What are behavioral factors? How to influence behavioral factors

How difficult it is to keep your website in the first positions and get into the top 50 on a certain topic. You constantly need to analyze the site, analyze competitors, follow news on the market and understand how to correctly present your product or service so that it is noticed by both the search engine and the consumer, while complying with all promotion requirements.

What is a behavioral factor?

One of the important indicators for a site is the behavioral factor, i.e. this is the behavior of people on the site, which can tell how interesting the resource is, how well it meets the needs of visitors and whether it is of interest to the consumer so that he will return again.

Some consider this indicator not very important, others, on the contrary, say that it is worth paying attention and analyzing behavior; in any case, you should definitely pay attention to it, and improving the indicators will only be beneficial.

Before examining the factors in more detail, we can consider the indicator using a simple example. The user, upon request “Buy a children's toy,” receives a specific website result that the search engine has prepared for him. Next, he selects a resource and begins to look at what toys there are, whether there is a description for them, and whether the price is indicated. If he likes a product and wants to buy it, then in one click the product should go to the cart and payment should take place in several steps. All these actions make up user behavior, which turns into behavioral ranking factors for Google, Yandex and other search engines.

Types of behavioral factors

All behavioral factors can be divided into external and internal. First, the user sees information about the site when it is returned for a search query, i.e., his external behavior develops. If he likes the brief information about the site (description, address, availability of contacts), then he can click on the link, thereby completing the action.

It is worth understanding that if the external factor works (there is a click on the link), then the internal one will also work (there is a visit to the site, which can be short, or it can be long, it all depends on the creators of the site).

It is always worth analyzing user actions over a certain period of time, for example three months or six months. If some new information or a new product has been added that you want to tell current and potential customers about, but sales have not yet reached a certain level, then the analysis should be carried out more often, comparing behavioral indicators week by week.

What indicators influence behavioral factors

To better understand users, it is worth analyzing their behavior on the site, and certain indicators can help with this:

How to improve PF

The resulting figures for indicators should be studied in comparison with several periods to get an overall picture of the site's development. This is what can help determine further actions and understanding how to improve behavioral factors if you are not satisfied with the statistics, there are few sales, but there are a lot of visitors.

First, you need to understand how well the page responds to the request that brings users to the site. Maybe he is looking for products, but there is only one on the site, and that is only for an order that will have to wait a week. In addition, the answer to the request should not just be specific, but expanded. For example, if you buy 5 pieces, you get free shipping or get the 6th product as a gift, etc.

Secondly, you need to analyze all the pages and see which of them are the most unpopular. Understand why the page is not liked and what can be changed in it so that the user begins to linger on it.

Thirdly, you can increase traffic to the entire site by optimizing the text and each page for a specific request. At the same time, it is better to promote one request on a separate page, without mixing them together, as this can negatively affect the ranking.

Fourthly, the placement of keywords in the text, in headings, in descriptions. But it is worth remembering: the density of such words on the page should not exceed 4-5%, since if this indicator is exceeded, the search engine may consider the promotion aggressive and the site will fall under the filter.

Perhaps, you can influence behavioral factors in such a simple way as improving the usability of the site, i.e. making it more convenient, understandable and simple, so that you can immediately find a product, put it in the cart, write a question to the manager, find out about delivery and payment. Don’t forget about setting up social buttons; millions of people spend time on social networks every day, and perhaps it’s more convenient for them to follow a company there.

The main improvement method is content optimization

If the indicators are not satisfactory, then the main task is to improve behavioral factors. SEO specialists say that the first thing to start with is to optimize the site’s content, i.e. show your true face to users. Content is something unique that no one else has, although many sites don’t try very hard and simply copy texts without notifying the copyright holders.

Content is everything that can attract the user: text, pictures and photographs, video files. For example, the text should be interesting, unique and of high quality. It should be divided into paragraphs to make it easier to read, structured (subheadings and sentences are interconnected), perhaps diluted with pictures or videos for a visual example.

For example, if this is an online clothing store, then you need good photographs, a description and, possibly, informational text to interest the buyer.

We should also talk about headlines, which play a significant role in promotion. The title should be attractive, short, but informative. It should prompt the user to take action - go to the site where he can find the answer to his request.

