The more content you write and higher the number of links you’re able to acquire the higher your ranks ought to go and more the number of visitors to your site.

One of the core tenets of Google’s ranking philosophy is to push sites above that provide consistently good user experience.

To that end they use a few metrics that aren’t immediately relevant and harder to draw tangents between them and ranking. But still, they matter and influence rankings strongly.’

Optimize for Click through rates

One factor that strongly determines if people are finding what they’re looking for on your site is the click through and bounce rates. If Google gets a strong indication that that’s not the case the listing will get pushed down.

In an experiment Rand Fishkin asked his followers to search for best grilled steak, click on the first result and then click the back button and thereafter proceed to click for the 4th result.

Around 500 or so interaction later and in 70 minutes the listing moved to the first place from the 4th spot.

Eventually, the listing assumed its original position and went back to where it started from.

If you’re already ranking, a much more enticing and captivating meta description is enough to pull it up in the click volume. Something that evokes curiosity. Additionally, review stars and rich schema information that’s visible on organic listings is another way to capture attention, stop people on their tracks and click through.

That’s one way to improve click through rates. There are additional ways too:

By using analytics data

You might have written a blogpost that targets a particular keyword or particular order of keywords. But searchers might be searching for and landing on your site with another variation or order.

For instance, the keyword might be ecommerce marketing and searchers might be landing with the keyword marketing ecommerce or marketing for ecommerce.

By changing the title that appears on the search engines you can improve the click through rate and probably improve time on site since now the website or blog matches the dominant query that people are looking for.

Optimize for search intent

Search intent is taking on all the forms of turning into a ranking signal biggie.

In a recent post Brian Dean mentioned about trying to understand why ranking for one of his posts tanked and subsequently fixing it.

He wrote a post on SEO checklist but people on the site were not finding what they came looking for. Eventually he stripped down the post to more of a beginner’s guide and he added a checklist that people could download and read when they were free.

Making these changes the post that had sunk to the second page made its way back to the first page first spot.

Minimize bounce rate

It’s essential to provide people what they’re looking for and satisfy their search intent.

How?

Feedback gathering tools like Qualaroo can help you gain invaluable insights by asking people pointed questions on what they were hoping to achieve by coming to the site.

Armed with the insight you can create a better version of the page.

You could A/B test and see which version improves core engagement metrics.

Branding

When people recognize your brand and search for it by name you stand to get more visitors and a loyal following. This also helps rankings.

10beasts is a good example.

Because Luqman made his niche site into a case study there were hundreds of brand name plus keyword searches happening everyday for his website. Which they still do today. Despite the sheer small number of links to his site, the fact that it’s a brand helps the site retain top spots for most keywords. He has only 10 or so blogposts and still aces rankings for all of them.

Brand power

Finally, focus on building your brand and getting more email and blog subscribers.

The thing is people have to get exposed to your messaging over and over again to build a relationship.

It doesn’t happen quickly but once it starts there’s little to stop it. What do you think of these insights into ranking. Do you have anything more to share? If you have please share via the comment section below.