User engagement is a key factor in determining a site’s position in Google SERPs.
You need to focus on best practices for creating more engaging content that answers the search intent.
Google’s pretty smart and theri AI is geting smarter by the day.
Not that long ago you could rank on page 1 of Google’s search just by keyword stuffing and increasing the volume of pages on your website. Heck, it didn't even matter if the wording made any sense at all on the pages.
Then Google’s search robots realized that “content farms” produced little more than fluff, and the sites that utilized content farms rankings tanked. JC Penneys, eBay and Overstock are a few that immediatly come to mind.
That led to an effort to focus more heavily on content quality adn answering the search intent.
Yet, marketers still focus their attention on backlinks vs search intent and quality.
Backlinks are important, but they are not everything.
If you never ansewer the search intent, you'll never earn backlinks.
Backlinks are essentially a math equation based on content quality and search intent -- If you get backlinks from a few sites with high domain authority (DA), you’ll gain additional DA yourself.
That will make your site more likely to rank highly in Google for relevant search terms, since your content answers the seaarchers intent or question.
Engagement is more than Backlinks
Google is watching not only who links to you, but how your visitors interact with your site and content.
Google can collect data from millions of websites regarding how users interact with their content, and can establish benchmarks to measure high or low engagement levels.
While Google will “test” sites with good backlinks first, the pages that remain in the SERPs are the ones that drive the highest engagement with users—even if they don’t have nearly as much link juice as the big players in the industry.
As Julian Shapiro wrote in this article "How do startups actually get their content marketing to work?" content enables sites with much lower traffic to climb the Google rankings with winning content.
Julian nailed it when he wrote:
Prioritize engagement over backlinks
So, how do you ensure that your content maximizes user engagement and maintians a top spot with Google SERPs?
Let's start with Content Engagement?
First, what is content engagement, and how can it be measured?
Is your website offering the visitor enough valueand quality to stick around and read more?
Engagement is measured by a series of metrics, including these:
- Time spent on site
Does a visitor leave after just a second or two, or spend several minutes scrolling a single page?Your Analytics will aggregate the average time spent on site among all users.
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Pages visited per session
Do visitors tend to visit a single page, or click through to multiple pages on the site? -
Page scroll depth
When your visitors land on an article, do they lose interest after the first paragraph or scroll all the way through to the end of the article? -
New v. returning visitors
How many people enjoy your content so much that they actually come back again to read more? -
Conversion rate
What percent of your visitors complete a desired action, such as downloading an ebook, purchasing a product, or signing up for your email list?
If you want to learn moe on this topic, I suggest reading "Top 10 User Engagement KPIs to Measure," which offers even more user engagement metrics to focus on.
How to write engaging content?
So now that you have an idea of what defines engaging content — how do you make sure that your content delivers?
There’s a lot of design and copywriting that goes into building an overall engaging website or mobile experience, but I want to focus exclusively on content marketing, looking at assets such as blog content, infographics, and video content.
Here are some industry best practices to consider:
A good piece of content is the one that solves a readers problem in the most efficient way possible. Don't write long form articles just for the sake of it, write with the intent to solve the readers probalem in the most efficient way.
Write creadible - high quality- articles that are relevant - to the search intent and query - and useable with actionable steps and items for the searcher.
Don't stuff your article with keywords you can get great results by being strartgeic with adding keywords to your headline and throughout the article.
A few other options to consider:
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Get interactive, uses quizzes and experiences
Develop an interactive quiz will keep your audience clicking and eager to explore what’s next and how they size up to others with a similar problem or conerns or personalilities, etc. Interactive content is immensely difficult to walk away from: 97% of people who start Buzzfeed sponsor quizzes complete them. B2B brands don't need to be boring, you can use quizzes that are industry specific: take a look at , Outgrow’s “How does your SEO knowledge stack up?” quiz, once you start it you want to know how you stack up and wherre your skills need some refreshing. -
Add visuals to help educate the reader
Content with visual elements, including memes, in-line graphics, inforgarahics, animations, are more engaging than long blocks of text. In fact, content with visuals gets 94% more views than content without visual elements. -
Break it up with lists and bullets
Bullets and lists make your content more digestible and easier to read. -
Go deep on a subject
Short, superficial blog posts don’t tell the reader anything they don’t know, and they don;t answer the search intent. You're alsolikely to see your bounce rate increase. When writing an article, go deep into the subject, find the angle that no one else has covered and go deep. Add recent and legitimate research, quotes from subject matter expert interviews, and examples. Use both internatl and external links—yes, your reader may go explore the outside content adn supporting content on your website.
Embrace “cornerstone” content: when writing about a subject, create a truly useful resource that can serve as a foundation and reference piece. The current top Google result for the term “cornerstone content” was written in 2019, by Yoast "What is Coenrestone Content"and it still provides a great answer that is relevant today and answers the search intent. The article is over 1,500 words long, includes multiple types of subheadings, and includes plenty of visuals using screenshots todrive home the key points.
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Invest in producing high-quality content
Anyone can write a blog post. But not anyone can write a blog post that people will lern from and genuinely enjoy reading. When you’re focusing on not just getting readers to your site, but keeping them there, you need to make sure that you’re bringing the big guns out. Your content should have a clear narrative backed by external research or subject matter expert interviews, and include editing and proofreading to ensure that you’re putting your best work out.
Wrapping it up
More than anything, your focus should be on offering an exceptional user experience in everything you do.
That means thinking beyond content itself to everything that surrounds it and makes up the customer experience. This includes the website design and load time.
Set a goal to optimize for a the user experience, offering high quality content that answers the serach intent, use topic clusters to keep them engaged, and an improved Google ranking will follow.