Cheat and ban

Search engines monitor and take into account behavioral ranking factors. Yandex, which is a Russian search engine, takes special care to ensure that there is no cheating. After all, the main principle is the purity of the search, so that the sites themselves achieve the first positions, doing a colossal job.

In 2014, website promotion using behavioral factors became a real boom, when many promotion companies paid attention only to this. These actions really brought results, positions grew, and clients were satisfied, seeing their site in the top, until Yandex introduced sanctions and began to impose sanctions on the site for cheating. Positions began to drop sharply, traffic fell, and sales practically stopped.

If you use any kind of cheating, you need to do it carefully and wisely so that behavioral factors naturally grow. Serpclick is a company that helps with promotion by calculating in advance the number of clicks on queries. Such a visit can be called natural, since the work is carried out by real people who come to the site, spend a certain time there, go to the necessary sections, and this does not look like cheating.

Behavioral ranking factors: "Yandex"

The user enters a query into the search bar and waits for a relevant answer. The search engine, using its algorithm, tries to select sites that can answer the request, using the behavioral factor, since a machine is not able to replace a person.

However, Yandex, using its technology, still uses human labor, due to which the quality of sites that are located in the first positions has increased. Employees conduct very strict supervision over the issuance, since the main task is the most accurate response to the request received.

Yandex collects data on behavioral factors from various sources. Firstly, data collection when issuing a request. If the link is frequently clicked and the visit to the site is quite long, it means that it becomes more relevant for this request and is better ranked in the search results. Secondly, it collects information from the counter, if one is installed on the site, or from the installed Yandex browser.

PF and Google system

Google's behavioral ranking factors look somewhat different, and some believe that this search engine does not pay attention to this at all. However, according to the analyzes carried out, it can be said that Google takes into account various factors much less than Yandex, but still analyzes sites:

There are also negative factors that the system also takes into account, which can affect the position of the site, and this is worth remembering, because someone uses such earnings on behavioral factors, winding them up in an unnatural way, and someone will then pay for it and will be sanctioned by Google. For example, the Penguin or Panda algorithm monitors low-quality links, of which there can be a lot.

Myths about behavioral factors

There are several misconceptions that many people are not aware of and think it is right, which leads to wrong actions.

Many people believe that the more people come to the site, the higher its position in further search results will be. On the one hand, this is true, but on the other hand, search engines take into account not one behavioral factor, but several that are interrelated.

Another rumor or myth is that site owners are monitored by search engines, so they let some resources appear on the first page, while others remain in the 20th and 30th positions. It cannot be ruled out that everyone is being watched, so the work is being carried out more carefully. But even if they don’t follow you, you should always remember that the work is done for the sake of the user, since he is a potential client.

What to expect in the future

What might happen in the future and how important will behavioral factors be? Yandex and other search engines will never give a direct answer, but several development options can be assumed:

• It is possible that behavioral ranking factors will cease to play an important role, as a different algorithm for issuing sites for search queries will appear and promotion technologies will have to be improved.
• It is possible that the importance of PF will increase, and this will be a revolutionary path in promotion.

In any case, you should not be afraid of one option or another, since you can always adapt to the work of search engines, configure the site correctly and achieve the desired indicators.

If you follow all the rules, create a site for users where they can find everything they need and want to come back again, then you won’t need to boost the site, use black hat promotion methods and other steps to achieve first positions in the search results. By constantly improving the resource and analyzing behavioral factors, you can achieve good positions, which will bring profit and success.

To determine which resources are most relevant to which queries, search engines take into account many ranking factors: the relevance of the search query to the site’s content, the presence of keywords in the main meta tags and document text, the age and history of the domain, page authority, page loading speed, and others technical aspects - in total more than 800 parameters for Yandex and at least 271 for Google.

Let us dwell in more detail on the factors that arise as a result of visitor actions, called behavioral. To determine which sites people like best, search engines collect statistics - which site users have bookmarked, how much time they spent on it, how many pages they visited, which sites they choose from search results more often, and so on.

These factors can be divided into two types:

• Generated in search results.
• Formed within the site.

