How to Beat Google by Leveraging User Metrics

If thousands of people did a Google search for the same term, but everyone decided that they want to click on the second organic listing instead of the first one, because it’s more relevant, what do you think would happen?

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Well, Google would take the second listing and move it up to the first spot, and take the first listing and move it down to the second spot. Even if the first one had more backlinks, better on-page SEO, if users all told Google that the second listing was more relevant, it will rank higher.See, Google wants to rank websites that you love.

In SEO, it all comes down to marginal gains. So today, I wanted to focus on user metrics, because it’s the key to beating Google, and winning and ranking at the top.

If your title is a question, you typically will get 14.1% higher click-through rate, versus if you don’t have a question. An example of a question is, “Is Green Tea Really Beneficial to Your Health?” question mark, right? That’s an example of a question that can cause people to click through more.

Another thing that they noticed was, if your title tag is roughly between 15 and 40 characters, you tend to get roughly 8.6% higher click-through rate. Now I don’t recommend using 15 characters in your title tag, cause that means you just won’t be able to put enough keywords in there, but if you use around 40 characters, you can still have your keywords, and you can get that increase in click-through.

There was also 45% increase in-click through rate when the exact query is a URL. For example, if I’m trying to rank for the term “hosting,” right? And my domain name is neilpatel.com. What they mean by the exact query in the URL, if you have neilpatel.com/hosting, that’s a good exact match, and you’ll get more clicks. Now, if the URL is neilpatel.com/best-hosting-advice-reviews/123, the name hosting is in there with a lot of other words, so I’m not going to get as many clicks.

The next one, power words. So words like effortless, amazing, incredible, words like that can increase your click-through rate by roughly 13.9%. And, titles that contained emotions versus ones that didn’t contain emotions had roughly a 7.3% higher click-through rate. So when you can, leverage emotions within your title.

And then you can also get roughly a 5.8% higher click-through rate if you have a meta-description versus not. Even when you do a Google search, you’re like, “Yeah, I have meta descriptions. I can see all these sentences underneath my titles.” Well, it doesn’t mean that you have a meta description.

Titles with years generate 4.9% higher click-through rate. “How To Start a Website in 2020,” “Oh cool, this is updated and relevant for the next year,” right? Even though it’s just right around the corner. That’s an example of adding a date in your title, and that can get you more clicks, or, if you’re in the middle of a year, just put the date or the year that you’re currently in.

Evoking curiosity can increase click-through rate by 5.9%. An example of this is “The Seven Benefits of Green Tea: Number Six Will Shock You,” and you can put “number six will shock you” in parentheses. And people are like, “Wait, the benefits of green tea, what’s number six? That’s going to shock me? I got to click through and read the rest.”

Titles that resemble education also had a 10.4% more click-through rate. So an example of education is, let’s say you’re selling skincare products that that remove the dark circles under your eyes.

And, last tip I have for you is if you really want to be successful, getting the most amount of clicks, what I would recommend doing is, you want to go out there and look at all the paid ads that are ranking at the top for the keywords that you want to rank for.

So, look at the ad copy. Remember, Google makes money when people click, not when they view, so it can give you quite a bit of ideas. And when you make those changes, you have to be patient. It could take roughly 30 days for Google to index those changes, and look to see if you should slowly start moving up in the rankings.

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