User Engagement for SEO

We design websites for both people and SEO Pretoria search engines. When designing for users, it is always good to look at your website and content from a fresh perspective. Mainly, how engaging is your content and are you already bored with the site? User engagement is a ranking factor for Google, even if it is indirectly.

Pages per Session for SEO

The pages per session metric indicated how many pages a user views before leaving your website. This metric along with average session is important for your SEO Pretoria factors. What these metrics means is how interactive and engaging your website is, from a navigational perspective.

• Look for opportunities to encourage linger session durations or more pages-per-session
• Insert call-to-action on pages to encourage conversions
• Provide additional navigation options within content, such as placing links in the body content or providing related reading materials.

Bounce Rate for SEO

Bounce rate can either be positive or negative, depending on how you look at it. Your bounce rate indicates how satisfied users are with your landing page or website. High bounce rates indicate that your pages aren't engaging and don't satisfy user intent. Bounces can also indicate that they are.

• Tell a story or lead with a compelling hook
• Get rid of intrusive interstitials and pop-up advertisements
• Improve page load times
• Ensure landing page copy is relevant to search queries

Click-Through Rate for SEO

Your website listing is the first interaction a user has with your site, CTR is one indicator whether if that interaction was successful. A low CTR could indicate that your message is not relevant to a user search. It could also indicate that your meta description or title tag is not compelling enough.

• Insert exact match keywords in title tags and meta descriptions so they are bolded
• Add a benefit of clicking on the page into your meta description
• Ensure your tags are the proper length so they do not get truncated

Technical Structure for SEO

We need to consider how our technical structure is impacting user engagement and our keyword rankings. Without a solid foundation, your house of content will crumble.

Crawlability for SEO

To get indexed, your website needs to be crawled. Search engine crawlers only have access to the links provided in your sitemap and is available from your home page. This makes the use of interlining very important.

• Create a sitemap using your CMS and submit it manually through Google Search Console
• Block all pages you do not want to be crawled or indexed by placing them under the disallow file of your robots.txt file
• Clean up redirect chains and set parameters for dynamic URLs

Security for SEO

Having an HTTPS secure website is very valuable for ensuring the security of transactions on your website. It is also a ranking factor for Google.

• Contact your hosting provider for SSL certification and implementation
• Run a crawl of your website
• Place sitemaps in your robots.txt file independent of any user-agent commands
• Rewrite your .htaccess file to redirect all website traffic to a specific domain using an HTTPS URL.

Clean URLs for SEO

Equally as important, you do not want content that links to broken or redirected pages. Not only does this affect speeds, but it can also impact indexation.

Find out more about SEO Pretoria in our final article in the coming weeks