On-page and technical SEO Part 2 – SEO Unlocked – Free SEO Course with Neil Patel
– [Instructor] Hey,
everyone its Neil Patel here and today we're going to
be going over off page SEO. One thing that most
people don't think about when it comes to SEO is dwell time. Dwell time matters when it
comes to SEO and rankings. And if you're not sure what dwell time is, don't worry about that. Dwell time is a metric that
calculates user engagement, session duration, and SERP CTR. So how do you measure dwell time? Its Session duration, you know, is someone staying on your
website for a long time. Bounce rate. Are they just bouncing off and going to a different
website or going back to Google or somewhere around the web because they're not happy
with what they're seeing? And click-through rate. A click-through rate is when someone's doing a Google search, they find a keyword, are they clicking on your listing
more than the competitors? Because if they're clicking
on your listing more, it tells Google that hey,
you're more relevant.
People like your site more, so it should rank higher
than the competition. The last thing you want to do, is have people just come
to your site and be like, "hey, it's time to exit,
let's get out of this site" Now, of course, you're not going to keep
people on your website forever. But there's things that you can do to keep them there as long as possible. The main way is to
measure and check to see if your customers are happy. And even your visitors. Because if people are happy when they're coming to your website, and they're happy with the content, they're happy with the images,
the videos, the product, the service, they're more
likely to stick around.
If they're not happy,
they're going to bounce away. The way you do this is you
go to Google Analytics, and you sign up. Once you enter in your URL. It'll give you a tracking code and you want to place this
tracking code onto your website. If you're not sure how, you
can always email your developer or you can ask my team and
we'll tell you feedback on how to do this. If you have WordPress, there's a Google Analytics
WordPress extension.
And most of the platforms
that CMS' out there have little plugins or
easy way for you to install your Google Analytics code. Once you add it to your website, you can view it in your source code. And then over time, not right away. But within a day or two, sorry you have to be a little bit patient, you'll end up starting to see data. And you'll start seeing
it for future dates. So if you put on the code today, you're not going to see your
traffic stats and your data from a month ago, but you'll
see it from today onward. And what's cool about Google Analytics is it can show you session duration, this is how long people are
going to be on your website, and then navigation, go to audience. Then click on behavior, and
then click on engagement. And you'll get data all
the way from time on site, page use per session, bounce rate, these are all very important metrics.
What you ideally want to shoot for is people staying on your
site for at least two minutes. Two minutes is a really good number. As per bounce rate, the lower the better. And here's some examples, of some other sites
and their bounce rates. So from retail sites, they have roughly 20 to 40% bounce rates, landing pages 70 to 90. When you're looking at
portals like MSN or Yahoo, there's some around 10 to 30%. Service sites, anywhere from 10 to 30%, content websites 40 to 60%, lead generation sites 30 to 50%. So look at the graph,
see what website of yours is closest related to it, could be retail, could be landing page, if
from B2B is probably service or lead generation. If it's a blog, it's a content site. And look at this and try to get your bounce
rate somewhere in that range. That's what's good. And I'll show you how
to do that over time.
The first thing you want to do is within the navigation
of Google Analytics, go to behavior, then site content, and then exit pages. This will show you all the pages that are causing
people to leave your website. If you can fix this and cause less people
to leave your website, what you'll find is your bounce rate will decrease over time. These are the pages to focus on. Put yourself in the visitors
shoes or the customer shoes. Why would they leave during this web page? Do they not like it? Is there something wrong? How can I make it better? Now some pages will have a lot of exits, like your thank you page. well someone already buys and you're shipping them a
product, then they're good to go.
And those pages are okay
to have a lot of exits. But if it's an informational
page that's educational, well, hey, maybe you should
be linking to other articles on what they should do next, after they read this one article. That way I can keep them on my website and keep educating and helping them out and provide a better user experience. You also want to look at your site speed. The slower your site loads, the worse your bounce rates going to get. So go to Ubersuggest. And in Ubersuggest, go
to the site audit report in the left hand navigation,
once you load up Ubersuggest. And then I want you to
click on site audit, in there, not only does
this report show you all the errors you'll
have when it comes to SEO, when you scroll down a little, you'll see a graph that looks
like this on the screen, and it'll show you your
overall site speed.
You want to aim for green,
green is good, red is poor. And it maps it off for
both desktop and mobile. That's really important because
Google ranks mobile websites differently than desktop sites. And I know your website
has a both a desktop and a mobile version. In most cases, it's the same, but they still will rank
your website differently on mobile devices than
they will on desktop. They have two different indexes. You also want to compress your images. When you compress them and make
them smaller and file size, it'll improve your load time. It's the number one
reason for slow load time and you don't want that. General benchmarks. The zero to 40% bounce rate is good.
