How User Behavior Affects Search Engine Optimization

Jun 18, 2020 3 min read
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As a business owner or content creator, you want to make sure your website stays ahead of your competitors and ranks well on search engines. And to do that, you need to understand your audience’s behavior, which you can then use to refine your search engine optimization.

Understanding the user behavior of your audience is important, not only because it affects your website’s ranking but also for gaining insight into the roadmap for the long-term growth of your business.

In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at how user behavior affects your website’s search engine optimization and ways how you can improve your ranking with the user behavior data that you collect.

How search engines interpret user experience

To understand user behavior, we must first get an idea on how search engines interpret a user’s experience as they search for a query.

To briefly explain the process, search engines basically operate using a proprietary algorithm that interprets not only the specific keyword that was used but also the intention behind it. It is this algorithm that functions to filter out the millions of websites and determine the ranking of the pages and which ones to display to the user.

All of this happens in the background and is invisible to everyone except the engineers in Google themselves. And yet, it affects how our websites are ranked on the Internet. However, we can interpret how it impacts and improves our website’s search rankings.

User behavior signals

As we briefly prefaced above, Google uses their algorithm to identify which pages are delivered to the search engine results page (SERP). How they filter the pages are based on a number of ranking factors that all point to a single unifying metric, and that is user experience, which can be further identified by user behavior signals.

Google has stated that one of the user behavior signals which they use are the clicks and post-click behavior of their users. The algorithm keeps track of which websites users click on, the length of time they spend on that target website, and what action they do next (closing the tab and searching another query, for example). Together, these behavior signals form a pattern that the algorithm interprets and then filters which pages are delivered to the users.

Looking to increase your business’ organic rankings? Our team here at Juicebox can help you optimize your website for improved performance according to your needs and industry.

We’ve worked with businesses in a wide variety of fields, and understand that each business will have their own unique challenges that need to be addressed in order to maximize its potential.

When you’re ready to grow your business, contact us at Juicebox.