to reach the people who buy stuff that is related to the stuff you're selling.
For example, let's say you're a florist or jeweler. You can target Facebook ads at people who will celebrate an anniversary within the next 30 days.
Why would you want to do this? Because you know these people will be searching for keywords relating to flowers and jewelry soon. That's how you can start biasing them to get them to have happy thoughts about your business, increasing the likelihood that they'll click on you, but more importantly, convert.
It's not just Facebook. You can also buy image display ads on Google's Display Network. You can use Custom Affinity Audiences to target people who have searched on keywords you're interested in, but didn't click through to your site (or you can specify certain categories related to your business).
3. Remarketing
Image via Fox.
People are busy and have short attention spans. If you aren't using remarketing, essentially you're investing a ton of time and money into your SEO and marketing efforts just to get people to visit one time. That's crazy.
You want to make sure the people who gave you a look to see what your site was about never forget you so that subsequent searches always go your way. You want them to stay engaged and convert.
Remarketing greatly impacts engagement metrics like dwell time, conversion rate, and time on site because people are more familiar with you, which means they're more likely to be engaged with you for longer.
There's a reason we spent nearly a million dollars on remarketing last year. Investing in remarketing:
- Boosted repeat visits by 50 percent.
- Increased conversions by 51 percent.
- Grew average time-on-site by 300 percent.
These are huge numbers for a minimal investment (display ads average around $10 for 1,000 views).
It's your job to convert or squeeze as much money as you can from people who are already in the market for what you sell. So use remarketing to increase brand familiarity and increase user engagement metrics, while simultaneously turning the people who bounced off your site in the past into leads now.
4. Clean up your bad neighborhoods!
If you've tried all of the above (and other ways to improve engagement rates) and still have bad neighborhoods on your websites that have low CTR and/or user engagement rates — just delete them. Why?
I believe that terrible engagement metrics will lead to a death spiral where your site gets less clicks, less leads, less sales, and even lower rankings. And who wants that?
Now, I don't have any proof of this, but the software engineer in me suspects that it would be very difficult for Google to compute engagement rates for every keyword/page combination on the Internet. They would need to lean on a "domain-level engagement score" to fall back on in the event that more granular data wasn't available. Google does something conceptually similar in AdWords by having both account-level and keyword-level Quality Scores. It's also similar to how many believe that Google considers links pointing to your domain and also individual pages on your site when computing organic rankings (a moment of silence for our beloved Google PageRank Toolbar). Dumping your very worst neighborhoods — only if all attempts to resuscitate have failed miserably — would, in theory, raise a domain-level score, if it existed.
Obviously better CTRs, higher engagement rates, and improved conversion rates lead to more leads and sales. But I also believe that improvement in these metrics will lead to better organic search rankings, creating a virtuous cycle of even more clicks and conversions.
Conclusion
It's becoming increasingly clear that organic CTR matters. But you might not realize that high CTRs with low engagement rates aren't that meaningful.
Image via Fox.
So no cheap tricks, guys! Don't invest in sites that specialize in gaming your click-through rates. Even though they might work now to an extent, they won't work well in the future. Google is good at fighting click fraud on ad networks, so you can expect them to apply those same learnings to fight organic search click fraud.
I would prioritize click-through rate and conversion rate (or engagement) optimization at the very top of the most impactful on-page-SEO efforts.
At the very least you'll get more conversions. But if I'm right, you'll not only get more conversions, but you'll get better rankings, which will lead to more conversions and even better rankings.
So use the tactics and strategies from this post to diagnose your engagement rates, and then start optimizing them!
My problem with the article is that you make huge leaps from a very limited data set (some of your own articles) to some pretty sweeping conclusions. And the fact that at several points you say the equivalent of "we have not evidence that X is true, but I choose to believe...." Great to share your beliefs, but not to present them as actionable data.
Indeed your bounce rate graph is interesting, but would need confirmation by others and a larger and more diverse data set before I'd put any money on it. Replication of results is an important part of any scientific investigation.