External behavioral factors

Click through rate

If your site, while ranking lower than its competitors, is clicked on more often, this is a signal for the search engine to increase its position in the search results. This is achieved by improving the quality of the snippet - a small excerpt of text from the page included in the search results. Since in most cases its role is played by title and description meta tags, by improving them, we improve the snippet.

This is what snippets look like in search results.

Return to search results

This factor helps in measuring natural rankings. The system calculates how quickly a person returned to the search after visiting the site and concludes whether he was able to get an answer to the query. If there was no return, it means he was satisfied with the result.

Transitions from social networks and other resources

This user behavior indicates that the site is interesting to people, so search engines rank it higher in search results.

Internal behavioral factors

For each type of site and search query, internal behavioral factors will have an individual set of ideal indicators.
These factors are very important for ranking, but to what extent they have an impact is difficult to say - search engine algorithms evaluate everything as a whole.

When generating results for each type of request, the search engine expects certain user behavior that is different for each type. For example, if a user is looking for an instruction manual for a specific model of iron, we can conclude that he is interested in getting results as quickly as possible. Yandex and Google in this case expect that people will not look through several pages on the resource in search of an answer and it is best if it is on the landing page. And if a person enters a query ”beautiful desktop wallpaper”, then most likely he will study the site and its sections and view a large number of pages.

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of visitors who left the site from the login page within 15 seconds. There can be many reasons for this: low loading speed, outdated design, low usability, inconsistency of the site’s content with the search query, and so on.

The standards will be different for different types of sites. For example, it is completely normal if a person went to a blog to read an article, spent enough time there to read it, and left after receiving an answer to his question.

View depth

This indicator shows the number of pages viewed by a visitor in one session. This is an important indicator of the activity and interest of visitors.

If a user visits several pages of a site in one visit, this indicates the overall usefulness of the resource not only for a given request.

For different types of sites (online store, social network, information portal), different viewing depths will be considered optimal. Therefore, it is possible to determine which is the norm for you only in dynamics.

Browsing depth is closely related to the time spent on the site, and both factors should be considered in conjunction. The more the user visits pages that interest him, the more time he will spend on the site. But if he viewed many pages in a short period of time, and the conversion rate is low, this may indicate unclear navigation and a confusing structure.

Using Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics, analyze user behavior: what route they take to get to this or that page, which pages they stay on, why they don’t reach the target page (for example, paying for an order).

Placing internal links to pages with additional information on the topic helps increase browsing depth and thereby improve user factors.

Stay time

Both the time spent on the site as a whole and the time spent on a specific page are taken into account. This helps the algorithms better determine whether each item matches a user's request.

The more time the user spends on the page, the higher the likelihood that he has studied all the information provided and received the answer he was looking for. For example, if there is a large amount of text information on the page, and the user left the site before it takes time to read it, this indicates that the content was not interesting to him.

To increase the time spent by users on the site, you need to take care of useful and informative content.

Yandex.Metrica takes into account the difference between the duration of the first and last view during one session. Moreover, if a visitor opened and did not refresh the page, the time spent on the site will be considered zero. Also, if the user opened the site, but did not perform any actions for half an hour, and then moved to another page within the site, this will be considered the start of a new session (new visit).

In Google Analytics, average time on site is determined by the ratio of total duration of stay to the number of sessions. To determine the duration of one session, activity on the page is taken into account. If the visitor is inactive, the session automatically ends after 30 minutes. As soon as the user is active, the “session end time” parameter is shifted by half an hour.

Example of Google Analytics sessions

Revisit

Repeated visits to the site by the same user indicate that the site interested him in the information provided. It’s very good if he added the site to his bookmarks.

Attendance

The more we visit a resource for low-frequency queries, the higher its chances of moving to the TOP for high-frequency queries.

Activity

Ultimately, what matters is whether the user achieved the goal or not. Therefore, all other factors should be considered in conjunction with this.

How to improve behavioral factors

Quality content

Filling your site with truly interesting and unique content will help attract and interest visitors. Dilute textual information with visual information – photographs and infographics. Users respond better to such content and perceive it more easily. And adding a video increases the time spent on the page.

Usability

Usability scores directly affect conversion. Heavy or outdated design, inconvenient navigation and an abundance of pop-ups can discourage visitors and increase the bounce rate.

