What behavioral factors ranking and how do they affect the SEO-optimization of the site in Yandex and Google? Where do search engines get PF data from? List of 26 Behavioral Ranking Factors: How to Improve Them? Is it possible to wind up the PF or pessimize the competitor's website? Read more about everything in this article.

When generating search results, search engines are guided by, which are used in algorithms for determining the quality of sites and their relevance to search queries. One of the most significant SEO factors are behavioral ranking factors.

What are site behavioral factors?

Behavioral ranking factors- a set of parameters that determine the relevance of the page search query, based on the actions of site users, their profile and history of interaction with search. These parameters are used in search ranking algorithms.

Behavioral factors today play an important role in the process of determining the relevance of sites, however, their contribution cannot be assessed. quantitative indicators. Firstly, search engines do not comment on the information and do not disclose site ranking factors and their weight in the overall ranking formula. Secondly, there are a large number of other factors that also affect the issuance. These can be domain, link, commercial factors, etc.

Behavioral factors reflect the visitor's engagement and interest in the content presented on the page. Modern SEO optimization does not seem effective without working on these indicators, the convenience of interfaces, and the quality of content.

The Impact of Behavioral Factors on SEO

It’s worth starting with the fact that behavioral factors cannot be considered in abstraction from other ranking factors. For example, technical factors such as low speed site performance or the presence of broken internal links can significantly reduce the browsing depth. Server unavailability or unoptimized images for people with unstable internet can be a problem in displaying content on the site, which in turn can increase the bounce rate. Poor quality content, uninteresting text, is likely to provoke the user to go to another site.

The high degree of dependence of user factors on the quality of the site, as well as the complexity of artificially influencing them, made these factors one of the most significant in determining the relevance of the issue. About 10-15 years ago, text and link ranking factors had high priority in search algorithms. The simplicity of their definition has led to artificial cheating: mass purchase of external links, re-optimization of texts with keywords. Naturally, the influence of these factors decreased, and pessimizing ranking algorithms appeared, such as Baden-Baden and Minusinsk, which lowered sites in search engine spam and unnatural link mass.

Since 2014, Yandex has naturally announced an increase in the influence of behavioral ranking factors in determining the relevance of pages, and a corresponding decrease in the influence of external links. The search engine said that the priorities in the updated algorithm, that is, having more weight in the overall ranking formula, are behavioral factors that are based primarily on the quality of content, usability and user experience of interaction with the search and the site.

Where do search engines get PF data from?

Before moving on to the list of behavioral ranking factors, let's look at the sources from which search engines draw data on web resources.

1. Analytics systems. Almost every site today has a Yandex.Metrica statistics counter or Google Analytics. Providing webmasters free tool analysts, search engines receive in return a huge amount of data that is used for ranking.
2. Browsers. Search engines spend a lot of money developing and advertising their own browsers for a reason. This is another source of information about the user profile, its interaction with sites, which allows you to make the search better.
3. Browser extensions like Yandex.Bar, they can transmit data to search engines about user interaction with the search.
4. Search engine services. Data from Google Search Console, Google Plus, Yandex.Webmaster, Zen, Directory and other search engine services may be taken into account in determining the relevance of sites.
5. Other software and software, one way or another controlled by search engines. For example, PuntoSwitcher purchased by Yandex can provide search data about user typos. This information can be used in determining the vital vadacha.

Internet memes are already being made about the user experience of interacting with search companies:

As the saying goes, there is some truth in every joke. Modern search engines can approach the formation of a user profile in a personalized way, based on the data of his interaction with all kinds of services and applications.

List: 26 Behavioral Ranking Factors

Consider a list of behavioral ranking factors that today can significantly affect your site's position in search, both for better and for worse:

Behavioral factors cheating is an artificial imitation of user actions on the site. It is designed to increase the browsing depth, time on the site, reduce the bounce rate and affect other parameters that affect the ranking of sites. To date, optimizers either develop their own software or use third-party services for cheating PF.

We consider both ways of artificial influence on extradition unpromising. 4-5 years ago, these tools could work, however, later search engines began to be pessimistic, or completely exclude resources from the issuance of such frauds. User factors - in themselves are complex and non-linear indicators, the effectiveness of which strongly depends on the subject, user profile, visit history, type of resource, and many other factors. Objectively, existing services linearly wind up the most accessible factors in fairly primitive ways that are easy to track. In the site statistics, the geography of visitors, their devices, IP addresses, the unjustified nature of user behavior on the site, the distribution of attention across pages, etc. change dramatically. Such uncharacteristic changes are easily tracked by modern search engines. Theoretically, it is possible to develop an algorithm as close as possible to the actions of users, however, this will be the result of a security breach on the Internet, the creation of botnets, which can later be used for DDos attacks and other selfish goals of hackers. Search engines regard this threat as search spam and have a negative attitude towards the spread of malware on the Internet.