Overall, though, just as with claims that social media is a ranking signal, there may be many things that account for some of your results that you are not taking into account. It may just be that sites that rank well for the KWs you're looking at also tend to be sites that have low bounce rates or high CTRs, but it does not follow that therefore those are causing the higher rankings.
Also, at SMX West Google's Paul Haar answered very clearly about how Google uses CTR and dwell time. He categorically stated that they do NOT influence rankings. Rather, they sometimes use them as search quality testers. They will run a test for a certain query with a limited set of users and use those factors as a quick evaluation of the quality of their results. However, he strongly emphasized that the results are NOT used to alter the rankings even of the tested results. Instead, what is learned is used as feedback for improving the overall algorithms.
I think you actually have a lot of good advice in general here for improving UX and UI and user experience, and thereby improving conversions and brand reputation. But to suggest that they are affecting search results is a leap I don't think you have at all proven.
thanks for commenting, both here and on facebook. as i mentioned there, just a few points:
I agree with Mark, good article but some huge jumps. Especially on bounce rates, I will use one of Matts own examples. I search for something I am looking for, land on Wikipedia, read information I need and bounce, time on site 90 seconds. Was this a bad thing, No, I found what I was looking for. Why would you then add a ranking penalty to the site that answered my question. Now since no matter how smart a Google bot thinks it is, it is not yet capable of knowing if i found what I was looking for. Therefore it would be unfair to rank a site on bounce rate and dwell time. That doesn't mean that with new software will come new techniques. IE: If I bounce away from a Shop in 90 seconds or less and then go to another shop using the same search term where I spend 10 minutes might in the future effect your rank. However as of this moment in time it is not a ranking factor.
read section on dwell time vs. bounce rate.
Interesting stuff. I personally think there are certain times when high bounce rate isn't necessarily a bad thing. If for example you want to go to the cinema, you search "What's on at the Cinema + Local Town", land on a page which has a great list of all the films showing that night + a number to call. You bounce off the page, call the cinema and book 4 tickets. 100% bounce rate and 4 transactions!
If users are digging 10 pages deep on your website, that could also mean that aren't finding what they are looking for! Don't get me wrong, I want low bounce rates as I want to keep people on my websites, but there are lots of exceptions to the rule.
I recently ran a large PPC campaign where the goal was to get users to download a PDF. Bounce rate was 90%, results were the best ever. Over and out.
yes exactly. two things here. (1) in the post i said right at the opening to not to pay attention too much to the absolute numbers in this post. like 73% bounce rate or whatever - because expected (or average) engagement rates vary wildly for different niches and query types. (2) keep in mind that i'm not saying that google looks at bounce rates. i'm saying they're looking at dwell time (which we can't measure directly, but is on average, proportional to bounce rate and other website metrics). so, if you had a high performing PPC campaign with high bounce rate, provided that the user didn't hit "back" and return to the SERP (which seems likely if they're converting well) then you're good!
Agreed! My comments were more about "should Google consider high bounce rate a bad thing (if indeed they actually do like you say) given that in some cases it means the users found what they wanted right away", than questioning your points. All of which make perfect sense!
Another example I like is this one. If you search for 'Guitar tuner', you'll likely find this cool resource in 2nd: https://www2.fender.com/experience/online-guitar-tu...
So users tune their guitar, then go off and play a tune. Yes some may click deeper, but the majority must bounce (especially returning users). Great experience in that users get what they wanted (a nicely tuned guitar), but the message to Google is that they didn't stick around. So many potential outcomes on this subject. Thanks!
i totally get what you were saying. we're actually on the same page. when i say that engagement rates vary greatly by industry and query type, i'm agreeing with you that there are many instances where it's not desirable to have a long session.
Correlation is not causation. Have you considered that perhaps the people who click on the first 1-4 links are more likely to spend longer at the destination than those who click links that are lower down? If they've reached the 6th or 7th link and click it they are probably already bored and impatient and therefore likely to linger less at the destination.
