Eric Siu and Neil Patel explain how Google RankBrain ranks pages based on user experience signals like page speed, bounce rate, and time on site. They recommend tools like GTmetrix and Hotjar to measure UX, and suggest A/B testing and mobile optimization to boost rankings without traditional SEO work.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today, we're going to talk about how to rank higher on Google without doing SEO. Neil, I'm looking at you.
I'm like, he's looking at the camera. So for all of you guys listening to the podcast, we also have videos. Where can the videos be found, Eric?
Well, they're supposed to go on your channel too, but you can go to my channel. It's Go Growth Everywhere, but they should be on your channel too. I haven't up—
I don't think I've uploaded any of them yet.
Well, we'll send them to you.
I don't think I uploaded the email or even opened the email, my bad. All right, so you can go to Eric's channel to find the video version. But have you guys heard of Google RankBrain? If you guys haven't, check it out. It's an old algorithm update. Most of the companies I talk to don't understand it or aren't thinking about RankBrain. It's really simple. Yes, there's backlinks, there's on-page code, but what's the ultimate factor that tells Google if a result is relevant? Yes, they're looking at things like, oh, which result are people clicking on more? But more importantly, because of RankBrain, they're using artificial intelligence machine learning to figure out what users like by trying to look at and analyze the user experience. And they found that RankBrain is 10% more higher quality results than when engineers were manually programming things. And what they ended up finding out was When you're looking at things like user experience, bounce rate, time on site, people going back and forth and leaving the site or not finding what they're looking for, it's the ultimate signal to Google if that site's a good quality and people found what they like or don't want. So if you're trying to really rank high, yes, you can do all the other tactics we talked about on this podcast, but you can't forget user experience. It's one of the most important aspects. And that's how you rank super high in the long run without doing SEO. You optimize your user experience. And the tool that we could talk about to optimize your user experience is usertesting.com. Have you used it?
Yeah, there's usertesting.com and there's one called usabilityhub.com. So either or.
Yeah, there's tons of them. And Eric, you've used them. How has your experience been so far?
It's all right. I mean, it's, you have people actually looking at it and telling you the issues that are going on with your site.
Yeah, think of it that way, right? So there's mouse recording, mouse movements, A/B testing, like the Crazy Eggs of the world, the Hotjars, et cetera. But nothing beats talking to your users, seeing how they're engaging, not just their mouse movements, but them telling you over voice, this is what's confusing, this is what I like. And you don't want to just do it with 5 or 10 people. You need to do it with 30+ people. Because once you have a big enough sample size and you start seeing commonalities, you can then optimize your user experience to provide them with what they need, So they're more likely to stick on your site, which in the long run improves your rankings.
Yeah, ultimately, I mean, who's Google serving? They're serving people, right? Or you can call them users too. This is why you call user experience, you can call it people experience too. So, I mean, look, even though you are, when you're trying to optimize for people experience, you're kind of inadvertently doing SEO. So if you're trying to optimize for, let's say, page speed, for example, you could use something like GTmetrix and it'll show you all the things that are taking too long to load on your site and how long it takes to load on a mobile device, for example. Actually, I was speaking at a conference 2 weeks ago in Poland and I was hanging out with 2 developers and they're like, man, Eric, like your site takes 10 seconds to load on mobile on 3G and people are gone. I mean, after 3 seconds they're gone. And I was like, oh, that's a really good point because these guys are performance guys that measure performance all the time and speak on that. I'll also say that, I mean, look, you can look at the— looking at qualitative data too around how people are interacting on your website, looking at Hotjar, for example, or using a tool like FullStory. Just to see where people are in terms of like the video recordings, looking at that and then figuring out from there, looking at that with your team, you can make good decisions and improve the experience overall.
And when you're optimizing for usability, you need to do 2 testings, one for your desktop version, another one for mobile. You have to treat them separately because Google has a mobile-first index in which mobile is now ranked differently than desktop computers. By optimizing the usability for both mobile and desktop, ideally at the same time, you shouldn't have a mobile website and you shouldn't have a desktop website. It should be one. You want to use responsive design so that way it's compatible for both users. But by optimizing experience for both of them, what you'll find is your rankings will increase for both.
Yeah, and some of you might be finding that this stuff is duh, like, oh, like I've heard of this stuff before. But even the stuff developers were telling me like 2 weeks ago, it's stuff that I've known from the past. It's kind of the fundamentals around ranking higher, improving the user experience, SEO. But sometimes these reminders are really helpful and just looking at my GTmetrix tells me that I need to do something about my mobile speed. I never really thought about 3G, I never really thought about other people in that respect, but when they started giving me metrics, what is old becomes new again. So, Neil, anything else to add?
Yeah, 2 things. So, one, as Eric's talking about 3G, even if someone has an LTE phone or a 4G, doesn't mean that they're going to have fast connections. because it's not 4G everywhere you're going. So this website could still load really slow. And for that reason, you need to have a fast mobile experience. The second thing that I was going to mention is when you're optimizing for user experience, make sure that you're running A/B tests. So don't just like make a drastic change and be like, oh cool, let's see what ends up happening. I like running tests. I like looking at time on sites and seeing what's more effective than others, what's causing more page views for visitors, et cetera. A good example of this is we did an A/B test with popups and we found that having a popup upon exit intent on a desktop computer didn't really affect the user experience. On mobile though, on the other hand, by removing it, we found that we got a 16% increased time on site by not having a mobile popup upon exit.
Wow.
Because with mobile, all the technologies out there to determine when an exit popup should appear isn't as perfect because it's not like a mouse cursor and using velocity on when they're exiting the browser window.
Great, so that's it for today. Hope you found this helpful. If you want helpful marketing tools to grow your business, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.
