In my previous articles, I have discussed the major SEO factors like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, SEO principles, and etc. But I didn’t talk much about how “engagement” affect SEO. Engagement is very important for SEO now and it will continue to be important well into the future. Google has been tracking traffic data for a while and they’ve been integrating it more and more and I think ultimately like what they see with it a lot because it can dramatically affect the results. Google can see a lot of what the traffic on the internet is doing, even if the visitor not on a Google site.

If your site has Google Analytics installed, then Google can see where your visitors come from. For example, if you have visitors arriving from a link on Facebook, then Google will see this and it will help build your authority a bit.

SEO Engagement is about how visitors respond to your site

The most important part of engagement is how visitors respond to the search results If they click on your site from Google’s search results and then come back to the search results very quickly, then that is very bad. If they click on your site from Google’s search results and then stay for a long time or don’t come back at all, then that is going to help your rankings for the search phrase they searched and any closely related ones.

Google’s primary goal is to give the searcher for a certain query the answer that they’re looking for for. If a website does that, then the content on that site is considered engaging and, therefore, high quality. As a result, Google will want to rank that content. Google’s official page mentioned how search works as below:

Over time, our testing has consistently showed that people want quick answers to their queries. We have made a lot of progress on delivering you the most relevant answers, faster and in formats that are most helpful to the type of information you are seeking

Engagement is actually a trump card for SEO. If your site is highly engaging for some search phrases, Google will forgive a lot of bad behavior and you will need a lot less On-Page and Off-Page SEO optimization to rank.

Good SEO engagement can supersede SEO-unfriendly website

In fact, a site could be penalized, but if its SEO engagement is good enough, if it is highly engages the visitors, or it answers a very specific query well according to how Google measures that, then that engagement trumps the penalty. You could have the worst site in the world in terms of all the Google metrics, but if Google knows that its highly engaging and it answers the queries of the visitors, they will not care and you will still rank. I have a great case study proving that you can be penalized and still rank that shocked me when I first saw it.

You can’t start necessarily with SEO engagement because you have to get people to your site in the first place and you have to get ranked for what you want to rank for, at least a little bit and get a little bit of traffic going there. Engagement is not necessarily where you start, other than to make sure that you’re building the right foundation to where you can have SEO engagement done to where it’s not that hard, or it’s built into your processes.

There’s really one big metric that we’re going to use to measure engagement. There are several metrics, but the one I think matters the most or at least is most representative of engagement is how long people are on your site, or “time on site.”. If a visitor is searching for something and they come and they spend 10 seconds on your site, then that is going to hurt your rankings, especially if it happens repeatedly. Now, if visitors consistently stay about six minutes, then your ranking will improve or at least be “sticky”.

Bounce Rate

There are other metrics like bounce rate, but ultimately I like to keep it simple and focus on the most important metric(s). I try to focus on keeping the visitor as engaged for as long as possible on my website. If I’m successful at keeping the visitors from Google on my site for an extended period of time (say, 60 seconds or more typically), then I’m happy and Google will likely be happy as well.

If you’re not ranking for something, it’s not quite as important that you have perfect engagement, but if you’re high up on the first page, or on the first page at all for a big search phrase, at that point you definitely want to make sure everything is all set up right. With my processes, it’ll already be there and your engagement will already be largely taken care of.

I can’t stress how important engagement is going to be. Not just for now, but into the future. There’s just no point in which Google is going to say, “You know what? We don’t really care what our visitors do”. They’re just not going to do that. Ultimately, that’s what they want. Again, think back to their primary goal. They want to serve up the results that answers the queries of their visitors.

How are we going to work on this SEO engagement in kind of simple way? Video!

Specifically, videos on the Google-owned YouTube.

Why video? Well, first of all video can be very inexpensive and easy to make. You already have a smartphone and it shoots HD video. Not having a professional $10,000 video can actually work in your favor, depending on your market. You really don’t have a while lot of excuses not to have video. Not only that, but there’s software out there that costs $20 a month that can make really awesome videos in five or ten minutes. They are rally cool looking

Now, even further. It’s so easy to make videos that you can hire people for $5 or $10 on the internet to make you a pretty good looking video.

There’s a lot of different ways to approach making videos, but ultimately videos are the best and most engaging form of content. I would consider anything really rich media is more engaging. A picture is very engaging as well. Instagram, Pinterest… The reason why Pinterest took off is because it’s heavily focused on bein visually pleasing.

Video is the easiest to make. Also from video, u can extract images! If you make videos, you have images. Not only that, but you can make text out of videos.

A visitor press a button, sit back, and be entertained or educated without putting much effort into it. Video is the path of least resistance to consuming content. This is not true for all markets or topics, but it is true for most markets and topics. As a result, visitors are going to spend more time on sites that have videos on them! Therefore, sites with videos on them are going to be seen as more engaging into Google.

Let’s say we put videos on our site and Google sends a visitor there and they click on video and they watch the video for 90 seconds. 90 seconds is usually good enough to be marked as “engaging”. It is generally going to be easier to keep a visitor on your site for longer if you have a video for them to sit back and watch. If you videos are YouTube videos, then that is even better.

What kind of videos help SEO engagement?

You don’t even have to use your own videos! You can embed somebody else’s video from YouTube if it is relevant to your market and not a direct competitor to your business. You can legally use somebody else’s video as part of the YouTube’s creative license.

Think about ultimately what Google wants. Google wants to answer a searcher’s queries as best as possible by serving up relevant websites. Sending people to your site and getting them to spend at least a few minutes on there, preferably with videos, is going to boost Google’s impression of how closely you answered that specific query.

If you have a website, please share how did you make your visitors stay longer on your site.