40 to 60 is fair. 60 to 100% is poor. When you're starting out,
you'll also find that your bounce rate is going to be higher. And that's okay. As you get more traffic, you get more age, you've been around on the web longer, your bounce rate should decrease. If you have a brand new website, you'll find that your bounce
rate is extremely low. And that's probably
because you're visiting your own website a lot. And when you visit your own website a lot, you're probably not
going to bounce as much because you're going between page and page and spending a lot of time,
so you're skewing the results. But once you start getting
a few hundred visitors, a few thousand visitors
a month, your bounce rate will probably skyrocket
and be in the poor range and overtime you want to
get into fair and then good.
Another way to make your metrics better is to improve your click-through rate. Remember, we talked about Meta tags that's your title, Meta description. If everyone does a Google
search for the best dog food, and everyone clicks on the second result instead of the first result, because the second result
has more appealing text. That tells Google hey, we
should make the second result and move up to the top. And because it's more
relevant people are clicking, and the one that was at the top, we should move it down because
not everyone cares about it and they're not clicking on it. So you want to use appealing text. So for your title, I broke
down in the previous lesson on how to create amazing
titles, follow that. In your meta description. Make sure you include keywords. And you can use a site
audit report in Ubersuggest to make sure you're avoid
using long meta descriptions or long title tags, or
duplicate descriptions or duplicate title tags.
By following all of that, you'll end up doing better
and getting more clicks, which will improve your rankings. Here's an interesting stat for you. And this is from word stream. for long tail phrases, assuming that's what you're going after, and that's what I
recommend at the beginning, you'll find that you can end up getting many more clicks than if
you go after a head terms. So focus on the right terms. If you're going after broad
terms like credit cards, well, someone searching for credit cards may want to figure out how to refinance their credit card debt, or they're looking for
credit cards for bad debt.
Or they're looking for
business credit cards, or they're looking to figure out how to
cancel their credit cards. It's so vague, they're going
to have a lot of people bounce off and not even click
through onto your website. That's what you want to go
after longer tail terms. And it'll improve your overall metrics, not just from your click-through rate, but the people sticking on your site. So its the time on site, and it will also decrease
your bounce rate as well.
And you can see a lot of this information within Google Search Console. When you go into search console, if you already haven't, go
sign up for it, It's free. It's a free tool by Google,
helps you track your data. And you want to click on search
results on the left side, and it'll show you data on how many impressions you're
getting and how many clicks. Your goal is to get more
impressions over time because the more impressions you get, that means you're ranking
higher and higher on Google. And more clicks means that you're getting a better click-through rate, so you want to improve
your impression count, but you also want to improve
your click-through count as well. And it breaks down the percentage, average, click-through rate 2.2%, you want to get that better and better. So that way your numbers
just improve over time. You also want to make sure your
website is mobile friendly. If it's not mobile friendly, you're not going to rank
well in the long run.
Remember, I said there's two
different indexes on Google, one for people on mobile devices, and another one for people using laptops or desktop machines. So you want to make sure that
your site is mobile compatible, you can do this through
a responsive design, and that helps quite a bit. Page speed is super
important with mobile because these mobile devices even
if they're on 5G or LTE, it doesn't mean they're
going to get that connection everywhere.
If I go into the middle
of Missouri on our ranch, I may only have a 2G connection and things can load really really slow. You also want to avoid using flash. You want to have a simple design and UX that way your page loads fast. You also want to consider
using AMP framework. It's a framework by Google. And that ends up loading
your mobile content much much quicker, especially
for your blog base articles. Site structure is very important too, this will help with click-through rate. If you have a lot of pages on your site in your interlinking right. Over time, when someone
searches for your brand, you're going to see an indentation. These are site links. This helps you get more clicks. And it also helps Google
understand your website. So make sure that you're
using internal linking because if you're not, you're not really going
to see too many site links on your site, if any at all. And that's it when it comes
to your site structure. Yes, you have your homepage, where your homepage should
link to maybe category pages and those category pages could
link to more deeper pages, and some of them may even
link back up to your homepage or other category pages
or other blog posts.
In other words, you should
see a really tangled web, think of like a spider web. That's how your website should be when it comes to linking together. But of course, when you're doing this only link relevant pages to each other, don't just link for the sake of linking, it has to be the ideal user experience. Don't do stuff just for Google, put the user first because
Google in the long run will rank the websites at the
top that are best for users. So action items for you before
we finish today's lesson. I want you to download and complete the SEO factors worksheet. You can find these at
neilpatel.com/training. I don't know where you
guys are watching this, it maybe YouTube or LinkedIn or Facebook. So if you're not sure
where to find the PDFs, go to neilpatel.com/training.
If you're already on neilpatel.com you'll see it below this video. I want you to download and complete the SEO factors worksheet. I want you to export your top 50 CTR pages from Google Search Console and we'll show you how to do this in this Excel sheet. I also want you to export the page speed of 10 or more of your popular
pages on your website, and we'll work through
with you on this worksheet on how you can improve all of them. Thank you for watching. I look forward to teaching you how to
audit your website next when it comes to SEO..
