Getting on top of Google
It’s not hard to get on top of Google, neither is it easy. It is one of those things which happens by magic, except that nobody knows what exactly to do. Some say you have to do one thing, others something else, but at the end of the day there are some metrics that strongly increases your odds of being on top of Google.
The things we know
One of the major factors which will take you to the top of Google is to make your readers stay on your website. This is the major reason why most of the searches for a product features Amazon on top. People who go to Amazon to buy a particular product gets lost in its myriad of suggestions and spend much more time than originally intended. This results in Amazon getting a ton of time on page and thereby helping it rank higher on Google.
So how do we make people spend time on our blog?
Answer: Add Interactive Content.
Let’s all agree that reading is boring. I mean how many articles have you read without skipping some parts? Creating a large amount of content is not going to help make magic happen.
On the other hand adding interactive content such as videos, quizzes and other elements make humans stick to your blog.
Even huge websites such as menshealth.com (traffic around 30 million), independent.co.uk (traffic around 83 million) and trustedreviews.com (traffic around 3 million) use quizzes in them. These websites have no reason to put a quiz in their articles, and yet they have. This tells a lot about adding quizzes and other interactive content to your website.
Adding interactive content helps in multiple ways. For one thing, the increase in the time spent on-page and then the interactions that happen on the website. Google tracks people movements on the website and people interacting with your content is seen as a great thing by Google (again, remember how Amazon ranks on Google because their customers interact a lot).
You can add polls or quizzes inside your article to engage uses more. Humans are naturally inclined to find out how well they know what they like and also to share the content among their peers so that they can see how well they rank against their peers. Quizzes about famous TV Sitcoms such as Friends, Big Bang Theory, Money Heist are answered by fans of these Sitcoms. All these contribute to your ranking with Google.
Another way to add time spent on the page is to add videos. Videos increase time spent on the page since users get immersed in the videos and keep watching them. YouTube videos in particular have suggestions in the end that make people watch one video after the other and thereby increasing time spent on page massively.
One thing I have noticed is that people tend to remember sites where questions personalized to them were asked. For example one of the most viewed/shared article is BuzzFeed’s which city matches your personality. The element of personalization in the quiz made it viral. In contrast to this quiz, the largest shared article in BuzzFeed has received only one-third of the traffic.
In short, adding interactive content helps massively in increasing your rankings.
Check out makethemstay, a platform that’s build to add multiple methods to make people stay on your website.