Here is a comment from a Yandex official from 2016, when the company began to actively fight this type of search spam:

This raises a completely logical question: "How do search engines track the promotion of PF in order to lower the positions of competitors in the search results?". We believe that sanctions for PF cheating are imposed after a long time of use and only manually. In this case, competitors will have to for a long time spend your own money, every day more and more doubting the prospects for attempts to pessimize competitors. Or perhaps suspicious traffic and PF, which search engines consider unnatural, is simply screened out from participation in ranking algorithms. Share your opinion in the comments on this issue.

Here is the official answer from Yandex support. The search engine says that such attempts are taken into account and tracked in the algorithm:

How to improve the behavioral factors on the site?

Instead of trying to artificially influence user factors by imitating user actions, it is better to work on the quality of the project, its content, page speed, usability and other aspects of a modern Internet resource. Let's take a look at a few website optimization options to improve behavioral ranking factors.

We are looking for weak points of the site

The best tool for visually displaying the conversion holes of your site is Webvisor. This tool allows you to view the entire user session in the first person, to understand the nature and motives of his actions. With the help of WebVisor, you can analyze and understand why visitors leave your site, from which pages they leave and after what actions.

Analyze bounces, sessions with low duration and activity, through which users go to your site, browsers and devices. Track the correct display of your site on different resolutions, devices and browsers. Perhaps the biggest bounce rate comes from one browser that doesn't support your code.

Session duration

It makes no sense to purposefully increase the duration of the session, since this factor strongly depends on the subject of the project, its goals and content. However, an increase in the amount of time users spend on your site can signal that users are more engaged with your page's information or product range.

If you consider a commercial site, then be sure to add pagination of pages, add the ability to filter the number of products on the page, use product filters, experiment with loading products without reloading the page (Ajax). Display the number of products in a category so that users are aware of the breadth of your range. Provide users with the most complete information about your products: video reviews, photos from various angles, detailed descriptions goods, their characteristics. Try to display important information for users even before switching to the product card.

Information sites can increase user engagement and session time with all sorts of polls on the topic, tests, opinions of experts and celebrities, infographics, useful videos, convenient tables, and high-quality structuring and presentation of content on the page.

There is one very interesting technique for checking the usability and usability of your site. Suggest to your mother or grandmother, who are not advanced users, to find a certain page or place an order on your site. By their reaction, it will immediately become clear to you what weak areas your site has from the point of view of users.

View Depth

Work on semantic page linking, navigation and site structure so that users can get to any page in no more than 3 clicks. Offer related content to users based on their interests and the content of the page they are on.

We reduce the bounce rate

We remove aggressive ads and pop-ups from our site that block access to content for the user. Raise the most important content for the user to the top of the page. If this is a product category, the user should immediately see the product items in the visible area of ​​his device. If this informational article, the user does not have to scroll to the middle of the page in the hope of getting to the content, viewing a ton of ads or useless materials.

Check that your website scripts work correctly on all devices and browsers. It is possible that errors in the interpretation of the code by the browser prevent users from accessing content or taking necessary actions.

Development of snippets

Analyze the CTR of your snippets, traffic on individual pages and the position of the site in the SERP in comparison with past indicators. Evaluate the relevance of the information presented in the snippet to the tasks that the user is trying to solve. Do not forget to take into account the seasonality and dynamics of demand for certain key queries.

Work on your site's microdata to get rich snippets. Experiment with using special characters and HTML5 tags in snippet titles and descriptions. See how it will affect your positions and traffic.

We increase user activity

When using "Chat with the company" in the search, promptly and as detailed as possible give users advice.

Try at the end of the article to ask the opinion of your readers on the material presented, perhaps this will increase their involvement in the discussion of a given topic.

Update and update content

This recommendation applies to both commercial and informational sites. In the first case, it is extremely important to maintain the relevance of product balances so that users do not order those products that are no longer in stock. It is also necessary to maintain the relevance of prices, descriptions, graphic materials, so that the product that people see on the site corresponds to it in reality.

For information sites, it is important to keep the data up-to-date, especially in dynamically changing areas. Legal sites with outdated legal information are unlikely to stay in the TOP of search engine results for a long time. As well as a site about SEO optimization, which recommends buying links and cheating user factors, is unlikely to deserve the attention of users.

Irrelevant and not updated content of your resources can negatively affect behavioral factors, engagement and audience loyalty.

