It is important to consider engagement both qualitatively and quantitatively when it comes to SEO. Links and other external signals are among the main indicators used by search engines to determine the quality and relevance of a website, but the real interaction between users and the page — or the exposure — is at the end of the day an equally important quality indicator.
Like most of the other factors that are part of their ranking recipe/algorithm, Google's detention is around which direct exposure parameter is important, how these parameters work, and how much they affect ratings. Although the details are neither exact nor official, we know in the SEO environment that these indicators are about:
- Time spent on the page (hour on site in webmaster-jargong). How much time do visitors spend on the page? Do they do a search, click on your page in the search result, but returns immediately and click on a competing page? This is called ”pagosticking“ and we suspect that Google is an indication that your content is not engaging or satisfactory.
Do visitors spend longer time on your page compared to the other competing pages in the search box? This time-on-side parameter is also a factor that measures exposure and provides realistic insight into the satisfactory content of the page.
- Social actions, such as comments and likes, are other forms of measuring user exposure.
SEO specialists can speculate a lot about what exact exposure targets the search engines use in the algorithm, and how much they mean. Yet we are sure of the following:
The content of the page should involve users, make them spend time on your page, give them the urge to read more of your articles, see more of your pictures and videos, evaluate as much as possible of your products, and recommend the page to the most people as possible. Google's ranking factors are just a reflection of the criteria a living person with thoughts and feelings evaluates when they visit and interact with a website, and these are those people you should search for to satisfy.