What is the Unknown SEO Rule You Need to Know?

So you won't find this SEO rule in any discussion about Google algorithms. You also won't find this issue being hotly debated in the SEO community ... well, not yet anyway.

But it may be the one thing that could influence your Google EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) the most.

Your visitors must understand your content if your content is going to rank well.

Well ... hmmm ... that may seem over-simplistic, but hear me out.

In all of the website content and UX audits I have done over the years, this is still one of the primary issues I encounter. Visitors are often challenged to understand your content because of a wide variety of reasons. This issue can be challenging to solve and it is rarely directly addressed.

There are 4 great reasons for creating content that your audience will actually understand.

1. User Engagement and Experience: If visitors understand the content, they're more likely to engage with it, stay longer on the site, and return in the future. This enhances user experience, a key factor in building a loyal audience and SEO ranking.
2. Effective Communication: The primary goal of most websites is to communicate information, whether it's about products, services, or educational content. Clear understanding ensures that the message is conveyed effectively and that people stay on the site (another major SEO factor).
3. Conversion Rates: For commercial websites, user understanding directly impacts conversion rates. If potential customers understand the products and services offered, they are more likely to make purchases or take other desired actions. Yes, Google can see these also.
4. Brand Trust and Credibility: Clear, comprehensible content helps establish credibility and trust. Misunderstandings or ambiguities can harm a brand's reputation and deter potential customers or followers.

So knowing how important it is that visitors understand what they are reading, how can you determine if they actually are so that you can make improvements?

This is where the challenging part comes in but you can monitor these metrics and build custom dashboards in Google Analytics that will help you monitor content performance so you can figure out what needs to be fixed.

Here are some key metrics to consider:

1. Engagement Rate: This metric indicates the percentage of visitors who are interacting on your site. A low engagement rate could suggest that visitors didn't find what they were looking for or found the content too difficult to understand.
2. Readability Scores: Using tools to assess the readability of your text can help you understand how accessible your writing is. Tools like the Flesch-Kincaid readability test provide scores that estimate the education level needed to understand your content.
3. Content Decay: This is the measurement of how your content is ranking over time at Google. If content is dropping in its rankings, most likely people are not finding it useful so Google is dropping it in rankings.
4. Average Time on Page: Longer time spent on a page can indicate that users are engaging deeply with the content, potentially reflecting a good level of understanding. Conversely, very short times might suggest confusion or lack of relevance.
5. Heatmaps and Click Tracking: Tools that show where users click and how they scroll through your site can indicate which parts of your content attract the most attention and where they might be losing interest or getting confused.
6. Page Views Per Session: This shows how many pages a visitor views in one session. More page views can indicate that users are interested and effectively navigating your site to find more content, which could suggest they understand the initial content they encounter.
7. User Feedback and Comments: Direct feedback, whether through comments, surveys, or contact forms, can provide explicit insights into how well users understand your content. This can be particularly valuable as it comes straight from your audience.
8. Conversion Rates: If your site has defined actions you want users to take (like signing up, purchasing, or downloading), the rate at which these actions are completed can tell you if users understand what is being asked of them and see value in it.
9. Search Terms on Your Site: If your site includes a search function, analyzing what visitors are searching for can help you understand if they are finding the information they need or if they are confused about where to find specific content.
10. Exit Rates: This metric shows the last page that users visit before leaving your site. High exit rates on certain pages might indicate where users are getting confused or not finding what they need.

By combining these metrics, you can build a comprehensive picture of how well users understand your content and identify areas for improvement to make your website more user-friendly and effective. If you want more ideas and tools to track your web content performance, we wrote a more in-depth guide on content analytics.

Another great concept to embrace is the Grunt Test, originally proposed by the team that created Storybrand. It details how to create better page headlines and content that will grab your visitor's attention.

Dashboarding Your Content

To help in this, you will want to create a dashboard to monitor this information to help you make decisions about your content, some of this can be created in Google Analytics, but not all of it. You may have to use your own dashboarding tool or possibly Looker to be able to get a single view of your content performance.