User Engagement - A Ranking Factor 90% SEO's Ignore

To get ranked your blog & articles in search engine is not an easy task and If you are already ranking your blog articles for specific keywords then there’s no surety that your articles will remain on number #1 position forever.

You can't be sure anything when it comes to search engines and especially Google. They have changed their algorithm a lot since the last few years to rank any blog in search engine with very complicated matrix calculations.

There are dozens of factors that are involved in SEO but there is also one massive ranking factor that is mostly ignored by many SEOs which is User Engagement. It is one of the biggest factors that play a key role in search rankings indirectly.

What is User Engagement?

User engagement is an assessment of an individual's response to some type of offerings, such as a product, a service or a website. An individual's degree of engagement may be determined directly through interaction or may be assessed through observation of the user's behaviors.

When it comes to user engagement, the various factors that may come up in your mind would be Bounce Rate, Time-on-Site, Navigation, Design UX, load time etc and yeah Content of course. 

I read somewhere, You are your own teacher that can truly help you to teach a real lesson.  Just ask few questions to yourself which are given below and have a small thought on each of the following questions:

• How do people interact with your site?
• How long do they stay?
• How many pages do they visit?
• Do they return to Google?
• What is your blog loading time?
• Do you have well site navigation?
• What is your blog bounce rate?

You may be confused with these questions, If you are a newbie but don't worry, I am here to help you. You can get all these stats in your analytics page.

I have seen many bloggers and SEO experts never take these things seriously which are really important factors that help to boost search ranking and instead of it, They spend hours doing different kinds of stuff like link building, content marketing, etc to boost their blog rankings but they totally ignore this Massive On-Site factor.

What Comes under User Engagement?

There are many things that come under User engagement but the most important factors are Bounce Rate, Time on Page, Time on Site, Pages Per Session, Recurring Visits, Page Navigation, and Pogo Sticking.

I could have listed Article Quality, Keyword Density, Image Optimization, External Linking etc but I have avoided such factors since you and many other experts cover them while doing ON-PAGE optimization.

Now the question is "How to get all these states?" and My answers is using Google Analytics which is a free Google service that provides best and most accurate stats of your blog. Also, there are many other tools that provide some info but you have to invest some money for that.

• Check your blog stats for last one month, two months and so on.
• Keep an eye on articles that are working good having least bonce rate and better conversion rate.
• Tweak that articles that are not working good, have high bounce rate and bad conversion rate.

This is quite simple and easy. Am I right? But don't overlook these factors. Take your time and be patient while checking your analytics stats.

The above article is just an overview of user engagement and Hope this article helped you.

Have I missed something here? Do you have any question regarding user engagement? Do you have any suggestion about this topic? Do comment on the comment section and don't forget to share this article with your friends.