Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
-
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th.
Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority?
We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved.
Thanks,
Alan
-
Hi Jeff:
Happy to report that improved metrics are not caused by bots or any unusual spikes in traffic. So I think we are seeing a legitimate improvement. Last year we focused on UX improvements. Will focus on content and links this year in order to solidify our gains.
Thanks for your input!!
Alan
-
Hello Kingalan1,
Looks like you're already improved your Google rankings! Have you checked your traffic sources in Google? To improve your site authority quicker, start a link building campaign.
-
For starters, congratulations on the improved metrics you're experiencing! I would have to also agree with EGOL on this one, in that it will be important to observe how those numbers are pulled, because it's very easy to get false positives with small amounts of data after large changes.
Some tips:
- You may want to look into your numbers a little deeper, and isolate performance based on location and user type. Meaning: are your numbers being skewed by internal members of the organization? Your tech team is a notorious source of generating false numbers if their IPs are not filtered. An easy way to do this is to compare % new users before/after launch. If the % of new users is substantially down, you may want to drill down into location to see if there is anything fishy going on. Which brings me to #2...
- Drill down into city to ensure that all of the traffic isn't coming from one place. You would be surprised at how much traffic is actually bots. If you see a disproportionate number of sessions coming from one city, take a look at the % of new users from that city. If it's in the single digits, you have a bot or developer, or spammer. I wrote a blog post on how to identify bots (and if they are creating false positives).
**As for rankings...: **
- Lots of controversy over this one, but I think more SEOs than not seem to agree that dwell time (time between leaving SERPs and visiting a site, then returning to SERPs) is an important factor for RankBrain.
- Look up "pogosticking" and its relationship with bounce rate. This is also likely a RankBrain factor.
In my opinion, if the numbers are true, in a very cursory observation, it seems that you have created a better experience for visitors. I would imagine that this **may **result in better rankings. At least, there is a better chance than not resulting in better rankings.
Apologies, SEOs never seem to give clear-cut answers, and qualify every statement
Jeff
-
Lots of people speculate that website usability impacts search rank, but this hasn't been conclusively been proven. Improving your website experience is great for conversions and something you should definitely work to improve, but if you want to improve search ranking it's still important to focus on content & links.
-
Hello Kingalan1,
If you are getting a nice increase in the number of people getting in touch for this time of year then you have made impressive improvements in the function and visitor satisfaction of the site. Nice work.
I expect that you will see some kind of rankings increase.
-
Hi EGOL;
Thanks for your input. I am receiving a dramatically increased number customers inquiries from the redesigned site. Hopefully there is a reasonable chance that Google will reward us with improved rankings. But I guess time will tell.
THANKS,
Alan -
First, nice work on getting a new website with metrics that might be better.
Since you only have a few days of data, and its over the Christmas holiday, don't bet on the new metrics yet. They might simply be a result of return visitors stumbling around the site trying to find things that they were returning to see, or snooping around for something different. Your metrics will probably be improved, but don't take it to the bank yet.
If you get improved metrics, will it increase your rankings? In my opinion, it will depend more on how those metrics were obtained more than the metrics themselves. If your new metrics are a result of people being more pleased with your site and that is what caused them to explore more then you might get a rankings increase. If the new metrics are a result of it being more difficult for people to find they want then you might get a rankings decrease.
Will it change moz authority? I don't know the answer to that question, and I would not give it a single wit of thought. Why? Moz authority has nothing to do with how Google ranks your website, how much money you are going to make, and what people think of your website.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Search Results Pages Blocked in Robots.txt?
Hi I am reviewing our robots.txt file. I wondered if search results pages should be blocked from crawling? We currently have this in the file /searchterm* Is it a good thing for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Ranking better in different countries than in the UK
My URL is: www.geckonewmedia.comMy friend's site is being ranked in the top 10 in Google in countries such as Norway, Poland, Spain, Germany and France for the term "web design Edinburgh"The site is UK based and it's ranking on page 3 over here. I went into the webmaster tools and changed the location setting to UK on Monday this week as I thought that might be the issue. So far there's been no change.Can anyone help me out with the reason why it might be ranking so well abroad but not in the UK?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geckonm0 -
Will using my Homepage as a KW target improve my Inner page Ranking?
Hello your help please! I have 2 KWs that i have targeted Inner pages for and they have got them to page 2 in SERPs, but now its getting difficult to move them up to page 1. Will targeting the home page with a higher authority, for the same terms, help or hinder the inner pages current position? Many Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Moz Rank and how to do better?
Could anyone offer me some help regarding Moz Rank? Of all the metrics this seems to be one where we want to improve but just have not been able to. Does anyone have any advice or tips that we could look at implementing to get this thing to move at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Google Ranking Wrong Page
The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords. A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website. Our URL structures now look something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cpapciak
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4 Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city. My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical. Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!0 -
Will Linking To "Offical Sites" Increase My SEO?
I own a movie trailer website. (Where you can watch movie trailers) Will having links on each page that are for "offical website" of each movie, increase my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610