[Build Backlinks Online] SEO Ranking Factor #1 is Satisfaction

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'SEO Ranking Factor #1 is
Satisfaction'


Posted by Cyrus Shepard

You know the numbers â Google uses over 200 ranking signals, updates its
algorithm over 500 times a year, and employs thousands of engineers. We often
get so caught up in the minutiae of the algorithm that we forget all this effort
serves a single purpose:


Satisfy the user.


This isn't a touchy-feely post that says "Make great content and visitors will
come" or "Delight your customers and magic will happen."


It's not magic. Satisfaction is an actual ranking factor.


Unlike other ranking factors, this one is hard to measure because it's based
almost entirely on search engines' own internal data â something they
don't share. We do know search engines both measure and reward satisfaction in
very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google's
most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results.


It's easy to tweak a keyword. It's much harder to stop visitors from clicking
the back button on your website when they don't find what they were looking for.
Satisfaction is very difficult to game; perhaps that's why search engines place
so much emphasis on it.

How Google measures and predicts satisfaction
User behavior in search results

Stephen Levyâs excellent book In the Plex describes how Google engineers
figured out how to improve search results by mining their user behavior data
(bold added):


"â Google could see how satisfied users were. â The best sign of
their happiness was the "long click" â this occurred when someone went to
a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has
successfully fulfilled the query. But unhappy users were unhappy in their own
ways, most telling were the âshort clicksâ where a user followed a
link and immediately returned to try again. "If people type something and then
go and change their query, you could tell they arenât happy," says Patel.
"If they go to the next page of results, itâs a sign theyâre not
happy."


Often called pogosticking, this refers to the behavior of users that click on
a result, then "pogostick" back and forth between the search results and
different websites, searching for satisfaction.



Search quality raters

In 2012, Google released an abbreviated copy of its Search Quality Rating
Guidelines to the public. A version of this document is used by Google's small
army of Search Quality Raters to evaluate search results.


One of the highest scores a quality rater can assign to a page is "useful"
(bold added):


âUseful pages should be high quality and a good âfitâ for
the query. In addition, they often have some or all of the following
characteristics: highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent
(such as breaking news on a topic). Useful pages are usually well organized and
pages you trust. They are from information sources that seem reliable. Useful
information pages are not "spammy."


The problem with quality raters is they can only look at a few thousand
websites at any given time. There are millions of sites on the web, so Google
invented a new system:

Panda

Instead of evaluating results after the fact, Panda gives Google the ability
to predict user satisfaction â modeled on actual human surveys â and
apply it to every site in its index.


Less satisfying pages are ranked lower in search results, and every few weeks
the index is updated with new data.


The chart below shows Panda hitting a site again and again.




Site visits with Panda updates via Panguin Tool and Google Algorithm Change
History

What can we do?

If search engines measure user satisfaction and employ it as a ranking factor,
our goals as search marketers are to:


Create highly satisfying experiences so that users donât return to search
results to pick another URL.
Build sites that meet Pandaâs expectation of high quality.
Surprise and delight our visitors so that they seek us out again and again.


5 Tips to improve visitor satisfaction:
1. Google's free website satisfaction surveys

As if to put an exclamation point on the whole satisfaction experience, Google
recently released free, embeddable customer satisfaction surveys for website
owners.


After installing a line of JavaScript on your site, your visitors are presented
with the following questions:


Overall, how satisfied are you with this website?
What, if anything, do you find frustrating or unappealing about this website?
What is your main reason for visiting this website today?
Did you successfully complete your main reason for visiting this website today?




If you'd like to customize the questions, Google allows you to do this for
$0.01 per response.


It feels like Google wants to give site owners the same type of feedback
Google acquires directly from behavior data. Using these forms won't tell you
exactly what to do, but any webmaster using them is sure to get a ton of
valuable feedback about visitor satisfaction.


2. Removing barriers

Weâve talked for years about making your site more accessible for both
search robots and humans, but we rarely discuss how those usability factors
affect rankings.


Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content,
which is otherwise accessible to search engines. We're seeing these more and
more all over the web.




What if Moz required registration?


The idea is simple: folks click on a search result, see the form and return to
the search results to try another URL. After a few hundred times (or less),
search engines start to figure out this result doesnât satisfy users.


At Moz, weâve seen sites use similar tactics only to watch their bounce
rate skyrocket, and their rankings drop. In fact, thereâs anecdotal
evidence of sites being hit by Panda after introducing similar barriers.

3. Speed it up

We know that faster websites are good, but page speed has two mechanisms by
which to influence rankings:



Directly: Google reps have stated that page speed has a direct impact on
rankings for a certain percentage of queries (only 1% in 2010).

Secondary: As page speed affects usage, it can have a secondary effect on user
satisfaction. A frustrated user waiting too long for a page to load can often
return to search results.


Google obsesses over speed, and scientists at Microsoft have shown that users
will visit a site less often if it's only 250 milliseconds slower than the
competition.


Source: NYTimes


If you ever need to convince your client or boss to improve page speed, try
the comparison tool at Webpagetest.com which allows you to export a slow motion
video.



4. Empathy

Empathy as a ranking factor? "Cyrus," I can hear you saying, "youâve
been hanging out with Rand too much!"


Consider this comment on a recent Whiteboard Friday. I've edited the comment
below to highlight the important parts:




When you practice empathy, you put yourself in the shoes of your visitor to
try to build a satisfying experience. You accomplish this by


Answering their questions
Employing intuitive layouts
Giving them relevant links and resources to click
Surprising them with extras


While it's difficult to prove a relationship between improved user experiences
and rankings (because we can't measure user behavior like Google can) there's
strong anecdotal evidence that search engines aggregate these factors into their
algorithms.

5. Linking out

One of the best SEO articles Iâve read all year is AJ Kohn's Time to
Long Click, a great article you shouldn't miss. AJ explains how linking out (and
also creating content hubs) can be used to increase user satisfaction (bold
added):


What Iâm recommending is that you link to other valuable sources of
information when appropriate so that you fully satisfy that userâs query.
In doing so youâll generate more long clicks and earn more links over
time, both of which can have profound and positive impact on your rankings. Stop
thinking about optimizing your page and think about optimizing the search
experience instead.
-AJ Kohn


Think of it this way: It's far better for users to click away to another URL
from your site than for those same users to return to Google to try again. In
the first instance, you are the authority hub, in the latter, Google is the
authority.


Be the authority.

How do YOU improve satisfaction?

There are two types of SEOs: those that try to satisfy robots, and those that
satisfy users.


The robot-focused SEOs build pages with just the right keywords and title
tags, hoping to attract the bots on relevancy. I say "try" to satisfy robots,
because search engines are actually watching the users. If the users aren't
happy, neither are the bots.


The user-focused SEOs works with the same keywords and title tag, but then
they go one step further and ask their users to try the site. After that, they
do whatever it takes to make their users happy.


Have you seen improvement in rankings after improving user satisfaction? Share
your story with us in the comments below.

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