In a previous article we learned that two factors affect how long it takes for a new article to reach the front page of Google:
1. The difficulty of the keyword that your article is targeting.
The higher the difficulty, the longer it will take to rank on the front page of Google.
2. Your site’s domain authority.
The higher your domain authority, the less time it will take to rank.
However, once your article reaches the front page of Google, what factors determine whether it ranks as the 1st result as opposed to, say, the 7th or 8th result?
To answer this question, we can turn to a massive study conducted by the SEO firm SEMrush that analyzed which factors affected rankings the most.
Here’s a summary of their findings:
The top four factors that affect the ranking position of an article are:
1. Direct website visits
This represents the number of readers that reach your page by simply typing your domain name in their browers.
This is a number that will naturally increase over time as more readers discover your site and as your site develops a reputation for being a reliable place to find information about a certain topic.
For example, I have focused exclusively on writing SEO-optimized articles with Statology, which explains why over 90% of my traffic to that site comes from organic google search.
However, as people have discovered my site over and over again in the search results for different topics related to statistics, the site has developed a reputation for being helpful and reliable, which has lead to the direct traffic actually increasing quite a bit over time.
The following screenshot shows my weekly direct traffic since I started Statology back in October of 2018:
The site currently gets almost 1,500 sessions per week, or about 6,000 sessions per month just from people directly typing “statology.org” into their browsers.
This is the beauty of focusing on SEO. As more of your articles rank on the front page of Google, more readers will find your site and you will inevitably gain a reputation as a reliable and useful site. This means your direct traffic will naturally increase over time.
2. Time on site
This represents how long the average reader remains on your site.
In Google’s eyes, the longer a reader stays on your site the better. This is an indication that a reader is finding value in your article and is taking the time to read through it, as opposed to immediately leaving your site to check out another article in the search results.
There are several ways to naturally increase time on site, including:
- Write longer articles. This occurs naturally if you use the approach I mentioned earlier of combining the ideas covered in the top 3-5 current search results into one big helpful article.
- Include videos. If you include a 3-5 minute video in your article, this is almost guaranteed to increase the time on site since the reader will take the time to watch it. Of course, you need to make sure that the video is actually relevant and adds value to the article.
- Include images. Images that include information relevant to your article are another easy way to increase time on site.
- Make the article user-friendly. Use the tips mentioned in a previous article to make the article as user-friendly as possible to increase the chances that a reader stays on your page.
3. Pages per session
A “session” is simply the act of a reader landing on your site. Within that session, they can click around on your site and read more than one article. Thus, pages per session measures how many pages an individual reads on your site during their visit.
The most obvious way to increase this number is to include plenty of internal links within your articles – links to other relevant articles on your site*. By doing so, this increases the chances that a reader will click on one of those links and read through another article on your site.
The more pages on your site that a reader looks through during their session, the better. In Google’s eyes this is an indication that a reader is finding value in your site if they’re taking the time to read through more than just one article.
*I typically try to place 3 to 8 internal links within each of my articles.
4. Bounce rate
This is a measurement of how many users leave your site after reading just one article. In general, lower bounce rates are better because it’s an indication that readers typically go on to read more articles on your site beyond just the one they found in the search results.
Similar to pages per session, the best way to decrease bounce rate is to have plenty of internal links within each of your articles. This increases the chances that a reader will go on to read more of your articles, as opposed to clicking away from your site.
Focus on the Factors Within Your Control
There are 13 other factors listed in the SEMrush study that impact search results, but none are as important as the four mentioned above.
What’s fascinating is that the most important ranking factors are completely within your control. As long as you do the following three things, you can maximize the chances that your article will rank near the top of the search results:
- Write the best possible article on the internet about a keyword
- Make your article as user-friendly as possible
- Include plenty of internal links to related articles
However, some of you might be thinking:
“What about backlinks from other websites? How important are those?”
That’s an excellent question that I answer in the next article.
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