Customers who visit your website leave behind various clues about their experiences. When you follow this trail of behavioral data, you glean valuable insights about who your audience is, what information they’re looking for, and where your site falls short of their expectations.
Put these findings to work, and you’ll position your business for significant growth. By precisely meeting your audience’s needs, you can boost search engine rankings, expand your reach, optimize user experiences, and accelerate conversions. Below, you’ll learn more about the valuable insights contained in your website and how to use them to sharpen your search-first marketing strategies.
Understanding Behavioral Data
Behavioral data is information about how users interact with your website, both in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and after arriving on your site. You can collect an array of data, including the keywords visitors use, the pages they look at, where they click, and how long they spend on your website.
This data sheds light on:
- The information users are looking for.
- The pages they’re most interested in.
- The areas of a web page that attract their attention.
- Where on your site they drop off.
You can leverage these insights in a couple of ways.
First, look for patterns in behavior to help you better optimize your site. There may be problems with layout, content, or site speed. There could also be a mismatch between your content and user intent or changes in user preferences over time. Behavioral data is critical for understanding where you’re not meeting needs, helping you better align your website with audience preferences and boosting your search engine optimization (SEO) success.
Similarly, use your findings to inform your strategies on other marketing channels. You’ll have a better grasp of your audience’s interests so you can synchronize other campaigns with your organic search efforts. This creates a strong, unified online presence for your brand.
Tools for Tracking Behavioral Data
Numerous website analytics platforms collect behavioral data. You’ll want to choose a few tools to create a comprehensive picture of your site’s performance.
Start with a platform that looks at overall site engagement. Google Analytics (GA) is a go-to for many businesses as it’s free and comprehensive.
GA aggregates user information and monitors metrics such as page traffic, engagement rate, session duration, completed actions, and conversions. It also tells you which channels users are arriving from, their location, demographics and interests, and devices used. GA pairs well with Google Search Console for information on how users find your site and their click-through rates in the SERPs.
For deeper insights into user interaction on a page level, consider a platform such as Hotjar or Crazy Egg. These tools show you which parts of a web page users focus on or ignore. Using session recordings, heat maps, and click maps, you can see where audiences click, hover, and stop scrolling. Use these observations to improve page layouts and user experience.
Key Behavioral Metrics To Monitor
You don’t need to analyze every piece of data your analytics platform collects. Focus on the behavioral metrics that closely align with your goals and that will guide you in making meaningful improvements.
Below are some key metrics to get you started.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Click-through rate is the percentage of users who click your link in the SERPs compared to all users who saw the link. The higher your CTR, the more effective your search-first marketing efforts are at driving site traffic.
If you’re seeing a low CTR for certain pages, you have some work to do to entice your audience to visit your site. You may need to:
- Improve your SEO efforts to appear higher in the SERPs. On average, climbing up one spot in the rankings increases CTR by almost 3%, according to Backlinko.
- Make your search snippet more appealing. Your title tag and meta description can impact clicks, as well as whether your business has a regular, rich, or featured snippet.
Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your website without engaging. Some pages naturally have a high bounce rate, such as a contact page with business hours. Pages like landing pages, forms, and blog posts, which are meant to encourage actions, ideally have lower bounce rates.
Low bounce rates suggest customers are interacting with your content. And when audiences stay on your site, they signal to Google that your content is relevant to a query and merits a prominent place in the SERPs.
Common reasons users bounce are:
- Slow page loading times.
- A confusing layout.
- A cluttered design.
- Intrusive pop-ups.
- A lack of mobile-friendliness.
- Irrelevant content.
Session Duration
Session duration is the time a user spends interacting with your site. In Google Analytics, a session begins when someone lands on your site and ends when they leave or are inactive for 30 minutes. This metric helps you gauge user experience and content relevance.
Longer session durations signal to search engines that users are exploring your site, which can positively impact your search rankings. If the behavioral data indicates your audience isn’t sticking around, investigate further. Check to see that your site has:
- Clear navigation.
- Appealing visual design.
- Helpful, people-first content.
- Content that matches user intent.
- Interactive content, such as images, videos, and quizzes.
- Healthy Core Web Vitals.
Pageviews
Pageviews track the number of times users visit a particular URL or load it into the browser. Use this metric to assess page performance to see which ones interest your audience the most. Try to identify patterns to inform your content strategy.
You might find certain topics or content types are driving more engagement, such as in-depth guides or free downloadables. Alternatively, you may be missing the mark on URLs with low pageviews — maybe the topics don’t resonate, or you need better on-page SEO to rank higher in the SERPs. Adapt your strategies so you can drive more interaction and better connections to your audience.
Analyzing User Behavior
You’ve established goals for your website analytics, selected relevant metrics, and collected the data. Now, how do you draw insights from this information and translate them into informed actions?
Methodologies
You can use various approaches to analyze your data, each giving you a different perspective of user behaviors. I’ve highlighted some common methodologies below to illustrate the nuances you can get from your analytics.
