Behavioral factors Behavioral factors are divided. Methods of influencing behavioral factors. Clicks on snippets and behavior on search results pages

Behavioral ranking factors are an analysis of the actions of the search engine (search engine) of site visitors. The results of this analysis affect the ranking of the site in search engines.

How is information about the behavior of visitors on the site collected? I will list the main ways to obtain information about user behavior:

• statistics services (Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics);
• web browsers (almost every more or less well-known and large search engine on this moment has its own Internet browser, through which the necessary statistics are collected (Google - Chrome, Yandex - Yandex.Browser, Bing - Internet Explorer));
• browser extensions (toolbars);
• other services and applications.

• Failure rate. This indicator records the user leaving the page immediately after viewing the first page. The percentage of visitors who leave the site without viewing anything other than the first page is called the bounce rate. In fact, this characteristic reflects the relevance of the page displayed in the search results to the search query. The reasons for a high percentage of failures may be a boring design, a site structure that is incomprehensible to the user, and, if the user has satisfied his need for information or a product by opening the page he needs.
• View depth. This indicator reflects the number of pages viewed by one user. And the more there are, the better this indicator. But at the same time, the viewing depth may indicate a confusing and illogical site structure, which can already negatively affect search engine rankings.
• Time on site. The time spent by the user on an Internet resource is also considered an important criterion of behavioral factors. To increase the length of a visitor’s stay on the site’s pages, you can introduce a photo gallery, post something interesting that will take time and retain the user. But you need to be careful in this matter so that the potential buyer, if this is a commercial Internet resource, does not forget about the main purpose of the visit.
• Return to search. This criterion reflects the fact that if a user, having opened your site, wandered through its pages and even spent enough time there, still goes back to the search, then perhaps he did not solve his problem, or received an incomplete answer. Ideally, it should be like this: the user came to your site, received necessary information and never returned to the search results.
• Direct visits and branded traffic. An indicator that records the number of visits to a website by entering the domain of an Internet resource in address bar browser, or transitions from the bookmarks bar. If a site is remembered, it means it was useful to users, and this is already a signal for an increase in ranking.

Many people try to cheat behavioral factors by imitating user actions special programs, but now it is recognized by search engine algorithms. Therefore, for such actions you can be subject to sanctions from search engines.

But if you still decide to try to cheat, then in order not to fall under the filter, use queries for which your site is no further than the TOP 30 in the search results. You need to raise your positions to this level using other methods. It is recommended to use at least 10 different queries for cheating. You should increase no more than 20% of the real statistics, or better yet, about 10%. At the moment, you can use the following services to boost behavioral factors:

• User;
• SerpClic+PFLINKk+Vpodskazke;
• Miralinks (to enhance articles with clicks).

In general, the influence of promotion for website promotion is insignificant. Most users of promotion services are filtered. The best way to boost behavioral factors is where other methods have already been exhausted, for example, promotion with links.

Commercial factors

What are commercial factors? These are the indicators that determine the reliability of an online store.

To determine the need to add one or another so-called “commercial factor” to the site, you should analyze the top search results in relevant topics.

The analysis can be done using a special matrix of commercial factors. In it, in the first column we write a list of competitors in our field from the TOP-30, and horizontally we write a list of all the commercial factors that we noticed among any of the competitors in the top. Then we simply note with pros and cons what exactly each of the competitors has on the site and what is missing. This way we will see what commercial factors are present among competitors who are in the top search engine for thematic queries, what factors you need to add to your website in this regard.

Behavioral factors (PF)– actions of visitors that they can potentially perform on the site: surfing the resource pages, clicks on buttons and links, comments, reposts on social networks, likes, repeated visits to the site, stay time, etc.

Search engines carefully monitor user actions and use the data obtained as one of the factors for ranking sites in search results.

The process of monitoring by search engines is carried out through browsers and their add-ons, as well as official web analytics systems (Yandex.Metrica, Google Analytics), which are installed by webmasters on their own websites.