This would also account for the jump in the bounce rates between your 4th and 5th results.
yes correlation is not causation however these particular correlations look very un-natural -- see the "kink" (discontinuity) in the slope of the chart. leads me to believe the relationship is algorithmic in nature.
Hey Larry, I do agree that dwell time (engagements) plays an important role as a ranking factor and CTR (Organic CTR) do posses some value but these all are our assumption. Still there are many people who says this is a ranking factor or some not. This doesn't make clear that whether its or not but looking on the data making, doing analysis will give us little bit of idea what could be a ranking factor in future cos still its not mentioned by Google.
Anyways thanks for another wonderful post Larry.
Good Morning Larry,
I totally agree in the fact that dwell time is really important for any kind of web. It's the one that reflects whether your content is valuable (and I'm talking about quality, not quantity) and if the content is great people is going to be around your web more time, google is going to notice, and finally, you'll get a better positioning.
Lots of people creates content as an obligation cause they've to keep maintaining the blog and don't really pay much attention to it, and that's a mistake that can really affect our rankings.
Congrats for such a detailed post!
Great article Larry. One thing I'd add, is that while dwell time and bounce rate are useful engagement metrics to monitor, as a site owner I'd say they can easily lead you astray. If you increase time on page or reduce bounce rate, it may have potentially made the user experience worse (took longer or had to visit more pages, to meet their goal).
I'd suggest going to another level with the analysis and attempt to understand 'user intent' and making sure that conversions are aligned. If you're able to identify what your users are attempting to gain from your page (based on their search). Satisfying the user goal (not your personal/company goal) is the ultimate form of engagement.
From Google's perspective I expect the key measurement of user 'satisfaction' with a result, is the pogostick benchmark (yeah, yeah Yahoo! patent, I know). For example:
Unfortunately, we as site owners have no way to measure this metric, hence why the focus on satisfying user intent is key.
We agree. See section called "Does Google measure dwell time? How is that different from bounce rate & time on site?". What u call pogo stick is what I call dwell time.
Awesome article, Larry!
I 100% agree that CTR and dwell time are used as validation methods to help make sure the first page is what users want.
As you said, even if dwell time isn't used by Google in any way (which is unlikely), you should still optimize for it.
And my dwell time on this post was helped by the fact that it was super actionable...and had lots of Simpsons references :)
(that's my favorite show!)
thanks brian. ha ha omg the simpsons. i can't believe i've been watching that since the early 90s. it's such a treasure trove of memeable moments.
Good Afternoon Larry,
I'm in total agreement with you! It makes perfect sense that engagement would be used to validate whether or not a site's content is deserving of those top rankings. Thanks as always, I've enjoyed your last few posts and your unwavering appreciation for the Simpsons. I'll make sure to share this with our team!
Man oh man, I've been questioning my continued membership of Moz for some time now and this article does not help.
Seriously people, just think about some stuff apart from what Google have made very clear about Bounce Rate / Dwell Time / 'Engagement Rate' (whatever that really is) / Time On Site etc.
'Dwell time' and 'Bounce rate' would actually look great on those spammy sites that make you click more to find what you want. Hands up anyone who has not seen those godawful mobile adsense sites with CTA's like 'Wait Till You See What Happens Next' or 'Number 6 in Our Series Will Shock You'. Is that what Google really wants to encourage? (We know it is not).
What about Search Intent? - If I'm looking for an emergency plumber or electrician or snake handler, I'm going to be mere seconds on the website before calling and getting back to my little domestic emergency. Tiny dwell time, total bounce but I got what I needed so it was a successful search!
What about the niche? If I'm checking out restaurants I might be onsite longer than if I'm on dentist websites?
What about device? If I'm on mobile I might want to be real quick versus being on my home or free wi-fi? (not to mention your mobile site experience might be good or bad).
