The SEO ranking factor you MUST master to rank in Google

there's a new Google ranking factor that's huge right now and when you take advantage of it you can find yourself with high rankings and more traffic and if you ignore it let's just say that you're missing out on a ton of high quality traffic i'm brian dean the

founder of backlinko the place where marketers turned four high rankings and more traffic and in this video I'm going to reveal what this new ranking factor is in three practical ways that you could take advantage of it I'll also show you the results of a real-life case study

that might surprise you keep watching a while back I published a post on my blog called how to get high quality backlinks without guest posting and like all of my blog posts I made sure to optimize this post around a keyword in this case the keyword was high

quality backlinks sure enough thanks to the white hat links that I built to that post it quickly hit the first page for that keyword but here's where things got weird one day I was checking my Google rankings and I saw something that made me almost fall out of

my seat not only was I ranking for high quality backlinks but I also ranked on the first page for the keyword how to get high say what needless to say my post had nothing to do with getting high but then I realized why Google ranked me for that

keyword it's because I had the keyword how to get high in my content but here's where things got really interesting most people that came to my site from Google spent nearly 3 minutes on my site but for this page the average is only one minute in 12 seconds

less than half of my site wide average so what's going on here when people search for how to get high and clicked on my result they quickly realize that I wasn't going to teach them how to make their own breaking bad style meth-lab so they quickly hit their

back button and left this tool Google in black and white people searching for how to get high hate this page in Google took action a few weeks later my page dropped like a stone for the keyword how to get high it literally went from number 6 to 12

to 21 to 33 in a matter of days but check this out my ranking for the keyword high quality backlinks didn't drop in they continue to climb why because people searching for high quality backlinks stuck to my site like superglue how do I know after my rankings for

how to get high dropped the overall bounce rate and time on page four my article significantly improved now in a minute I'll show you how you can easily keep Google searchers on your site longer but for now I want to show you where things stand today today my

page ranks number one in google for the keyword high quality backlinks and for the keyword how to get high I'm nowhere to be found that's the power of this new ranking factor so what's the takeaway lesson from this story even though backlinks continue to be the cornerstone of

Google's algorithm it's clear that user experience signals influence search engine rankings today I'm about to show you three practical ways that you can take advantage of these user experience signals including my favorite the a PP formula but first I want to tell you another quick story to show

you just how important user experience signals are today a few years back tech writer Steven Levy wrote an insider account of Google called in the Plex in that book Steven States on the most basic level Google could see how satisfied users were the best sign of their happiness

was the long click in other words when people click on your site in Google and stick around it sends a very strong message that your page makes searchers happy but when people quickly leave your site like they're on a pogo stick it tells Google the opposite it shows

them that your page isn't a good fit for that keyword the question is how can you get people to stick to your site so that Google sees you as the best result for that keyword the answer the three insanely actionable technique that I'm going to show you right

now first up we have bucket brigades before I got into SEO I used to work as a freelance copywriter and I had a problem a lot of my clients would hire me to write these crazy long six thousand word sales letters you know those sales pages that are

like 25 pages long and you have to keep scrolling and scrolling to get to the end I wrote those all the time the problem I had was this it's really hard to keep people on a page that's 6,000 words long people don't have the attend to skim that

much content never mind read it and I tried every trick in the book to keep people's attention I tried images I tried videos I tried storytelling I tried everything but the sales letters just weren't compelling enough to keep people from hitting their back button and though one day

I had a breakthrough I discovered a little no technique called bucket brigades that copywriters have been using for decades and these bucket brigades instantly made my content much more compelling so what are they bucket brigades are words and phrases that keep people on your page specifically they make

your visitors want to keep reading for example I have a post on my site called how to boost conversions by five hundred and twenty nine percent and the average time on page for the article is almost four minutes and a good chunk of that above average time on

page is due to bucket brigades like this and this and this when you see one of those bucket brigades it opens up a little information gap in your mind and you can't help but read the next sentence bottom line whenever you have a place in your content where

people might get bored and hit their back button add a bucket brigade here are a few other bucket brigades that you can include in your content once you've added two bucket brigades your content it's time for strategy number two benefit driven subheadings let me ask you something which

of these two posts would you rather read if you're like most people you prefer the one on the left why because the content on the left is broken up with subheadings in my experience subheadings are huge you can never use enough of them for example my post 17

insanely actionable list building strategies has an average time on page of over five minutes the number one reason because the post contains lots and lots of subheadings but not just any subheadings benefit driven subheadings I'll explain most people use random subheadings like this sure that does break your

content up into easy-to-read chunks but random sub headers like that won't grab your readers attention and make them say to themselves wow there's a ton of value here fortunately this is a quick fix for that include Ben fits in your sub headers for example and my list building

post I use benefit rich copy in almost every subheading instead of a bland subheading like focus on your thank-you page I put the benefit front and center okay so I saved the best for last that a PP formula here's the truth when someone visits your page from Google

you have two seconds to convince them to stick around not ten not five two and if you lose them in those two seconds you lose them for good but if you hit your visitor off with something amazing right off the bat they're much more likely to stick around

and as you saw earlier in this video this boost in time on page can be huge for your Google rankings and whenever I need to improve the time on page for one of my articles I turn to the a PP formula so what is it the a PP

formula is a proven content introduction framework that's designed to do one thing keep Google visitors on your page longer here's what the a PP formula looks like as you can see a P P stands for agree promise and preview now I'm going to break each of these three

elements down and show you a real-life example of how I use the a PP formula to keep Google searchers on my page first up we have agree you want to start your intro off with an idea or concept that someone searching for your keyword will agree with this

shows that you understand their problem and when someone sees that you understand them and their problems they're much more likely to stick around for example a while back I published a blog post that show people how to create a high converting squeeze page here's the intro from that

post see how I say I think you'll agree with me when I say it's really hard to convert ice-cold traffic into email subscribers that's something that anyone trying to build an email list can relate to now that you've got them nodding their head in agreement it's time for

the promise the promise is where you give your reader a peek into a better world here's an example from my squeeze page post most people think that you need to run hundreds of a B tests to get more email signups but my promise shows that there is an

easier way finally hit them with the preview there's no need to beat around the bush here your preview just need to tell your reader exactly what you have in store for them for example here's the preview from my social squeeze page post and once you put the finishing

touches on your preview you're set you now have an introduction that keeps Google searchers on your site and a page that Google will want to show to more people if you liked this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe

button also if you want exclusive SEO and traffic techniques that it only share with subscribers head over to backlinko comm and sign up for the newsletter it's free now I want to turn it over to you which of the three strategies from this video are you going to

use first are you pumped to try bucket brigades or maybe you want to give the a PP formula a shot let me know by leaving a comment right now again once I'm not saying it right in fact oh didn't drop it's two to two crazy not ten not

to understand what I said there was that too fast