Key Behavioral Factors

There are quite a lot of markers on the basis of which a general idea of ​​behavioral factors can be formed. Among the main ones are:

Bounce rate. This factor is expressed as a percentage and shows how many people left the site without taking any action on it (they viewed less than one page, were on the site for less than a specified period of time, for example, 15 seconds). Roughly speaking, the bounce rate measures what percentage of users did not like the content of a page or site. For more details about it, you can read our article given at the link.

Total time the user spent on the site. A more interested user will spend a lot of time on the site.

View depth. If the visitor, in addition to the login page, found other useful materials on the site, this indicator will increase. It is important for you to give the user the opportunity to see something that could potentially be useful to him. High-quality linking will help you in this matter, which can be organized both in the content part, in “popular materials” blocks (per month, week, all the time), and through entire courses.

Visits and repeated returns to the site by entering the site url in the address bar, social networks, links from other sites, etc.

Site snippet CTR (click-through rate). The more attractive your snippet, the higher the percentage of clicks from the total number of views.

How to improve behavioral factors?

Every webmaster or optimizer has effective levers for controlling behavioral factors. At the same time, the work itself to improve various indicators is very justified, since every year their influence becomes stronger.

Speaking about white methods of working with PF, the following recommendations should be highlighted:

In less detail, but touching on individual techniques, we examined PF in the article “5 real ways to improve behavioral factors.”

Cheating behavioral factors

The methods of working on behavioral factors listed above are not to everyone’s taste, because... they require a lot of time and help improve the site's performance in terms of quality. At the same time, there is always that category of webmasters and optimizers who do not care about generally accepted norms. They are trying with all their might, by hook or by crook, to deceive search algorithms by convincing them of something that is not really there. For example: they are trying to simulate the user’s actions - finding him on the site, reading an article and then commenting, liking, reposting.

There are many methods for cheating PF, but it is becoming more and more difficult to deceive the system every year, and the sanctions for such actions are getting tougher and tougher.

In this article we will not talk about PF promotion services and various individual techniques. As a rule, the struggle itself between cheaters and search engines is not equal, and sooner or later either method will die, and your project will be under attack.

Work towards quality, ask feedback from your users, publish interesting content and everything will come.

Behavioral factors- This various actions website visitors who are evaluated by search algorithms, these actions influence overall assessment site quality. Such factors include, for example, time spent on the site. It is likely that over time behavioral factors will be taken into account even more than they are now. There are many related to behavioral ranking factors various types manipulations that are used to improve the ranking of a site, but such methods are not approved by search engines.

External behavioral factors

External refers to user behavior before going to the page.

Behavioral factors that depend on the request:

• Ratio of clicks to impressions: how attractive the resource is for visitors.
• Switch to another search engine.
• The first and last transition: the first to a resource that attracted attention, and the second to a resource that satisfied all the visitor’s requirements. Ideal when they match.
• The only transition in the search results.
• Average number of clicks per request.
• Average time before switching to a resource.

Behavioral factors that are independent of the request:

• Targeted traffic.
• General traffic.
• The number of known requests for the resource.
• Transitions for all known queries.
• CTR for all search queries relevant to the page.
• Various traffic sources.
• Thematic sections.
• Traffic structure.

Internal behavioral factors

If an external factor is triggered, then the internal one is triggered at the same time: the user clicks and goes to the resource. Internal ones are easier to influence than external ones and can be used to advance a project.

