What are UX Signals and Why You Should Care About Them

By: Team WTI | Date: October 16, 2020

Categories: Digital Marketing,

Tags: Internet Marketing, SEO, SEO Articles,

UX signals are behavioral patterns measured by Google to determine a user’s experience on your site. Two of the most crucial of these behavioral metrics are click through rate (CTR), and bounce rate. These two metrics affect your rankings in major ways so it’s important to understand what UX signals are, and how to use them to your benefit.

A Quick Note on Rankings:

When talking about rankings, remember that sites don’t rank, pages do. Therefore, each page on your site should aim to rank for a specific keyword that your customers might search for. These keywords are often your business services, or products that you offer.

What Are UX Signals

Click Through Rate

Click through rate, otherwise known as CTR, is a percentage used to describe the number of people that click through a particular link to go to a page. This percentage is figured by taking the number of times a link to your page is clicked, and dividing that by the number of times your page was shown. Clicks divided by impressions, equals your CTR. A high CTR is a good indication that users find your content useful and relevant to their search.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors that land on your page, and immediately leave without interacting with any content on your page. In other words, it is single-page sessions divided by the number of all sessions. A high bounce rate can affect your rankings in a negative way for a few reasons. One being that the visitor clicked onto your page and it wasn’t relevant to their search, so they exited.  Another reason is that the user didn’t find what they were looking for, and you didn’t give them a reason to click through to other pages on your website.

Why UX Signals Matter

These signals matter because they can tell a lot about the quality of information provided on your site. Visitors are more likely to stay on your site longer when you have high-quality content relevant to the words they were searching for. By taking a look at your CTR and your bounce rate, you can understand which pages perform well, and what pages need some work.

You can utilize your CTR to find what pages or posts are performing well. What is your content about? Is it long-form or bite-sized? What about your content is helpful to your visitors? Do you have images or videos that are relevant and helpful? How can you use these high-performing pages to guide other content you create for your site?

We hope this post helps you take those web analytics and turn them into more killer content! Prefer just to focus on your business and not the marketing? No worries! We can totally help with that! We’re a team of digital marketing, and web experts ready to take your website to the next level. Contact us to get started!