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Although it’s perhaps a subtle change, it’s a logical one, as it makes frequently used features easier to access and organizes them into related groups that match “the stages of search” – to quote Google.

Here’s a screen shot from my own blog’s Webmaster Tools (GWT) account, so you can see the new navigation (on the left):

As you can see, new navigation headings have become: “Search Appearance”, “Search Traffic”, “Google Index” and “Crawl”. This new design is much tidier, allowing quick access to the key areas or issues that webmasters will want to monitor and assess.

I am inclined to agree, these are the key areas of the stages of search: Google crawls a site then indexes the content accordingly.

As digital marketers, we should be monitoring GWT closely, because if Google cannot crawl and index your site, neither can a user access your content costing you valuable visits. So if there are issues here, we need to correct these first.

But if crawling and indexing are ticking over nicely, we then try to improve the appearance and coverage in search so that we’ll receive optimum levels of search traffic to our site. This is something that we tend to monitor more frequently than crawl issues, as we always have our eyes on the prize of more traffic.

So, what’s under each heading?

Site appearance

Under this heading, you’ll still find structured data. Google’s data highlighter tool allows the less technical savvy among us to markup content with rich snippets. These additional snippets of HTML allow Google to include more information in its search results.

The “sitelinks” feature allows you to check which links are appearing within your individual organic results. Here’s an image of a listing using rich snippets in the search results:

New search appearance pop-up window

Google has added a new feature to this tab, too. Just click the question mark bubble. A window will pop up showing how your site appears in the search results.

You’ll then be able to make changes to individual listings so they’re more appealing. Here’s what it looks like:

Search traffic

The ’Search traffic’ tab allows you to gain an insight into the terms people are using to land on your site (click on “search queries” for this). There’s a tab listing “links to your site”, which is a great way of finding out which sites are already linking to you.

And there’s a run-down of your “internal link” structure. So, you should look here to check that your site is clearly structured.

Google index

Here you’ll see how many pages of your site are in Google’s index. GWT tells you the overall number of pages it has indexed. If you’re seeing more pages indexed than you have published, this may be a sign that your site has a ‘duplicate content’ problem. In other words, Google is finding more than one version of each of your pages; which will harm your site’s rankings.

You can also see which keywords Google has found on your pages.

You’re also able to request the “removal of URLs” from Google’s Index if not already blocked in the robots.txt file. Use this feature if you have pages that you don’t want Google to find.

Crawl

This tab allows you to understand Google’s crawlers a little better, especially their behaviour on your own website. It’s important that Google is able to crawl your site easily: you want Google to find and index your content after all!

You can find out “crawl stats”, any possible “crawl errors”, the “URLs that are blocked” from Google’s crawlers, “sitemaps” associated with a website and find out whether Google is having any trouble with the coverage of your site with the “URL Parameters” tab.

All of these are important factors in making sure your site is indexed properly by Google.

Account-level admin tasks now accessible from the settings menu

There’s also been a shake up on which items users can see. If you’re the admin for the GWT account, you’ll find a full list of tasks like “Webmaster Tools Preferences”, “Site Settings”, “Change of Address”, “Google Analytics Property”, “Users & Site Owners”, “Verification Details” and “Associates” under the gear icon in the top right hand corner.

If you have limited access, you’ll see fewer options. The idea is that you can give access to a wider variety of users.

If you’ve received any messages in Webmaster’s Tools there could be a chance that Google isn’t able to properly access and index your site which can have a detrimental effect on rankings and visits. 

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

You know the numbers — Google uses over 200 ranking signals, updates its algorithm over 500 times a year, and employs thousands of engineers. We often get so caught up in the minutiae of the algorithm that we forget all this effort serves a single purpose:

Satisfy the user.

This isn’t a touchy-feely post that says “Make great content and visitors will come” or “Delight your customers and magic will happen.”

It’s not magic. Satisfaction is an actual ranking factor.

Unlike other ranking factors, this one is hard to measure because it’s based almost entirely on search engines’ own internal data — something they don’t share. We do know search engines both measure and reward satisfaction in very significant ways. In fact, I highly suspect satisfaction is one of Google’s most important metrics used to judge the performance of its own search results.

It’s easy to tweak a keyword. It’s much harder to stop visitors from clicking the back button on your website when they don’t find what they were looking for. Satisfaction is very difficult to game; perhaps that’s why search engines place so much emphasis on it.

How Google measures and predicts satisfaction

User behavior in search results

Stephen Levy’s excellent book In the Plex describes how Google engineers figured out how to improve search results by mining their user behavior data (bold added):

“… Google could see how satisfied users were. … The best sign of their happiness was the “long click” – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query. But unhappy users were unhappy in their own ways, most telling were the “short clicksâ€� where a user followed a link and immediately returned to try again. “If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy,” says Patel. “If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy.”

Often called pogosticking, this refers to the behavior of users that click on a result, then “pogostick” back and forth between the search results and different websites, searching for satisfaction.

Search quality raters

In 2012, Google released an abbreviated copy of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public. A version of this document is used by Google’s small army of Search Quality Raters to evaluate search results.