• View depth. This is the number of pages visited by a visitor in one session. This behavioral factor is a relative value: it is compared with competitors in search results. For webmasters, this is an indicator of the project’s demand, and the search engine considers depth when ranking. Directly affects rankings in search results. Depends on the purpose of the resource: the depth of viewing of social networks will differ from the depth of an information site, so the parameter is analyzed for certain categories separately. The functionality and convenience of the resource also influences. Do not increase views using cunning tricks: do not split one article and post it on different pages. The visitor will not want to rush around the site, and he will leave the resource. Complex navigation pushes away traffic and increases bounce rates. In addition, if the depth of views is high and the session time is short, then this is just a signal that the user is confused in the navigation and has not received an answer to his question. Create the right one internal linking- This is a well-known way to increase the depth of views.
• . If one page is visited in one visit, and the session duration is less than 15 seconds by default and the “non-rejection” service event is not recorded, then Yandex.Metrica counts the failure. In Google Analytics, bounces are considered per page visit during the user's stay on the site. If the resource is one-page, then the indicator is always 100%, and then there is no need to take it into account. Page relevance influences bounces. A high bounce rate reduces conversion. To lower the indicator, pay attention to the content of the site. If it is not attractive to people, then neither can effective advertising. Pay special attention to pages with 404 errors, which can increase bounce rates.
• Visitor actions: map of the site, mouse actions, filling out forms, opening links, clicking on advertisements, and so on.
• Session time. The more time users spend on the page, the better. They receive answers to their questions, and the search engine regards the resource as useful and raises it to high positions. You also need to pay attention to the navigation: perhaps the user is spending a lot of time because he cannot find the answer.

How behavioral information is collected

Behavioral factors are more stable than link factors, so search engines focus on visitor behavior when ranking. The following tools are used to obtain data:

• Attendance counters: Yandex. Metrica and Google Analytics.
  They collect information not only for the optimizer, but also for the corresponding search engines: they anonymize and transmit information for further use.
• Own web browsers.
  Every major PS has a browser: Google Chrome, Yandex, Rambler.Browser. Programs collect information about user interests to improve the operation of the software, including behavioral factors.
• Browser extensions and plugins.
  Yandex offers for installation Yandex.Bar, which, in addition to weather reports, also tracks behavioral factors and uses the results for ranking: which sites the user often visits, which ones he leaves, and which ones he returns to.
• Clicks on snippets.
  Many clicks from low positions tell search engines that the material is in demand, and they increase their positions in search results.
• Services, applications: collection and transmission of location information, processing user interests.
  Many large sites collect their own statistics.

When a user opens a large number of tabs simultaneously from the SERP, behavioral factors are either not taken into account or are distributed to a lesser extent.

Cheating behavioral factors

Cheating is the artificial creation of user behavior and refers to the black method of promotion. Operating principles include registration for special services, the choice is between robots or real people, and then everything goes well: the factors increase, the site moves to the top.

But search engines quickly notice cheating: robots are distinguished by the similarity of IP addresses, devices, behavior, and real people are identified by their search behavior and increased interest in different thematic areas. After detection, penalties are imposed: Yandex removes the page from search for up to 10 months.
The site's reputation suffers. Therefore, professionals advise using legal methods to increase behavioral ranking factors: for the benefit of both the site and the user. Let's consider such strategies.

How to improve behavioral factors

Initially, competition occurs on search engine results pages. How to win the fight for visitors? An informative and attractive snippet will help with this. This means that after reading short description, the visitor makes a decision to go to the resource, and you must make sure that he comes to you.

How to attract attention in SERP:

• Use special HTML characters to present information creatively.
• Highlight key words to reveal the main themes in the material.
• Do not neglect quick links: they translate into internal blocks, and visitors do not have problems with navigation.
• Use special tools for webmasters and don’t forget about services such as Yandex.Market. If you have products on your page, then add the price for the product to the snippet using the Market. This will increase interest and click-through rates.