What about locality and its relationship to my intent? Am I after a local supplier or a product delivery from Amazon, either of which might be days or weeks away and come with different expectations?
This article is full of 'I Believe' statements - there's nothing wrong with that, but, some folk believe in the Elephant God, the God of Fire, Astrology, various Religions around the world, Homeopathy and many more, even though there is no evidence, at all, to support their beliefs.
Enjoyed the read but too many holes and too many inappropriate conclusions for folks at Moz who are trying to learn more about online marketing.
hi read section on dwell time vs bounce rate
Hi Larry,
Thank you for the detail overview on this topic, as many folks believe the same however some also think that this is not the ranking factor even indirectly.
However, after reading your piece of work, i strongly beleive in and support your argument.
thanks. it's a bit confusing because some people at google say that it's a factor, while others deny it. however, the my experiments lead me to believe that it matters.
Hello Larry,
Thanks for the post. I hope that one day website engagement will start playing even a bigger role for Google. Just like for Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, where website engagement is one of the most important ranking factors.
Heck, here in Russia we even have pure black hat 'website engagement farms' where users (mostly teenagers) are getting paid to imitate great engagement on sites :D
yeah me too! i think they're already doing it and/or moving in that direction. it's just that they don't talk too much about it or downplay it. just don't use the click farms... you will get caught!
I 100% agree with this.
thanks john!
Larry thanks for this research.
At characteristics enunciated before I should also mention that maybe your offer has not triumphed not have properly selected your target audience.
Yes. a high bounce rate can be fixed in 2 ways: change your target audience to be more aligned with your offering (which i guess would imply optimizing for different keywords in organic search) or changing your offer to align with the audience of people who currently are visiting your page.
Hi Larry,First of all thanks for this useful post.Higher CTR is gold for any site owner.it will automatically reduce bounce rate which ensures site quality.We run tracking site and have noticed people just track their shipment and leave the site.We decided to write articles regarding courier and tracking related issue.We found within two months significant site improvement.We think more site engagement really helps organic rankings factors.
i agree!
Hi Kim, I realized that my rankings in Google are affected by time on site spended by my visitors!
Anyway nice article , very informative!
indirectly, yes!
In our agency we always put the quality in front of the quantity. We know sometimes it may take a bit longer to create really nice content, but we personally think that it's always worth it when it comes to engaging your readers.
Really nice post!!!
yeah i guess it all boils down to that in the end.
Hi Larry,
First of all thanks for a wonderful post. I have query for Does time on site impact organic position?
1) You mean to say if visitor say on 1 page 500 seconds then organic position will be between from 1 to 6? is it?
2) In google analytic it is showing "Avg session duration" can I consider this as Time spend by visitor on page?
Thanks!
Hi Larry
To Google is a key factor user experience, and if the residence time is high, we are ahead of the first indication that this experience is still good
yes!
Agree! My organic click-through rate is increased recently pretty well after making important updates and removed unnecessary elements in my gaming website. Thanks for the valuable information.
awesome. say no to low CTR!
This article is a typical illustration what goes wrong if authors prefer quantity over quality and blogs are just publishing anything they get served. You make some good points, but the global story is messy.
1. The title doesn't cover the post. You start by covering engagement metrics (time on site/bounce rate) but then move over to conversion rate (the ultimate metric). Link with organic rankings? The parts on increasing conversion rate and actions you can take are not bad but are not related to the main topic.
2. I don't necessarily disagree that engagement has influence on rankings. I disagree however that time on site / bounce rate as provided by Google Analytics are good measures to track them. A better measure would be to use adjusted bounce rate . Cleaning "bad neighbourhoods" based on bounce rate / time on site as presented "out of the box" from Analytics site could be a disaster. On some of our sites we had bounce rates >80% and time on site less than 60sec where have consistent top 3 positions for very competitive keywords. We moved to adjusted bounce rate and saw that engagement in fact was pretty high. Adjusting bounce rate also improved measurement of time on site (time on page is not measured for bounced visits - check this article on how time on site is measured)
3. As already mentioned by Mark your basically provide no data to support your theory. The argument that the community is smart and the article could be considered as an invitation to conduct experiments is weak. As author you should put a minimum effort to get some relevant data to support your believes. To put it extreme: I could easily state that I strongly believe that all horses behave like dogs based on this data: Texas horse thinks it's a dog and plays dead - if I'm wrong - it's up to the community to experiment and see if I'm right.
