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Posted over 8 years ago

Optimizing Your Website for Google's Customer

In my previous post, I gave 4 basic tips on how to optimize your website for better search engine results page (SERP) ranking. Real estate marketing is ultra competitive, and having a website that consistently ranks on the first page for a given search term is a great way to get leads from sources that most people don't have the time to leverage. 

This post is going to expand on point one of the previous post: Optimize your site for Google's algorithm (which may be a misnomer, I'll explain later).

How Google produces search results is bit of a mystery. The good news is, there are plenty of companies out there who are constantly performing tests using their own methods, and come to their own conclusions based on the results. Fortunately, I've been able to also test content using their advice in a market that receives a lot of attention: criminal legal services. And their advice is correct.

For those who don't know, my wife is a criminal defense attorney in Orange County. The competition is among the stiffest in the country, and we regularly add content to her website and 2 blogs to maintain her front page Google SERP ranking. It's a beast of a marketing machine, and her business has exploded since we began focusing on .

Our two most important metrics (as recorded by Google Analytics) are Average Time On Page and Bounce Rate.

Average Time on Page: Google views this metric among the most important in determining what web pages contain the best information. The key to remember here is that Google's goal in delivering search results is to provide its customers (the person performing the search) with the most useful content possible. This morning, Analytics tells me that, in the last 7 days, our website has seen an average of 2:30 (min:sec) average time on page. This is far beyond the +/- 30 second minimum Google looks for. So, when Google sees your visitors are spending longer than 30 seconds on a page in your website, it concludes that this content was useful for the person who searched "sell my house fast," and, thus, will rank the site higher in the future. How much higher? I honestly don't know.

Increasing the average time spent on your page can be accomplished a number of ways. In our testing, educating our potential client about their particular case has been the best way to increase the average time spent on the page. Not only does it keep them on the website longer, it creates an enormous amount of credibility. Other ways of increasing your average time on page could be the inclusion of a compelling video (manual start, not automatic) or a chat window. Try to stay away from features that could cause your visitor to immediately click the back button. These might include music, fancy self-assembling graphics, or a voiceover welcoming them to your website. Just let them get to the content!

Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is "the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page)." Google ranks websites that have similar content to the page it delivered int he search results higher than those that do not. Google can measure this by the number of page visits that are generated from a webpage that it delivers to the person performing the search. If it has delivered a page that has useful content - especially when it comes to business websites - the person performing the search will remain on that website. 

One caveat: high competition, high stakes industries (real estate, lawyers for hire, retail, etc) will have high bounce rates ranging from 80-95%. But that's okay! If your bounce rate is the lowest among your competition, your website will be viewed as delivering useful content. 

The best way to decrease your bounce rate is make your user's experience better. Easy navigation is by far the most important function of a website with low bounce rate. You might have spent all the profit from your last flip on a million pages of content in order to rank high by keywords, but as long as your homepage is hard to navigate, your users are going to become frustrated and leave. They might have spent more than 30 seconds trying to figure out how where to go, but that shouldn't be your goal. 

When you're creating content for your website, always keep in mind that Google's main objective is to provide its customers with the best results for their search. This should keep you focused on creating content that is engaging, informational, and that causes your user to stay within your website. 


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