One of the key things you need to do to rank better on Google is to pay
attention to these 4 things:

1. How long visitors spend on your site
2. How many pages they view while there
3. “Bounce Rate”
4. Speed at which your site loads

Here’s an explanation of each and why it’s important.

Rank Better On Google – Time On Site

Google algorithm that decides how sites get ranked is based on providing a good experience for the searcher.  One way Google measures this is by how long someone stays on your site.  If they arrive and then quickly leave, Google will interpret that as meaning the searcher did not find what they were looking for and therefore rank you lower on that search term.

The solution is obvious – try to provide more content people are looking for at your site.  Another term for this is “engagement”.  One way to help this is to include relevant videos on your site, that will keep them longer.

Rank Better On Google – Page Views

This also directly relates to engagement and is another statistic Google looks at. The more pages a visitor views, the more engaged they are in your content.

Rank Better On Google – Bounce Rate

Your “bounce rate” is a stat Google tracks that measures what percent of your visitors leave your site without viewing any other pages. It relates to the other analytics – they are all trying to measure the same thing really – did the visitor get what they wanted when they went to your site – if they did, you’ll get ranked better, if not, you get ranked lower.

Since the people at Google are so wicked smart, I believe it hopeless to try to trick them – why not just give the visitors what they are looking for and get some “Google Love”?

Rank Better On Google – Site Load Speed

This one is a bit different. It does still relate to the visitor experience but measures it differently. If your site loads too slow, people will give up and leave. People expect your site to load in a couple seconds, and if it doesn’t they are gone. Google knows all – so they know this too.

I just hired a guy on fiverr.com to decrease my image sizes so one of my sites would load faster, and it’s now loading twice as fast as before and the guy did it for me for $5.00.

So, although site load speed depends on many factors, this one is an easy fix. If the fiverr link doesn’t work – who knows how long the people on fiver are available, just search for “WordPress site load speed” or a similar term and you’ll find people who can do it for you.

Google themselves will track this for you if you have the free Google Analytics tool on your site.  Additionally there are many sites to measure site load speed.

A free site load tool I use is at webpagetest.org

For everyone out there who is not an Internet expert or guru, the entire world of Internet marketing, keyword research and so on can be quite overwhelming and you can be tempted to just give up.

It’s not really that hard – especially if you use the tools available.

Keyword Tips – What You Need To Know

What is a keyword?

Keywords are the terms you want to be found on when someone goes online and does a search. If you are not found when someone searches for someone who does what you do, you will get no sales or leads online. In fact, if you are not in the top 10 results (first page) of the search results, you have wasted your time.

What is keyword research?

Before you publish anything online – in either a blog post or on a web page, it pays to make sure people are searching for what it is you sell. In fact, I recommend you do this before even creating a product or service to sell. It’s a great way to do market research BEFORE you create a product or service!

The best free tool is the Google Keyword Tool. You can put in a keyword and it will recommend up to 800 more keywords and also tell you how many searches there are for each term and how competitive it will be to get on the first page of search results.

To get the full power of the Google tool, set up a free Google Ad Words account. That allows you to get the full search results and without having to put in that annoying “captcha” to prove you are human, not a robot. (I don’t know about you, but I find these captchas very difficult to figure out – and there is software that is more human than we are that can do it automatically!)

How to interpret the results?

The Google tool is great to find out if anyone wants what you are selling, but to find out more about the competition, there are two tools I recommend. I use both.
Market Samurai is the cheapest paid tool as it is a one time fee. It will let you know how it is to get ranked on a keyword and also keep track of how your web sites/pages are doing in the rankings.

For the best info, there is another tool called SEcockpit. This tool is more expensive but gives you a lot more info and does it quicker.

All in all, if you want to make money online, you will need to learn some stuff about how to do it. My recommended resource for that is the Empower Network. I bought all their training and even though I’ve been a marketer for 30 years, I learned a lot I didn’t know. In fact, I’d been doing my online marketing all wrong even though it used to work . . .

Feel free to call me anytime to discuss – I really like to help people to shorten your learning curve!

Joe McVoy
joemcvoy@gmail.com
720-890-8760