4. The conclusion is not related to the post:
"It's becoming increasingly clear that organic CTR matters." => This was covered in the other post on Moz not in thisone
"But you might not realize that high CTRs with low engagement rates aren't that meaningful."=> the point of the article was to show that low engagement had an impact on rankings. As far as I know - lower rankings = lower CTR
"I would prioritize click-through rate and conversion rate (or engagement) optimization at the very top of the most impactful on-page-SEO efforts." - I did not see any argument in your article that showed the relation between conversion rate and SEO - so how could it have an impact
"So use the tactics and strategies from this post to diagnose your engagement rates, and then start optimizing them!" - most of the tactics you mentioned are not about engagement rate but about conversion. Not saying they are bad - but link with engagement is missing. The part on cleaning the site based on bounce rate/time on site is a very bad idea (see my point 2)
hi dirk, thanks for commenting. just a few ideas here.
1) i'm not saying google cares about bounce rates, conversion rates and time on site per se. I'm saying google cares about dwell time, which we can't measure directly. the reason why i'm measuring bounce rates, conversion rates and time on site is that they can be directionally proportional on average (but not always) to dwell time as they may often indicate successful or unsuccessful task completion rates.
2) when i suggest cleaning up bad neighborhoods, an alternative way of saying this would be to focus on fixing or deleting pages that you believe aren't satisfying user search intent. engagement metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates and time on site, may provide you with clues as to if people are finding what they were hoping to find. i didn't mean to suggest blindly blowing away stuff with high bounce rates that met searcher intent. yes, common sense must prevail!
3) there is data in this post. it took weeks to compile.
4) (a) think of my posts as a series. it wasn't possible to put it all in one story because it was too long. that is why i referred to previous post. (B) the point of the article is an experiment that showed a connection between dwell time proxies (bounce rate, time on site) and rankings and what that might mean (c) the relationship between conversion rates and SEO is dwell time. as others have pointed out, high bounce rates and low time on site doesn't always mean bad dwell time / low task completion rate. intuitively conversion rate is a better gauge of task completion, by definition.
thanks.
Very impressive post Larry! But can you please tell me what procedure you opt for increasing your conversion and engagement rates by 10x? You switch your strategy from software sign up trials to report cards, what you did for that actually?
If possible, please reply.
the big idea was to change your offer in a BIG way. not merely changing the image or font colors or button colors but actually offering something better with completely different conversion rate characteristics. I did this for my own website. the new offer was called the adwords grader, which you can see here: https://www.wordstream.com/google-adwords
When user clicks on a search result and then enagage with the site rather than bouncing off back to Google then I believe it helps in organic rankings.
Thanks Larry,
Really liked this detailed research done by you, personally I was bit apprehensive if it really made any impact on rankings or not, thou I always had inclination based on chats and discussions that it does make impact someway or other but now after reading this I am pretty sure that it does make impact on rankings
Regards
Pulkit Thakur
thanks for stopping by pulkit.
Yes, this explains why longer post (2k+ words) tends to rank higher.
yes it does! the google algo probably doesn't favor long form content over short form content, but longer form content may have longer dwell times, which could improve user engagement signals, which matters to rankings, indirectly.
Larry you are great if talk about High CTR, tips from Cyrus Shepard:
My Single Best SEO Tip for Improved Web Traffic
is also help to build high CTR naturally. I do believe it helps to improve bounce rate + time on site + conversion rate= HIGH CTR and rank higher because we answer what user really need.