Navigation on the site should be intuitive, and its unobtrusive design should correspond to the theme and not interfere with the perception of the content. And of course, first of all, it is worth carrying out technical optimization of the site: eliminating technical errors, getting rid of duplicate pages, working out the structure, and so on.

How to create a convenient and selling website, improve the usability of an existing one and create attractive triggers to increase conversion at a thematic seminar by Dmitry Shuchalin, speaker of our training center.

Attractive snippet

A snippet is the first thing users see in the search results. Based on it, they determine how well the site satisfies their request.
The snippet should briefly reflect the essence of the information posted on the site - you should not write in it about what the user will not find on the page. This will help improve conversion and reduce bounce rates.

What does it mean? Let me explain: every user who searches for something on the Internet performs a number of actions there (on the search results page and on the sites themselves). This could be views of certain pages, clicks on links, transitions to other sites, returns to searches, clarification of queries, etc. and so on.

Based on the user’s actions, you can understand whether he found what he was looking for or not, whether the resource was useful to him, or whether he wasted his time. This information is important for search engines, because by owning it, they will be able to more accurately identify high-quality resources and show them in search results on the first pages.

The behavior of real users is an objective criterion for assessing the quality of sites. This is, in fact, why behavioral factors have such a big impact on a site’s ranking in search results.

What PFs are taken into account by search engines?

PF can be divided into external (behavior on the SERP when the user chooses which site to click on) and internal (behavior within the site when the user views information).

External PF

• Site click-through rate(how many users who saw the site went to it)
• Satisfaction with the site(did the user return back to the search to add information, or was he satisfied with the site he viewed and stopped searching)

Internal PF

• Total traffic volume
• Loyal users(refunds)
• Time spent on the site
• Failures(leaving the site in less than 15 seconds)
• View depth(number of pages viewed)

How do search engines learn about user behavior?

Information about external PFs is easy to obtain - each search engine analyzes user actions in its results.

With internal PFs it’s a little more complicated. Yandex, for example, receives data on internal PF in the following ways:

• via Yandex.Metrica, if it is installed on the site itself
• through Yandex.Bar applications, if they are installed on the user’s PC
• through the Yandex browser, finally, which is also installed by the users themselves

So if suddenly, due to the weak PF of your site, you decide to “ban” your own Yandex.Metrica, then in vain. Search engines will still extract data about user behavior. Therefore, it will be more useful to improve these same PFs.

How to influence behavioral factors?

As PFs gain more and more weight in ranking algorithms, restless SEOs are looking for more and more new methods of influencing PFs. These methods can be white and fluffy, they can be vaguely gray, and they can be black. The latter, as a rule, promise the fastest results, but is it worth it...

Let's look at several different methods of influencing PF.

Method 1. Cheat PF using special services.

There are plenty of such services. These are Userator, Movebo, WebEffector, SerpClick, etc. They live quietly on the Internet, promising good results and complete security for client sites. Their offers look tempting and truly safe. But why then do hundreds of sites fall from their positions after the next update? And their owners receive letters like this in response to their requests:

So, in my opinion, boosting PF is too risky a method of promotion. Perhaps it is justified for young but high-quality sites that are not yet visible. After all, in order to acquire natural PF, they need at least some traffic to begin with. But anyway, isn’t it easier to order contextual advertising? Or take a slightly longer path of natural search engine promotion than guessing every day: will they catch you or won’t you, will they apply a filter or not apply a filter?

Method 2. Improving website usability

And this is precisely the most legal way to improve PF. After all, what is usability? This is the convenience of the site for the user. The more convenient the site, the more interesting and useful it is, the more time users will spend on it, the more often they will return and the better the PF of this site will be, the higher the site will be in the search results.

Unfortunately, working on website usability often scares its owners. If the site was originally created by amateurs, then refining it can take a lot of time, effort and money. Sometimes you need to rewrite texts from scratch, sometimes you need to change the entire structure of the site. Moreover, not everyone can immediately say what’s wrong with the site. Even I, having been working in Internet marketing for several years, don’t see all the mistakes.

In our company, usability audits are carried out by specialists who have ate the dog in this matter (they studied with Steve Krug and Satin himself). So, if you want your site to be sorted out and given a professional assessment, call or write... we’ll come to an agreement =)

Method 3. Triggers

This obscure word refers to marketing techniques that are designed to capture the user’s attention. For example, trust triggers: reviews, certificates, licenses, mentions of famous clients, etc. Or triggers of greed: crossed out old prices, gifts with purchase, free bonuses.