Segmentation
Segmentation involves breaking your data into smaller data sets to learn about customers with similar behaviors or attributes. You can segment data by demographics, geographic location, channel, and new or returning visitors, for example. You can then leverage these insights to better optimize your content for a particular audience segment.
Trend Analysis
Trend analysis detects changes in metrics over time to uncover patterns in behavior. You can monitor seasonal trends to adjust for behavior at different times of the year or track interactions during specific campaigns, such as flash sales, to see how to better convert customers. Trend analysis can also uncover subtle declines in metrics so you can investigate unmet needs before they become an issue.
Cohort Analysis
With cohort analysis, you follow the behavior of users who share common characteristics over a specific time frame. A cohort might be all customers who purchased a product during the first month of its launch or as part of a specific promotion. You can then analyze the cohort to learn about their lifecycle, such as how often they return to your site, the kinds of marketing messages they respond to, and what other products they purchase. This can help you develop engagement and retention strategies for a particular audience.
Funnel Analysis
Funnel analysis investigates a typical customer’s journey as they navigate your website and complete desired actions. You can trace their behavior through specific stages as they read landing page content, view product demos, browse products, add items to carts, and check out. Review the data to see how they’re progressing and where they’re experiencing friction, and use this knowledge to optimize your sales funnel.
Applying User Behavior Insights With A/B Testing
As you consider changes to your site, use A/B testing to compare possible approaches. A/B testing involves creating two versions of a web page to see which design elements or content variations are most effective.
You might find users aren’t scrolling far enough on a landing page. You could A/B test different headlines and calls to action to see which ones improve conversions the most. Or you might determine your main navigation is confusing and test different menu structures to see how audiences respond.
We use VWO on our WordPress site.
Strategic Application of Behavioral Insights
Using your behavioral data as guideposts, fine-tune your website to improve user experience and search visibility. Below are some of the ways to adjust your site’s content and technical health based on your findings.
Content Updates and Optimization
Your content should be relevant, helpful, and optimized for crawling and indexing. If audiences aren’t finding your content or engaging with it, consider:
- Refreshing low-performing content. Look for ways to optimize pages with low pageviews. Review your target keywords and search intent, and improve the content to add value.
- Identifying popular content. Build on pages that attract traffic and engagement. Target related keywords and topics to encourage users to continue exploring the subject matter.
- Improving conversions on important pages. Examine scroll depth and clicks to find where users are focusing attention. Make headlines and calls to action more compelling.
- Enhancing on-page and off-page SEO. Focus on pages that aren’t generating clicks in the SERPs. Optimize title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords. Write easy-to-read, well-formatted content with proper headers.
- Enriching content to improve dwell time. Increase engagement rate with images, videos, infographics, and other rich content. Add internal links and calls to action to guide users to other content on your site.
Technical SEO Adjustments
A technically sound website delivers an exceptional user experience. If visitors are bouncing or dwell time is low, some possible site improvements include:
- Simplifying navigation. Users may have trouble finding relevant content. Provide clear and logical navigation options and reduce the number of clicks it takes to reach critical pages.
- Boosting site speed. To reduce frustration and bounces, make sure pages load quickly. Compress files, optimize images, implement lazy loading, and minimize redirects.
- Optimizing for mobile devices. Does your data show lower engagement by mobile users? Ensure your site is responsive across all devices.
- Fixing errors. Remove obstacles that can cause users to abandon your site, such as broken links, missing files, 404 errors, and form submission problems.
- Improving site security. Give users the confidence to submit forms and complete purchases by implementing appropriate security protocols.
A website maintenance service can help address these issues.
Ethical Considerations in Using Behavioral Data
Before I wrap up, I’d like to touch on the ethics of collecting user data. While this information can be a gold mine for businesses, audiences are increasingly concerned about their privacy and how their personal information is used. It’s essential your company protects the rights of anyone who visits your website. An ethical approach not only fosters trust and promotes your credibility but also safeguards you from legal repercussions.
Many jurisdictions have laws governing the collection, storage, and use of data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to any website collecting data from users in the European Union, for example, but similar regulations are in place in other regions.
Best Practices for Ethical Usage of Data
- Understand applicable laws such as the GDPR and ensure compliance
- Establish privacy policies and place them clearly on your website.
- Be transparent about how you collect and use data and obtain user consent.
- Allow users to opt-out or customize their preferences.
- Remove personal identifiers and anonymize data.
- Protect data through encryption and security protocols.
- Collect only the data you need and use it only for purposes users have agreed to.
Improve Your Marketing With a Search-First Approach
Behavioral data gives you the critical insights needed to ignite your company’s growth. By responding to your audience’s engagement signals, you can tailor your website and marketing to precisely fit their search journey. Reach out today for a free consultation with our experts and learn how our data-driven approach improves user experience, boosts SEO performance, and optimizes conversions and returns.
