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.
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
-
Readd/Reindex a page that was 410'd
A script of ours had an error that caused some pages we didn't wish 410'd to be 410'd, we caught it in about 12 hours but for some pages it was too late. My question is, will those pages be reindexed again and how will that affect their page ranking will they eventually be back where they were? Would submitting a site map with them help, or what would be the best way to correct this error (submit the links to google indexer maybe?).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wana-Ryd0 -
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 -
Redirect Search Results to Category Pages
I am planning redirect the search results to it's matching category page to avoid having two indexed pages of essentially the same content. Example http://www.example.com/search/?kw=sunglasses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WizardOfMoz
wil be redirected to
http://www.example.com/category/sunglasses/ Is this a good idea? What are the possible negative effect if I go this route? Thanks.0 -
How to rank product pages?
Hi guys, Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages. We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites. Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on. Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc. Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652 Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly. Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site? Thanks, Dino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dino641 -
How do I increase rankings when the indexed page is the homepage?
Hi Forum, This is a two-part question. The first is: "what may be the cause of some rank declines?" and the second is "how do I bring them back up when the indexed page is the homepage?" Over the last week I noticed some declines in several of my top keywords, many of which point to the site's homepage. The site itself is an eCommerce site, which had less visits last week than normal (holidays it seems, since the data jibes with key dates). Can a decline in traffic cause ranking declines? Any other ideas of where to look? Secondly, for those keywords that link to the homepage, how do we bring these back up since a homepage can't be optimized for every single keyword? We sell yoga products and can't have a homepage that is optimized for keywords like "yoga mat," "yoga blocks," "yoga pilates clothing," and several others, as these are our category pages' keywords. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
Different pages ranking for search terms, often irrelevant.
Website: www.templatemonster.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | templatemonster
Problem: Positions dropped while pages which were ranking previously disappeared from top 100 and now different - often completely irrelevant - pages are ranking. Examples:
Search term: Joomla Templates
Previous Position: 8
Current Position: 35
Previously Ranked Page: http://www.templatemonster.com/joomla-templates.php
Currently Ranked Page: http://www.templatemonster.com/logo-templates.php Similar situation with the following search terms: virtuemart templates, virtuemart themes, prestashop templates, prestashop themes, magento themes, zencart templates, zencart themes, zen cart templates, zen cart themes When: according to the Google Analytics (drop in visitors stats) this happened on July, 2nd Preconditions: we had 45 minutes downtime on July 2-nd - but could this 45 mins have had such disastrous results?
No redirects or canonical URL were used which could lead to such change of ranking page.
No changes in the site's informational structure and design.
In webmaster tools (inbound links report) we saw a website yesterday which had over 800,000 links pointing to our domain - http://moviebestwatch.com/ - and today this site is NOT found in Webmaster Tools report! Also, site is down, domain is quite new (how could it have possibly developed 800,000 pages in such a short time?) and whois is privacy protected. Is this some dirty trick from competitors - could it have possibly influenced our positions? Still, what I completely fail to understand - how could a page like http://www.templatemonster.com/logo-templates.php be the top ranking page for 'Joomla templates' if there is: not a single mention of the word 'Joomla' on the page (or source code), i.e. the page is completely irrelevant to the search term not a single link with 'Joomla templates' anchor text pointing to that page, neither external nor internal PS. No similar changes in other search engines noticed. Also, the pages in question have been re-spidered July 4th and cache shows the right pages, i.e. it is not that Googlebot has seen logotypes page instead of Joomla templates page. I checked any possible reason I could think of (see "Preconditions") but still have no clue - what is going on?1