Yes! it's true. higher CTR will lead to lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates. If you can get people excited about clicking on your listing, that excitement will generally carry through to purchase or sign-up.
Hi! Thanks por the post!
We studied the dwell time on our customers sites and we have seen how the top positions are occupied by Google pages with better metrics. Therefore , we believe that quality content is vital to appear in the top positions. Quality rather than quantity.
great so that agrees with our research too!
Awesome article. I especially like the advice to not use "Cheap Tricks".
Many SEOs and companies are tempted to grab immediate gains despite the repercussions in the future.
thanks so much. just say no to cheap tricks!
What a great article, bookmarking this for sure! Thanks Larry
thanks danielle!
Awesome info as always Larry.
I became aware of the importance of dwell time back in 2014, with a great blog post from Wordstream ;) https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/06/10/dwell....
I appreciate your ongoing efforts to keep us informed by sharing great information.
Cheers!
Hi Larry,
You could theoretically get your bounce rate to near zero percent by firing a timed event milliseconds after the page loads. Do you think that one of the reasons Bounce Rate is not an official ranking factor is that it can be easily manipulated by setting up timed Events in GTM?
You argue that there is a likely correlation between bounce rates and rankings (proven by the bounce rate graph in this article), but if I manipulated the bounce rate via events so that my bounce rate was below 10%, would I get the same correlation results as your graph? I doubt it, and this could be a hole in your conclusion. I also doubt that by manually negating a bounce with a timed event would result in Google rewarding my site with higher rankings.
I think you have written a great article with some really compelling food for thought, but I sort of agree with Mark Traphagen that you have not supplied enough data on the bounce rate correlation to make your argument stick.
Agreed!. It's really difficult to establish any relationship between Bounce Rate ( Which we can only see through GA or other analytics tool and is in user control) and Search ranking. Only other announced method by Google here is CTR and Dwell Time which itself seems to be impact, like comparing and research type queries.
We can expect correlation between page speed kind of factor about where we can get some real data accessible to all by common tools/methods but for metrics like Bounce Rate we could have only directional senses rather than some concrete deductions based on regress analysis.
Probably Larry also tries to deliver same kind of message and everybody can take it forward from here.
HI Daniel. remember, i'm saying google cares about dwell time (if people quickly return to the SERP, indicating that they didn't find what they were looking for). unfortunately, we can't measure those things directly. the only reason why i bring up engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates, is because one or more of them should be proportional to dwell time depending on your niche/query type. If you are mucking around with your analytics to manipulate those engagement metrics, then you've destroyed the the relationship between site engagement metrics and dwell time, so obviously that won't work. remember: no cheap tricks!
Hi Larry,
Thanks for the response. I agree with you that the example I gave (setting an event to fire milliseconds after the page loads) is what you call 'mucking around' with the metrics. It's not something I would do in practice. I used that as an example to demonstrate why bounce rate is a poor metric for measuring engagement; as well as to voice my doubts that Google uses this metric (symbolic or otherwise) to qualify potential SERP rankings.
That said, my opinion hasn't changed and I'll explain. Google Analytics is a tool that must be customised to your specific goals in order to get any tangible engagement insights from your visitors and there are legitimate reasons to set events to fire early on your site (causing a drop in bounce rate). An example is Justin Cutroni's post of Advanced Content Tracking (https://cutroni.com/blog/2014/02/12/advanced-conten...) . His method is to set scroll events to fire at certain pixels high on the page, which does the similar thing as firing a timer tag from GTM. E.g. fire around 30secs as an indicator that someone has started reading your content; fire a second event at 1m30secs to indicate someone has half read the content and fire a 3 minutes to indicate that the content has been read.
Now, in my experience, setting up and firing that first event will significantly lower your bounce rate to near zero. I would argue that it would also return engagement data that will not correlate in anyway with the graph on bounce rate and rankings in your article. Just because my bounce rate is near zero does not mean Google will raise it in the SERPs.I have pages with near zero bounce rates and they don't rank well.
