Is Human Engagement Google's New Ranking Factor?

Is Human Engagement Google's New Ranking Factor?

Over the past year, Google has spent a lot of time making changes to their search algorithms through the introduction of Panda and Penguin. For online marketing professionals, this required a complete overhaul of old practices. In order to build search engine optimization programs that continued to work well for clients, these professionals had to quickly analyze and learn the new ways to market in an algorithm geared more towards human engagement.

Google’s intention with the algorithm updates wasn’t to cause headache for marketers and small businesses using search engine optimization, but rather to offer users more relevant, higher quality results in search. As a marketer, it is now more important than ever to make sure that your content is interesting and valuable to your target market. Google’s new algorithm has made human engagement a much larger factor in rankings than with previous versions of the algorithm, so page metrics and other components are now even more important than in the past.

The following is a list of factors that may affect your SEO in Phoenix and other cities across the nation:

·         Bounce rates. If you have high bounce rates, this will negatively affect your SEO programs in Phoenix. When a user clicks your link from the search engine results page and then immediately clicks the back button, this means that your content fails to capture their attention. Not only will you lose potential customers that bounce off your page, but Google will also push your page down in the rankings. To avoid this, refresh your content to make sure that it is interesting and relevant to your target market.

·         Social signals. Once again, it is essential that you have high quality content, so that people will want to share your pages with their friends on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Google’s algorithm is now looking for these social signals to identify what pages are most relevant to the SEO keyword in Phoenix or the area that your business operates in. The higher your social signals, the stronger your SEO programs in Phoenix.

·         Referral traffic. The quality of the source that includes a backlink to your page is important to search engine optimization programs. The best links come from pages that are valued by Google and send traffic back to your page from a highly targeted audience. In order to be linked on these pages, you must have a well-designed, user friendly website with interesting content that is relevant to this target audience.

For successful SEO programs in Phoenix, it is essential that people actually read the content on your pages. When you have valuable content, you will likely achieve higher metrics, such as click-through rates, shares on social media pages and referrals as well as lower bounce rates.