Triggers can also include mini-tests that the user passes on the site to understand what type of service he needs. Or a pop-up window asking you to stay on the page when leaving the resource. All these and other triggers are aimed at captivating/attracting/detaining/tying your user to the site.

You probably use triggers on your website yourself. But you just don’t know what these are triggers =)

Use such techniques, and users will definitely appreciate it, because it makes their life easier. And sites with triggers are much more interesting than banal text “foot wraps” like “We are a young, dynamically developing company with the principles ...”

And finally, a couple of examples of successful triggers that work well and significantly improve PF:

Method 4. Special promotions

In the classical sense, a “promotion” is some kind of event, the purpose of which is to push the user to make a sale: discounts, gifts, bonuses, etc. The promotion in this case refers to the above-mentioned triggers.

But now we are talking about something else. I want to draw your attention to promotions, the main goal of which is to force real users to perform certain actions on your site: view N number of pages, stay on the site for more than 2 minutes, find your site in a search for a specific query, etc.

This is an excellent method for improving PF. It's not entirely white, but it's clearly not black either, so there's nothing to complain about. To make it clear what I mean, I’ll give 2 examples:

Example 1. In honor of the birthday, company “A” posted 3 gifts on the site: 3 painted gift boxes were “hidden” on the pages of the site. When you click on the image, a window with a promo code for a discount pops up. Potential clients were notified about this through mass e-mail mailings and on social networks.

Interested people ran to the site and began to literally “scan” it in search of the treasured boxes. The result is that the depth of page viewing has increased, and this is a significant PF.

Example 2. Company “B” announced a promotion on social networks for TVs. According to the rules of the promotion, you had to type in the search phrase “buy a TV” and find the website of campaign “B”, no matter what search page it was on. Open the website, scroll to the very bottom of the page and click on the “get a discount on TV” button.

The campaign was a great success, and as a result, the site’s clickability in search results for the request “buy a TV” increased tenfold, and with the next Yandex update, the site’s position for this request also increased.

conclusions

Well, that’s probably all about methods of influencing behavioral factors. You can influence them... and you should, but you need to do it wisely. The shortest path is not always the right one. And if you have serious long-term plans for your own website, don’t be lazy, start developing it, fill it with interesting content and special promotions that will not only improve the PF, but also generally increase interest in your resource.

What are behavioral ranking factors and how do they affect website SEO optimization in Yandex and Google? Where do search engines get data about PF? List of 26 Behavioral Ranking Factors: How to Improve Them? Is it possible to increase the PF or pessimize a competitor’s website? Read more about everything in this article.

When generating results, search engines are guided by , which are used in algorithms for determining the quality of sites and their relevance to search queries. Some of the most significant SEO factors are behavioral ranking factors.

What are site behavioral factors?

Behavioral Ranking Factors is a set of parameters that determine the relevance of a page to a search query, based on the actions of site users, their profile and history of interaction with search. These parameters are used in search ranking algorithms.

Behavioral factors today play an important role in the process of determining the relevance of sites, however, their contribution cannot be assessed with quantitative indicators. Firstly, search engines do not comment on information and do not disclose site ranking factors and their weight in the overall ranking formula. Secondly, there are a large number of other factors that also affect the issue. These can be domain, link, commercial factors, etc.

Behavioral factors reflect the visitor's engagement and interest in the content presented on the page. Modern SEO optimization does not seem to be effective without working on these indicators, the usability of interfaces, and the quality of content.

The influence of behavioral factors on SEO

It’s worth starting with the fact that behavioral factors cannot be considered in abstraction from other ranking factors. For example, technical factors such as slow site speed or broken internal links can significantly reduce browsing depth. Server unavailability or the presence of unoptimized images for people with unstable Internet can cause problems in displaying content on the site, which in turn can increase the bounce rate. Low-quality content and uninteresting text will most likely provoke the user to leave for another site.

