Almost every marketer knows a thing or two about SEO; it’s the backbone of our efforts, giving life to everything we produce. Ignoring it means our content is sentenced to a certain and untimely death with near nothing to show for it.
Sounds scary? It is, but this is exactly what some marketers do when they turn to tools like ChatGPT for quick content creation. Don’t get us wrong: We’re fans of artificial intelligence and all the ways it can make our lives as marketers easier and our content more effective. However, disregarding SEO in favor of flash-fast content isn’t a winning strategy.
Even if you’ve fed the metallic mind an outline that contains guidance from reliable SEO tools like MarketMuse on how to rank for a keyword, you may be flat-out ignoring an entire (and important) aspect of search engine optimization: user behavior.
So, let’s talk about it.
Whose Behavior? User Behavior
Google cares deeply about users’ search experience. Money first, of course — but search experience second if we were ranking priorities.
They want to (neigh, need to) know if the listings they’re serving up for a particular search term are any good. How do they do that? By having their robots pay especially close attention to three important user signals:
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of users who click on your website link when it appears in search engine results pages (SERPs).
A higher CTR indicates that your title tag and meta description are compelling and relevant to search queries, signaling to search engines that your page is a good match for those queries. On the other hand, the fewer clicks a particular result gets, the further it gets bumped down the page.
Bounce Rate or Pogo-Sticking
Pogo-sticking happens when visitors navigate back to the SERP from your website quickly after clicking on it — typically within 10 seconds or less. A high bounce rate, which includes pogo-sticking events, may suggest that the content did not meet user expectations or that the user experience is poor, potentially leading search engines to lower your rankings.
When users constantly back out of a particular result only to click on something else on the search results page, it sends a bad signal to Google.
Dwell Time
The amount of time a user spends on your page is called dwell time. Longer dwell times typically indicate that users find your content valuable and engaging, which can positively influence your SEO rankings. The flip side of that is that a user bounces and spends more time on other websites that pop up in the SERPs that aren’t yours. When that happens often, Google’s meticulous algorithms will start to believe your site is the weak link.
What does this have to do with ChatGPT, you ask? Here’s a question for your question:
What does ChatGPT do while creating its content to improve the likelihood that it will send Google all the right user signals?
Nothing. Zip. Zilch. It’s a content tool, after all — not an SEO tool. It cannot (yet) understand why people are interacting with your content in a certain way, which leaves the fine-tuning to you.
Don’t Feed the Machine Just To Ignore It Later
We’re all for using AI to enhance your content marketing workflows (you’re even reading this on a blog that’s all about AI). However, even the finest algorithms out there cannot understand user behavior or how to optimize your website for better results. Content is a part of that, sure, but there are a lot of other important aspects of SEO at play that require more than simply writing (or generating) content and slapping it on your website.
7 Ways You Can Optimize Your Website For User Behavior
By understanding and optimizing for key user behavior metrics — such as CTR, bounce rate and dwell time — you can enhance the perceived value and relevance of your site in the eyes of the almighty search engines. The following are digestible chunks of SEO where, with a focused and intentional effort, you can optimize your website for better user behavior. Oh and, for some of these, you can even use AI to give you a helping hand with your SEO work.
1. Create Compelling Titles and Meta Descriptions
Metadata is one of the most critical aspects of SEO and is hugely important when optimizing for user behavior. Title tags and meta descriptions should accurately reflect the content that’s behind them and include relevant keywords to help boost your CTR.
2. Enhance Content Quality
Quality content is key. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and crossing fingers. Google’s algorithms, so they say, prioritize content that’s helpful, reliable and people-first, i.e., content that is created to benefit users and not just appease search engines.
So, provide valuable, well-structured and informative content that meets user intent and keeps visitors engaged. If you’re using AI for content creation, which is OK, just be sure users understand the role automation plays in the content they’re reading. Google says you should ask yourself the following when publishing AI-generated or AI-assisted content:
- Is the use of automation, including AI generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways?
- Are you providing background about how automation or AI generation was used to create content?
- Are you explaining why automation or AI was seen as useful for producing content?
A general best practice is to use AI disclosures on content where you’ve employed the helping hand of an algorithm.
3. Improve Page Load Speed
If pages on your website take too long to load, users are going to bounce. A page load speed of 2 seconds is widely recognized to be the maximum before users start to get annoyed. If your website is taking longer, here are a few ways to speed it up:
- Optimize images by compressing files and using appropriate file formats.
- Minimize HTTP requests by merging files and reducing plugins and widgets.
- Clean up your code by removing unused elements.
4. Optimize User Experience (UX)
Clear, clean UX design does a lot of heavy lifting for SEO. It encompasses many website design elements from your site’s design foundation to fonts. While there are no hard and fast rules or templates you must follow, there are a few UX must-haves:
- Clear navigation.
- Readable fonts.
- Clean and organized layout.
Anything that makes your website easier to use and interact with is an SEO win.
5. Include Multimedia Elements
SEO stopped being about just written content long ago. Tasteful interactive additions to your website, like videos, images and other interactive elements can increase both engagement and dwell time.
6. Use Internal Linking
Useful internal links encourage users to click around on your website and, with proper placement and anchor text, can help reduce the chance of them bouncing right away. So, guide users to related content on your site to increase pages per session.
7. Monitor and Analyze User Behavior
Lastly, every marketer’s most trusted practice: monitor and analyze. Take advantage of leading tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track user behavior and identify areas for improvement. To take things up a notch, you can use heatmaps to get a sense of where users are clicking the most (and even where they’re not clicking). Using that data, you can make adjustments to better suit their behavior to boost engagement.
Use It, Don’t Abuse It
So, here’s your friendly reminder: Use AI thoughtfully, or else you risk churning out a whole bunch of content that does literally nothing for you. Even worse, it might just set back your SEO practices by about 10 years.
Yes, use AI to help you create content, but give it some backbone by being the human that optimizes it for important user behavior metrics. Maybe one day it will be able to handle these tasks, too, and we’ll be singing its praises. But for now, it still requires a watchful marketer’s eye and intentional intervention to make content really count.