One of the highest scores a quality rater can assign to a page is “useful” (bold added):

“Useful pages should be high quality and a good “fitâ€� for the query. In addition, they often have some or all of the following characteristics: highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (such as breaking news on a topic). Useful pages are usually well organized and pages you trust. They are from information sources that seem reliable. Useful information pages are not “spammy.”

The problem with quality raters is they can only look at a few thousand websites at any given time. There are millions of sites on the web, so Google invented a new system:

Panda

Instead of evaluating results after the fact, Panda gives Google the ability to predict user satisfaction — modeled on actual human surveys — and apply it to every site in its index.

Less satisfying pages are ranked lower in search results, and every few weeks the index is updated with new data.

The chart below shows Panda hitting a site again and again.

Site visits with Panda updates via Panguin Tool and Google Algorithm Change History

What can we do?

If search engines measure user satisfaction and employ it as a ranking factor, our goals as search marketers are to:

1. Create highly satisfying experiences so that users don’t return to search results to pick another URL.
2. Build sites that meet Panda’s expectation of high quality.
3. Surprise and delight our visitors so that they seek us out again and again.

5 Tips to improve visitor satisfaction:

1. Google’s free website satisfaction surveys

As if to put an exclamation point on the whole satisfaction experience, Google recently released free, embeddable customer satisfaction surveys for website owners.

After installing a line of JavaScript on your site, your visitors are presented with the following questions:

1. Overall, how satisfied are you with this website?
2. What, if anything, do you find frustrating or unappealing about this website?
3. What is your main reason for visiting this website today?
4. Did you successfully complete your main reason for visiting this website today?

If you’d like to customize the questions, Google allows you to do this for $0.01 per response.

It feels like Google wants to give site owners the same type of feedback Google acquires directly from behavior data. Using these forms won’t tell you exactly what to do, but any webmaster using them is sure to get a ton of valuable feedback about visitor satisfaction.

2. Removing barriers

We’ve talked for years about making your site more accessible for both search robots and humans, but we rarely discuss how those usability factors affect rankings.

Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content, which is otherwise accessible to search engines. We’re seeing these more and more all over the web.

What if Moz required registration?

The idea is simple: folks click on a search result, see the form and return to the search results to try another URL. After a few hundred times (or less), search engines start to figure out this result doesn’t satisfy users.

At Moz, we’ve seen sites use similar tactics only to watch their bounce rate skyrocket, and their rankings drop. In fact, there’s anecdotal evidence of sites being hit by Panda after introducing similar barriers.

3. Speed it up

We know that faster websites are good, but page speed has two mechanisms by which to influence rankings:

1. Directly: Google reps have stated that page speed has a direct impact on rankings for a certain percentage of queries (only 1% in 2010).
2. Secondary: As page speed affects usage, it can have a secondary effect on user satisfaction. A frustrated user waiting too long for a page to load can often return to search results.

Google obsesses over speed, and scientists at Microsoft have shown that users will visit a site less often if it’s only 250 milliseconds slower than the competition.

Source: NYTimes

If you ever need to convince your client or boss to improve page speed, try the comparison tool at Webpagetest.com which allows you to export a slow motion video.

4. Empathy

Empathy as a ranking factor? “Cyrus,” I can hear you saying, “you’ve been hanging out with Rand too much!”

Consider this comment on a recent Whiteboard Friday. I’ve edited the comment below to highlight the important parts:

When you practice empathy, you put yourself in the shoes of your visitor to try to build a satisfying experience. You accomplish this by

• Answering their questions
• Employing intuitive layouts
• Giving them relevant links and resources to click
• Surprising them with extras

While it’s difficult to prove a relationship between improved user experiences and rankings (because we can’t measure user behavior like Google can) there’s strong anecdotal evidence that search engines aggregate these factors into their algorithms.

5. Linking out

One of the best SEO articles I’ve read all year is AJ Kohn’s Time to Long Click, a great article you shouldn’t miss. AJ explains how linking out (and also creating content hubs) can be used to increase user satisfaction (bold added):

What I’m recommending is that you link to other valuable sources of information when appropriate so that you fully satisfy that user’s query. In doing so you’ll generate more long clicks and earn more links over time, both of which can have profound and positive impact on your rankings.

Stop thinking about optimizing your page and think about optimizing the search experience instead.

-AJ Kohn

Think of it this way: It’s far better for users to click away to another URL from your site than for those same users to return to Google to try again. In the first instance, you are the authority hub, in the latter, Google is the authority.

Be the authority.

How do YOU improve satisfaction?

There are two types of SEOs: those that try to satisfy robots, and those that satisfy users.

The robot-focused SEOs build pages with just the right keywords and title tags, hoping to attract the bots on relevancy. I say “try” to satisfy robots, because search engines are actually watching the users. If the users aren’t happy, neither are the bots.

The user-focused SEOs works with the same keywords and title tag, but then they go one step further and ask their users to try the site. After that, they do whatever it takes to make their users happy.

Have you seen improvement in rankings after improving user satisfaction? Share your story with us in the comments below.

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