Internal events

• Create unique content nice design, which will not distract and hurt your eyes, correct structure, where the user will not get confused in the maze of links. All this makes the site interesting and convenient for the user; he will want to stay on the site and continue studying, which will increase the session time and the depth of views. Find broken links, replace them, or come up with a smart 404 page.
• Fill the pages with photos, videos, podcasts, games, crosswords, polls: anything that will interest the user and keep him on the page longer. The search engine will receive a signal that the resource is informative and popular, which means it will rank it high. Do home page relevant, that is, provide accurate answers to user questions.
• Optimize website uptime: No one wants to wait a long time if the website takes a long time to load. Fast display of pages will increase the visitor's comfort. Also, adapt the operation of the resource to mobile devices: 60% of requests come from there. Accumulate traffic and behavioral resources.
• Provide traffic from different sources: non-search arrivals also indicate to the search engine about the usefulness of the resource: users share links on blogs, talk on social networks, which increases behavioral ranking factors.
• Work on the semantic core: first analyze and add low-frequency queries, and then move on to filling in mid- and high-frequency queries. This strategy helps with promotion in Yandex.

Behavioral ranking factors are of great importance in promoting projects: they select resources taking advantage of the interests of users, tracking their activity on search engine results pages and on the site itself. Improving behavioral factors can be achieved without cheating: useful content, clear structure, relevance of pages to the search query.

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 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 a few various methods influence on PF.

Method 1. Cheat PF using special services.

There are plenty of such services. These are Userator, Movebo, WebEffector, SerpClick, etc. They live quietly online, promise good results and complete safety 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. Notified about this potential clients through mass e-mail newsletter 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 interesting content and special promotions that will not only improve the PF, but also generally increase interest in your resource.

Behavioral factors (PF) - These are characteristics of a page or site that describe the behavior of the average visitor and influence search engine rankings.

Significance for promotion

Behavioral factors are extremely important for Yandex - if a site has poor user metrics, it has little chance of ranking high in search results for competitive queries. Along with tracking the actions of real users, Yandex attaches great importance to the opinions of specialists who analyze the site according to a set of parameters and evaluate the overall impression. For Google, the PF is much less important, but it is known for sure that it takes into account some factors when assessing the relevance of a page to a query.

Collecting information about user behavior

Search engines have several tools to collect information about user behavior on a website.

Web analytics systems

The web analytics system counters installed on the site (Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica) provide search engines with detailed information about user behavior. Of course, the PS cannot install the system code without the knowledge of the webmaster, but webmasters themselves willingly post this code, because web analytics tools are useful for them too.

Browser add-ons

Yandex is actively promoting its own brainchild - the add-on for the Yandex.Elements browser (until 2012 - Yandex.Bar). This is a small panel with quick access to various Yandex services and displaying information about the weather, exchange rates, etc. It works in much the same way as the Metrica code: it collects information about the behavior of a site visitor who uses a browser.

Search engine browsers

Both Google and Yandex have their own browsers - Google Chrome and Yandex.Browser, respectively. Both are also used for data collection.

operating system

Most popular mobile operating system, Google Android, owned by Google and installed with many additional programs and services that regularly access Google servers. It is likely that the system also sends information about user actions on sites.

Clicks on snippets and behavior on search results pages

The search engine collects behavioral information from . If users are more likely to click on lower SERPs, then those sites are more relevant to the query. If, having reached a certain site from the search results, users do not return to the search results, this is a signal that they have found the answer to their question.

Key Behavioral Factors

• the resource as a whole speaks of its popularity on the Internet.
• search engine. Here you should highlight the first and last clicks on the search results. It is generally accepted that for Yandex the most relevant pages are the first and last of the many pages opened from the search results.
• Time spent Online- one of the most important indicators site quality. A good website will keep a visitor for a longer period of time, unlike a bad one, which will be abandoned almost immediately.
• - the number of pages viewed per visit is taken into account.
• . A refusal is a situation where a user views only one page and spends no more than 15 (according to other sources - 20) seconds on it. Such a short visit indicates that the resource is of poor quality and not as requested.
• Return rate. If users return to the site pages, it means they find something they need there.
• Direct transitions And transitions from social network pages can also be a sign of the resource's usefulness.

Working with Behavioral Factors

A webmaster can and should work to improve the site’s PF: internal optimization and work with PF today are the main methods of search engine promotion. The ways to improve user metrics are obvious: the site simply needs to be useful and convenient for visitors.