Improve SEO of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels

On web pages and blog posts with higher engagement level, people stay longer. For example, if someone stays more than 30-40 seconds on a web page or blog post on your website, this web page or blog post has a higher engagement level compared to web pages and blog posts that people leave within five seconds.

A point on this NewsCreed blog post on content marketing KPIs caught my attention (although, all the points are worth reading):

Some articles may receive many pageviews but have low engagement rates, which indicates that you may want to revise those pieces to capture people for longer amounts of time. Other stories may have low pageviews and high engagement, indicating that you should reallocate distribution resources and re-optimize them for SEO to get those pieces in front of more people.

This makes great sense, and although it is a natural thing to do, we often ignore such steps.

You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to know how much time people are spending on individual web pages and blog posts on your website.

Your statistics give you lots of insight. There might be many web pages or blog posts that get lots of traffic, but people don’t stay on these web pages or blog posts for long.

In terms of SEO, these web pages or blog posts might be great, but they are not performing much in terms of eliciting a positive response from your visitors.

I repeatedly mention on my blog that traffic doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t get you business. Without business, more traffic is just ego massage or an illusion.

There might be many web pages or blog posts that don’t get much traffic, but when people land on these web pages or blog posts, they stay there longer. When they are on these web pages or blog posts, they even feel encouraged to explore other parts of your website or blog. This tendency of these web pages or blog posts helps you increase your conversion rate.

So, shouldn’t you try to get more traffic to these web pages or blog posts? You should.

If you have lots of web pages and blog posts on your website, prepare an Excel spreadsheet (or Google spreadsheet) and enter all the URLs you would like to track, over there. If you are using WordPress to manage your website, there is a nice plug-in that allows you to make a list of all the URLs in your WordPress database.

Some study of Google Analytics can tell you how you can find out how much time people are spending on your web pages and blog posts.

Once you have discovered that there are many web pages and blog posts that have a higher engagement level but don’t get much traffic, you can start promoting these web pages and blog posts.

Note down their current rankings, traffic and the amount of time people are spending on them in separate columns of the spreadsheet.

You can start with trying to improve their search engine rankings.

How to improve the SEO of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels?

Do you feel that if you tweak the content of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels may bring down their engagement levels?

Sure, this can happen, and this is where an experienced content writer can help you.

Anyway, as long as you are clear about why these chosen web pages and blog posts have a higher engagement level, you can optimize the content to increase their search engine rankings without meddling with their current engagement level.

You will need to be patient. My website gets crawled almost daily, and even multiple times a day sometimes. This way, I can find out quickly whether certain changes have had some sort of impact on their search engine rankings or not.

That might not be the case with your website. If it takes a while for Google to crawl and index your new and updated links, then you will need to wait and see how your recent changes are improving SEO of your chosen links and how it is affecting the engagement levels.

Make small changes. You must have clear idea of what keywords and search terms bring targeted traffic to these web pages and blog posts. See if you can incorporate more instances of these keywords and search terms into your existing content.

Maybe you can include a couple of more points with headings having your keywords?

Maybe you can increase the number of words?

But don’t add text just to increase the number of words; have something relevant to say. Make sure that you are adding value rather than creating extra noise to increase the size of your web page or blog post. This will cause more harm than good.

If right now you have got nothing to add, then don’t add. Do some research. Do some more reading. Take more time. This is not some job that you should do in a hurry.

Make a list of changes that you would like to incorporate and then wait for the new data to emerge in the Google Analytics dashboard.

As a content writer my advise would be to make very small changes in the existing text and then if possible, add more text where the original text ends. This way, the material that gives you a higher engagement level won’t be pushed down or diluted.

You can also promote links with higher engagement levels directly without resorting to improving their search engine rankings. You can encourage people to link to these web pages and blog posts. You can link to them from your own LinkedIn, Quora and Medium posts. You can repeatedly share them on social media. You can frequently share these links through your mailing list.

The string of thoughts that made me write this post was triggered by the suggestion that one should try to improve the SEO of web pages and blog posts that enjoy a higher engagement level so that more people can come to these web pages and blog posts, to get you even higher engagement level and consequently, improve your conversion rate.