- [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.