I also believe, despite it manipulating the bounce rate, Justin's method is a legitimate way on how to properly use Google Analytics for tracking content engagement and not a 'cheap trick'.
The insight I get from doing this is far more in-depth and useful than trusting the stock GA bounce rate. In this case, I believe, as you put it, 'mucking around with your analytics to manipulate engagement metrics' is a good thing and is far from destroying the relationship between site engagement and dwell time. I can break down my audience engagement by both time and mouse movement. Something that cannot be done in such detail with the stock-GA bounce rate data.
Thanks Larry!!! I'll save this for reference.
Thanks faiem!!
Great post! I agree with some of the things that were said here that a lot of people don't mind the quality of the content, more the quantity.
Thanks for sharing. :)
intresting theories, I wonder if you could black hat it up with enough visists and dwell time: be a curious test.
Interesting information. Thank you so much Larry for sharing your findings, and also the referral you've given.
Excellent post. I humbly think these conversion rates are valid for the US market in Spain where I live the conversion rates are much lower, perhaps we need more time to trust online shopping. Thank you very much for the information.
Understanding your website traffic, especially to know if your traffic is coming from a score (Lead Scoring) given by specific activities ... of clients served by organic search
Thanks for sharing such a nice post.
thank you car rental india! :)
Some of these comments are exhausting. Great article Larry, agree with this 100%.
i'm kind of blown away that so many people think google doesn't use user engagement metrics in their algos.
Does higher amount of Repeat users also taken as positive signal. Let says if we have two similar sites, and one with a higher returning visitors. Will that site have more credibilty and higher quality in the eyes of Google.
I would think so, but curious to hear your point of view.
a high percentage of repeat users is a symptom of high brand awareness (if nobody heard of you before, you would have high percentage of new users). Brand awareness dramatically increases click through rates and dwell time. People tend to click on the things and purchase from the brands they're familiar with. so yes, *indirectly*, you can say that repeat visitors is linked to rankings, in my opinion.
Larry, great post! It only makes sense that ctr on its own wouldn't correlate to a relevant, useful, listing. However, an above average ctr result that users stick around on, well that is a much clearer signal. It makes me wonder what would the signal look like if it were high ctr, an above average dwell time, with a lot if shares? The greater the combination of engagement signals, the clearer the signal that its a useful page. You have me going down the path of trying to reverse engineer all of the signals that would indicate a page is fantastic anyway. Thanks for sharing!
is there any engagement rate standars. For example once some visits my website he stays on a page for a minute and clicks 3-4 times on differenc links on my website. in that case what is the best click rate to prove that the visitor is engaged well to the content or the website.
no it varies greatly based on query type and industry. that's why i said not to pay too much attention to the exact bounce rates used in this example. my point was just to say that satisfying user search intent, and that sometimes that is proportional to user engagement metrics.
Thanks Larry, I find all the examples to reduce bounce rate very good.
I would believe it is logical for Google to use this as part of their algorythim, but one thing which I find difficult to understand is why, if they used it, they would not simply say it. Maybe there is a simple reason for that explains why, but I don´t know which one it could be. Have you any assumption of why it could be? Thanks
people need to understand that it's not google's job to tell us exactly how all of their ranking systems work. the webmaster team are nice people but at the end of the day they are google spokespeople, who must communicate what they are allowed to communicate, which while i believe is generally true, may also omit certain details.
Google's actually really bad at detecting click fraud in Adwords. (Thank God for IP Exclusions -- but if I can find the fraudulent clicker's IP address, why can't Google determine they're fraudulent clicks?)
They're really bad at detecting map spam in maps. (Eventually, someone's going to have to start actually verifying information people submit to Maps -- especially business names.)
