Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation are mainly about the right keywords, data and numbers. These are very important elements for a successful SEO campaign, and there is one other significant factor that you should aim for when you optimise your website for higher rankings: Visitor Satisfaction.
Why?
Think about it this way. If your visitors don’t find what they are looking for on your website, it is very likely that they will leave your site and move on to your competitor’s site. Satisfaction is a real ranking factor for Google and it comes in the form of Search Quality Ratings.
There are several ways for a website to achieve good Search Quality Ratings, and Google briefly explains it in this way:
“Useful pages should be high quality and a good “fit” 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.”
If you are curious about quality ratings, have a look at the official Google Search Quality Ratings Guideline.
Quality ratings are even more important now ever since the introduction of the Panda algorithm that works by finding “high-quality” sites and placing them closer to the top of the search engine results page.
There are two easy approaches towards boosting your SEO efforts:
1) Satisfy Robots (the thing that discovers your page and indexes it on search engine results)
2) Satisfy the Users
A robot-focused effort requires proper keyword placement and title-tags to attract these bots to your site, whilst a user-focused approach applies the same techniques and takes into account the quality score of the website. So, when these two are combined, they create a powerful force that can help boost your rankings to the top.
How do you satisfy the user?
1) Install Google’s Free Consumer Satisfaction Survey on your website
2) Make your website easily accessible
3) Increase page speed
4) Engaging, informative and exciting quality content
5) Visually attractive website with a clean layout
6) Improve website flow by providing relevant links to products or services
If you have any further questions about how visitor satisfaction can boost your rankings, or any other queries about Search Engine Optimisation, feel free to contact us directly today!
