According to research which is conducted by Moz’s ranking data on over 200,000 domains, the data is collected from traffic, age views, bounce rate, time on site, and rank. The result reveals how these metrics correlated with higher rankings. If it is compared to the other research that has been conducted before, this research is classified as a new one since they are primarily user-based metrics or on the other words, they vary based on how users interact with the individual websites, as opposed to static features such as title tag length. Besides, the user-based metrics are important to help ranking webpages.
Many marketer and SEO professional are wondering if there is correlation between web search ranking results and website’s actual traffic. The result is presented in the chart below; as the chart will reveal which metrics have the biggest correlation to rankings.
Traffic Correlated to Higher Rankings
After conducting the study derived from direct and organic search visits for a three month period, the research shows that there is high relation between website visits and Google’s search rankings.
It goes straightforwardly that the rank will go higher with more traffic. For example, Amazon and Wikipedia gets higher ranking in search result, while smaller sites rank below. This signifies that a relationship exists, even though this doesn’t mean that Google uses traffic and user engagement metrics as an actual ranking factor in its search algorithm. Moreover, traffic engagement aids search engines to identify trust building, popularity or brand establishment.
Website’s User Engagement and Its Rank
Having a lot of traffic may become your first goal; however, focus on traffic only without noticing how deep your user engages with your website will only leave your visitor as graphic data. So, here are what you should aware when having a lot of visitors.
Bounce rate: having lower of bounce rate will be a good sign for you as bounce rate means the number of people who leave your website immediately after he/she visits your website. So, if you have low bounce rate, this means people stay longer in your website. This is likely because they love your content or they find your content is helpful.
Page Views: The research shows that the number of page views brings positive impact on search engine rank. So, the more visitors come and check your pages, the higher your rank will be.
Time on sites: Even though, there is no strong correlation about this study, but this part also plays quite important role as the longer visitors spend their time on your website will also generate Google to place your website on higher rank.
If you notice these three factors and can take the advantages from these three points, you surely will get higher ranking in Google search result. From the above points, it is clear that Google is not only assessing your web through algorithm, but also from of its relevance, user satisfaction, and quality of results.
So, if you haven’t reached higher ranking yet, it may be because your competitor is leading your search result. Besides, the lower Global Rank a website has on SimilarWeb then the website will commonly have more traffic and good user engagement.