SEO: how does Google (really) rate your web pages?
It is well known that it is essential to optimize the natural referencing of your site so that it is well-positioned in Google search results.
But do you really know the criteria that the search engine uses to evaluate your pages and determine their rank?
" Keywords! You are probably thinking.
Admittedly, these are important SEO factors, but Google is far from being satisfied with this to develop its ranking. In fact, while keywords help the search engine understand the topic of a web page, they are only the basis of a much longer review process. Today, find out why user experience and content quality are at least as important as SEO optimization in the strict sense.
External links
We have already mentioned the importance of internal links: in addition to generating interactions with your web page, they have an intrinsic interest in SEO (Google appreciates that a page receives many links).
But external links (from other sites) have even greater SEO power.
Getting quality backlinks is no small feat, however: your page needs to be good enough and well-known enough for outside sites to choose you as a source.
And it is important to insist on quality: a backlink from a site with a bad reputation will not help you much.
Traffic
Traffic is an important factor for natural referencing… And referencing is essential for capturing traffic.
It may sound counterintuitive, but SEO is actually a virtuous circle that could be represented as:
A page that gains traffic will give a positive signal to Google, which will increase its ranking in search results for the targeted keyword (s).
By becoming more visible in the SERPs, the web page will automatically gain traffic, and so on ...
This underlines, once again, that the intrinsic SEO optimization of the web page is often not enough to hope for optimal SEO.
To hope to properly reference web content, it is therefore important to boost its traffic when it is launched:
Through social media marketing;
By using emailing;
Or by any other means, you could invent ...
Time spent on the page
Another strong index for Google: the average time spent on the page by Internet users.
Indeed, when a visitor takes no action on your site, it often equates to a bounce.
We can schematize the reasoning simply by saying that the fewer Internet users stay on a page, the less interesting the content.
User time is also "combined" with the bounce rate for a page's appreciation.
Thus, a visitor who spends a lot of time on a page but immediately leaves the site gives a poorer signal than a user who spends some time on the page and continues to browse (thanks to internal links).
The bounce rate: an evaluation criterion?
The measurement of interactions goes hand in hand with that of another indicator: the bounce rate.
When an internet user searches the web and clicks on a result, there are only two possibilities:
Continue browsing this site;
Close its tab or go back to the search results.
The second option is what is called a "bounce."
The bounce rate, therefore, represents the proportion of users who leave a web page without having seen another.
Several analyzes have shown a correlation between bounce rate and Google SEO.
Here, we see that a rate below 76% correlates with a ranking in the top five Google search results.
Another example :
Again, a low bounce rate is strongly associated with a good position on Google.
However, if there is a correlation, that doesn't mean bounce rate has a direct impact on SEO.
It could simply mean that quality web pages (therefore well ranked) have a higher ability to retain their visitors (because their content is interesting).
However, a paradox remains: top position in the SERPs and high bounce rate are not mutually exclusive.
Take a site like Wikipedia: most people there probably go to just one article, to get the information they are interested in, and then leave the site.
We can therefore deduce that Wikipedia has a tremendous bounce rate ... Which does not prevent it from being very well referenced.
There are all kinds of speculations that could be made to explain this, but we will conclude that it is difficult to estimate how Google uses bounce rate in its rankings.
Conclusion
Google's algorithm is infinitely complex, and these criteria are obviously not enough to summarize all the factors that influence the SEO of a page.
However, they do underscore the importance of user experience and the popularity of a site for SEO.
The real lesson to be learned is that keyword research (whether generic or long-tail) and text optimization is just the start, and there is much to do. other efforts to be made to reference content on the internet.
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