What Your Website Visitors Really Want High authority inbound links and well-crafted content still matter, but RankBrain is looking for other factors and determining rankings accordingly. It's no longer enough to optimize your content and gain inbound links for the keywords that you value most; you have to anticipate what your desired website visitors are really looking for when they search, because that's what RankBrain is doing for the billion searches that are completed through Google every day. Instead of trying to match specific keywords to content, RankBrain's aim is to understand what an internet user really means and what they want when they type in a word or phrase. It then wants to present results with maximum relevancy. RankBrain is trying to grasp concepts on a more sophisticated level — one that goes further than crawling high authority links and webpage content for specific terms. It manages to do this by carefully tracking and evaluating internet user behaviors. Once an internet user enters a keyword or phrase into Google's search bar, RankBrain pays close attention to what happens after that user clicks on the top organic search result. You Have To Anticipate What Your Desired Website Visitors Are Really Looking For

When determining how websites should be ranked, RankBrain looks for the following user experience signals:

Organic Click-Through Rates: This is how frequently an internet user clicks on a website link that's shown on a SERP for a specific keyword or phrase. A top organic (non-sponsored) result will receive the most clicks, and Google likes it that way.

Dwell Time: This is the length of time an internet user spends on a website or a specific page before they hit the back button or click away to another page. You want a longer dwell time for the pages you are targeting. This means an internet user has found content that is relevant to their search and there is enough of it to keep them engaged. A high dwell time tells Google that there is valuable, relevant content on a page.

Bounce Rates: This is how frequent an internet user clicks through to a website, deems the content as irrelevant or uninteresting, and uses the back button or other commands to navigate away from that page or website. A high bounce rate tells Google that a page isn't of value to most internet users and rankings will drop significantly as a result, which is detrimental to SEO efforts.

These experience signals play a big role in how RankBrain functions and how a website is ranked. To better understand how that works, let's look at a few different search scenarios for a specific type of query.

You've got an ant problem in your kitchen. It's becoming a major nuisance, so you Google "Get rid of ants".

Search Scenario 1: You click on the first listing that pops up. The results say, "How To Quickly And Permanently Get Rid Of Ants In Your Kitchen." linking to a website called Best Bug Busters, but you quickly see it's just a few lines of mostly promotional text on a site for a professional exterminator. Since you don't want to spend much money and you're confident you can take care of this problem yourself, you hit the back button and return to the search results.

Search Scenario 2: You click on the second listing. This one says "Ten Ways You Can Get Rid Of Ants And Other Common Pests." linking to a website called Easy Ant Control. This sounds more like what you're looking for, but when you get there, you see it's a sponsored slideshow of brand name sprays and ant traps you've already tried without lasting success. Once you've spent about 20 or 30 seconds clicking through several of the slides, you hit the back button again.