The high degree of dependence of user factors on the quality of the site, as well as the difficulty of artificially influencing them, made these factors one of the most significant in determining the relevance of search results. About 10-15 years ago, text and link ranking factors had a high priority in search algorithms. The simplicity of their definition has led to artificial cheating: mass purchase of external links, re-optimization of texts with keywords. Naturally, the influence of these factors decreased, pessimistic ranking algorithms appeared, such as Baden-Baden and Minusinsk, which lowered sites in search results for search spam and unnatural link mass.

Since 2014, Yandex has naturally announced an increase in the influence of behavioral ranking factors in determining the relevance of pages, and a corresponding decrease in the influence of external links. The search engine said that the priorities in the updated algorithm, that is, those that have greater weight in the general ranking formula, are behavioral factors, which are based primarily on the quality of content, usability and user experience of interaction with the search engine and the site.

Where do search engines get data on PF?

Before moving on to the list of behavioral ranking factors, let's look at the sources from which search engines obtain data on web resources.

1. Analytics systems. Almost every website today has a Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics statistics counter installed. By providing webmasters with a free analytics tool, search engines receive in return a colossal amount of data that is used for ranking.
2. Browsers. Search engines spend a lot of money on developing and advertising their own browsers for a reason. This is another source of information about the user profile and its interaction with sites, which allows you to make your search better.
3. Browser extensions like Yandex.Bar can transmit data about user interaction with search to search engines.
4. Search engine services. Data from Google Search Console, Google Plus, Yandex.Webmaster, Zen, Directory and other search engine services can be taken into account in determining the relevance of sites.
5. Other software and software that is somehow controlled by search engines. For example, PuntoSwitcher, purchased by Yandex, can provide search data about user typos. This information can be used in determining vital vadaka.

Internet memes are already being created about the user experience of interaction with search companies:

As they say, there is some truth in every joke. Modern search engines can take a personalized approach to creating a user profile, based on data from his interaction with various services and applications.

List: 26 Behavioral Ranking Factors

Let's look at a list of behavioral ranking factors that today can significantly influence your site's position in search, both for the better and for the worse:

Cheating of behavioral factors is an artificial imitation of user actions on the site. It is designed to increase browsing depth, time on the site, reduce the bounce rate and affect other parameters that affect the ranking of sites. Today, optimizers either develop their own software or use third-party services for boosting PF.

We consider both ways of artificially influencing search results to be unpromising. 4-5 years ago, these tools could work, however, later search engines began to be pessimistic or completely exclude resources from search results for such fraud. User factors themselves are complex and non-linear indicators, the effectiveness of which greatly depends on the topic, user profile, browsing history, type of resource and many other factors. Objectively, existing services linearly increase the most accessible factors in fairly primitive ways that are easy to track. In site statistics, the geography of visitors, their devices, IP addresses, the unreasonable nature of user behavior on the site, the distribution of attention across pages, etc., change dramatically. Such uncharacteristic changes are easily tracked by modern search engines. Theoretically, it is possible to develop an algorithm that is as close as possible to the actions of users, however, this will be a consequence of a security breach on the Internet, the creation of botnets, which can later be used for DDos attacks and other selfish purposes of hackers. Search engines regard this threat as search spam and have a negative attitude towards the spread of malware on the Internet.

Here is a comment from a Yandex official representative from 2016, when the company began to actively fight this type of search spam:

This raises a completely logical question: “How do search engines monitor the promotion of PF in order to lower the position of competitors in the search results?” We believe that sanctions for cheating PF are imposed after a long time of use and only manually. In this case, competitors will have to spend their own money for a long time, every day increasingly doubting the prospects of attempts to pessimize competitors. Or perhaps suspicious traffic and PF, which search engines consider unnatural, are simply eliminated from participation in the ranking algorithms. Share your opinion in the comments on this issue.

Here is the official response from Yandex support. The search engine says that such attempts are taken into account and tracked in the algorithm:

How to improve behavioral factors on the site?

Instead of trying to artificially influence user factors by simulating user actions, it is better to work on the quality of the project, its content, page speed, usability and other aspects of a modern Internet resource. Let's look at a few options for optimizing your website to improve behavioral ranking factors.

We are looking for weak points of the site

The best tool for visually displaying conversion holes on your site is Webvisor. This tool allows you to view the entire user session from a first-person perspective and understand the nature and motives of his actions. With the help of Webvisor, you can analyze and understand why visitors leave your site, from which pages they do this and after what actions.