I wouldn't hold my breath hoping Google gets good at detecting click fraud in Organic anytime soon.
couple of thoughts here. I think google is looking at steady-state CTR and dwell time (not just at an instant in time). so if you were gaming the system with long-click bots, those systems would have to be on continuously in order to work. so even if you fly under the radar today, it's possible that they get you later. kind of like how penguin penalized sites for junk links acquired years ago.
Thank you for the article. Cheap tricks are definitely enticing to use, but I agree with you that thinking more broadly translates to a bigger impact.
First time user of this blog, very depth on seo organic rank.. will read again this post will come back with my real questions..
lol ok
Hi Larry
Congrats for the post!!!
The tase bounce and the time spent on a web actually are indicative of how the customer interacts with this site. So, Google interprets the quality of it and serves as another parameter to classify the web in one position or another
It seems that now is much clearer
yes. just to repeat a key point here - i think google is looking at dwell time (did the user hit back and return to the SERP, and how quickly did that happen). unfortunately, we can't measure that. but we can measure other metrics like bounce rate, time on site and conversion rates which are (on average) directionally proprtional to dwell time.
One thing about the CTR curve - it's the other way around. Of course, if you are in top 4 your CTR will be higher. It's not that you've got to top4 because of higher CTR, it's the CTR is higher because you went in top 4.
Also, time spent on the site is not definitely a good sign. Users may be confused or trying to find information which is not presented at a clear location.
ctr and ranking are co-dependent variables. because ranking obviously impacts CTR, it's hard to know if CTR impacts rank. generally in mathematical terms, the way to do this type of analysis is a relative analysis (ranking vs. relative CTR) i.e. comparing the CTR of a keyword/page vs. the expected CTR, for a given position (rather than comparing the absolute CTR, which varies greatly by position). basically, just normalize the CTR to account for expected changes in CTR based on ranking, which i have done here. hope that makes sense.
Very nicely written article, Larry. I loved the images of Simpsons.
Regards.
You use Bounce Rate, but I don't think Bounce Rate means what you think it means.
Bounce Rate does not mean "run an organic search, click on a link to a website, immediately return to the organic search".
What you seem to be describing is Google's Long Click patent, discussed here by Bill Slawski: https://moz.com/blog/long-click-and-the-quality-of...
Bounce Rate is not limited to Organic Search, and it doesn't mean "returned to sender" as you implied.
A bounce is any visit that came to a page, which initiates a pageview event being sent to analytics, and that is the only event sent before the session times out (more https://goo.gl/ifuQph) . Within that span goals by the user could be completed that don't result in a tracked goal (such as viewing a business's hours of operation), the visitor could be on the page so long watching a video that the session times out before they continue their journey, or any number of other possibilities including closing the browser window.
Now you're going to say "dwell time", but as the Long Click patent discusses, Google wants to see the time between clicking on a result in the SERP and the RETURN TO THE SERP, as that could potentially be a sign of successfullness. But that is not bounce rates, conversion rates and time on site as measured by Analytics or other similar softwares without hefty customization.
Instead, if you even wanted to get close, you'd install the Riveted plugin (https://riveted.parsnip.io/), create a segment for "Organic Search from Google", and use that as your figure. But even then you'd need to know the percentage that boomerang back to the SERP. You might get closer if you used window.onbeforeunload() to send an event to Analytics (and use that event to further refine your segment), but even that will have issues.
But IMO using bounce rate, time on site, and goal conversion rate is just using bad data to justify a behavior that Google has already described quite clearly.
For the purposes of this article, what you're calling Long Click i'm referring to as Dwell Time (which is not the same thing as bounce rate). read section: "Does Google measure dwell time? How is that different from bounce rate & time on site?" for more info.
"The problem is, we don't have a way to measure dwell time. However, we can measure three engagement metrics that are proportional to and directionally equivalent to dwell time: bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate."
Except we CAN attempt to measure dwell time, and the three metrics you use are not equivalent to dwell time at all, and would very likely lead you far astray.
if you're saying there's no relationship between dwell time, bounce rate and conversion rates, i respectfully disagree.