Do you pay attention to the quantity of direct searches for your website?
It’s possible Google identifies user preferences by analysing how frequently they search for a website directly. It can do this by categorizing data from its search logs to show keywords that refer directly to a website or page or can be associated with it.
When a high proportion of a keyword’s volume results in a click to that site/page, it can indicate that users also associate the site with the keyword they’ve used. For example, if I search “football news bbc.com”, there’s an obvious indication that I associate the BBC with news about football.
That’s important because this data could then be used for site quality scores, as described in this patent filed by Google in 2012. It features a name very familiar to SEOs – Navneet Panda, who was central to the development of the Panda algorithm that bears his name.
The [site quality] score is determined from quantities indicating user actions of seeking out and preferring particular sites and the resources found in particular sites.
It’s possible this is one of the systems that was referred to as using click data in the recent US antitrust trial. As always with patents, we can’t be sure if or exactly how this is used, or to what extent – but they do give us useful insight into ways Google tries to identify relevant and high-quality results.
This signal potentially correlates or overlaps with brand awareness, trust and reputation (albeit with caveats – bad press could lead to a big increase in searches but a drop in user trust in a brand at the same time). It’s likely a longer-term view on the data is needed for this approach to be meaningful, in ways that dampen any short-term anomalies.
Further reading:
- SEO by the Sea – https://www.seobythesea.com/2015/05/google-site-quality-scores/
- Google Patents – https://patents.google.com/patent/US9031929B1/en
What is SEO Word of the Week?
Once I week, usually on a Monday, I post on LinkedIn about a SEO topic of interest (to me, at least) that allows me to share some knowledge in a format that’s easier to digest, and to write. This could be anything from a concept within search engine algorithms or systems to ideas that marketers can act on. I’ve also decided to collect these posts here to keep an archive that people can refer to without having to sift through the rest of my feed.