Analyze bounces, sessions with low duration and activity through which users navigate to your site, browsers and devices. Monitor the correct display of your website on different resolutions, devices and browsers. It's possible that your high bounce rate is due to one browser that doesn't support your code.

Session duration

There is no point in purposefully increasing the duration of the session, since this factor strongly depends on the topic of the project, its goals and content. However, an increase in the amount of time users spend on your site can signal greater user engagement with your page's information or product offerings.

If you are considering a commercial site, be sure to add pagination to the pages, add the ability to filter the number of products on the page, use product filters, experiment with loading products without reloading the page (Ajax). Display the number of products in a category so that users understand the breadth of your product range. Provide users with the most complete information about your products: video reviews, photographs from various angles, detailed descriptions of products, their characteristics. Try to display information that is important for users before moving to the product card.

Information sites can increase user engagement and session time with all sorts of surveys on the topic, tests, opinions of experts and celebrities, infographics, useful videos, convenient tables and high-quality structuring and presentation of content on the page.

There is one very interesting technique for checking the usability and convenience of your site. Invite your mother or grandmother, who is not an advanced user, to find a specific page or place an order on your site. Based on their reaction, you will immediately understand what weak areas your site has from the point of view of users.

View depth

Work on meaningful page linking, navigation and site structure so that users can get to any page in no more than 3 clicks. Offer users related content based on their interests and the content of the page they are on.

Reducing the bounce rate

We remove aggressive advertising and pop-up windows from our website that block the user’s access to content. Bring the content that is most important to the user to the top of the page. If this is a product category, the user should immediately see product items in the visible area of ​​his device. If it's an informational article, the user shouldn't scroll to the middle of the page hoping to get to the content while watching a ton of ads or useless material.

Check that your website scripts work correctly on all devices and browsers. Possibly errors in the browser's code interpretation prevent users from accessing content or performing necessary actions.

Development of snippets

Analyze the CTR of your snippets, traffic on individual pages and the site’s position in the search results in comparison with past indicators. Evaluate the relevance of the information presented in the snippet to the tasks that the user is trying to solve. Don’t forget to take into account seasonality and demand dynamics for certain key queries.

Work on your site's micro markup to get rich snippets. Experiment with using special characters and HTML5 characters in snippet titles and descriptions. See how this affects your rankings and traffic.

Increasing user activity

When using “Chat with the company” in search, provide users with consultations promptly and in as much detail as possible.

At the end of the article, try asking your readers for their opinions on the material presented; perhaps this will increase their involvement in the discussion of a given topic.

We update and update content

This recommendation applies to both commercial and informational sites. In the first case, it is extremely important to keep product balances up to date so that users do not order products that are no longer in stock. It is also necessary to maintain the relevance of prices, descriptions, and graphic materials so that the product that people see on the site corresponds to it in reality.

For information sites, it is important to keep data up to date, especially in dynamically changing areas. Legal sites with irrelevant legal information are unlikely to last long in the TOP of search engine results. Just like a website about SEO optimization that recommends buying links and boosting user factors is unlikely to deserve the attention of users.

Irrelevant and unrenewed content on your resources can negatively impact audience behavior, engagement, and loyalty.

Improving interaction with the site

Try to provide users with the maximum possible functionality and data that will help them solve their problem. For online stores, product sizing charts are a must-have. For example, it would be a big plus for a developer’s website to have a virtual tour of apartments under construction. For an information site dedicated to diets, it would be a good addition to have a calorie calculator that will help each user calculate their personal indicators and create a weight loss plan.

Put yourself in the shoes of users and think about what kind of interactivity or functionality you can use to help them solve their problems, as well as increase conversion or key indicators of your business.

Conclusion

In order to evaluate the behavioral factors of your site, it is not at all necessary to know all the elements of search algorithms. You already have everything you need for analysis from a human point of view - analytics systems. Master new reports, analyze statistics, user behavior on your site, holes due to which users leave for competitors. Put yourself in the shoes of users and ask yourself the question “what don’t I like about this site?”, involve independent people from your target audience to evaluate the content and usability of your resource.

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