Improving interaction with the site

Try to provide users with as much functionality and data as possible to help them solve their problem. For online stores, dimensional grids of goods are a kind of must have. For example, for the developer's website, the presence of a virtual tour of the apartments under construction will be a big plus. For an information site dedicated to diets, it would be a good addition to have a calorie calculator that will help each user calculate their personal indicators and leave a weight loss plan.

Put yourself in the place of users and think about what interactive or functionality you can help them solve their problems, as well as increase conversion or key indicators of your business.

Conclusion

In order to evaluate the behavioral factors of your site, it is not necessary to know all the elements of search algorithms. You already have everything you need to analyze from a human point of view - these are analytics systems. Master new reports, analyze statistics, user behavior on your site, holes due to which users go to competitors. Put yourself in the place of users and ask yourself the question "what do I not like about this site?", attract independent people from your target audience to evaluate the content and usability of your resource.

Subscribe to the blog, share the article in in social networks, ask your questions in the comments and share your opinion about the impact of behavioral factors on modern SEO.

To understand what commercial factors are, you need to have an idea of ​​the goal pursued by Yandex by introducing them. And here we need a little history. In order not to write a lot, consider the main events.

1 wave: In October, at the Cybermarketing-2011 conference on new factors that will evaluate commercial criteria that are important when choosing a product or service on the Internet, told Kirill Nikolaev. The groups of these criteria were announced:

• confidence
• service quality
• convenience of choice
• design

2 wave: In November 2011, Yandex announced a change in the ranking formula for the Moscow region. After the innovations, sites that were kept only by “optimization” really suffered a lot.

3 wave: In 2013, Yandex announced the abolition of link factors. Since one factor goes away, others get more weight, and many optimizers paid attention to commercial indicators. Around the same time, on the net with a description of the principles of operation and the stages of training the algorithm to take into account commercial criteria.

It has a list of 14 indicators by which the commercial component of the site is evaluated. These are the ones I want to discuss in this article. Obviously this is not full list, but just a few criteria for an example. But their analysis gives an understanding in which direction you need to work in order to improve the commercial performance of your site.

1. Detailed contact information

Since the request is commercial, the user potentially has to trust his money and be sure that he will receive a product or service. If you only have a form on your site feedback, it becomes doubtful whether it is worth doing.

We go to the contact page. If we see where the office is located - this is already a plus, if we see a photo of the manager - another plus, etc. The more detailed contact information is presented on the site, the higher the trust in it.

May be taken into account:

• Communication options (phone, e-mail, Skype, ICQ, online consultant, etc.). A real opportunity to contact is important! It is likely that the consultant's presence on site is also monitored and taken into account.
• Availability of regional offices or points of issue.
• Registration data. On the one hand, this incomprehensible set of numbers and letters will not tell anything to most users, but these data indicate that this is the site of an officially registered company, which, in which case, you can make claims. The importance of this information is also confirmed by the fact that now, without it, the site is not accepted into Yandex.Catalog, even on a paid basis.

It is necessary to optimize both the contact page itself and the template - the information must be available.

List of criteria related to quality contact information, can be expanded long enough.

Let's take at least a phone:

• it must be placed on all pages;
• Yandex says that a landline phone is more trustworthy than a mobile phone:

• specify the operating hours of the operators;
• the number must be placed in the form of text (available for indexing) and noticeable. Sometimes it seems that the owners tried to hide it from both users and search robots;
• if both a landline number and a mobile number are published on the site, it is obvious that it will be more convenient for the user if there are phones of different operators;
• if the company has several departments working with clients - plus if their phones are posted;
• there are many identical numbers in the number and it is easy to remember - it means that the company has taken care of its customers;
• the site has a number that the user can call for free - obviously, this is a positive thing for users.

As a result, there are many nuances in the placement of even a form of communication.

There can be many criteria, as we have shown, and it is very difficult to determine how much weight each of them has specifically in your subject. Therefore, it is correct to optimize the commercial factors of the site in parallel with the marketing analysis of the site and competitors. With this approach, you are more likely to hit the target. Otherwise, a lot of features and services that are useless in your subject can be added to the site.

2. Company pages in social networks

It is clear that for different topics, the effect of groups in the social. networks will be different. And if in the group of a hand-made goods store users can be active and traffic from the social. networks is quite expected, then in the group of companies engaged in metal rolling, you should not expect the same result.

But the fact that you are willing to work with your clients on different channels, spending time on maintaining and developing groups already shows that you care about your visitors.

Also, don't forget to include your details. social groups when adding an address in the Yandex Webmaster panel:

3. No ads

If the site is commercial, it cares about its customers and business, it will definitely not want a potential client to leave for another resource. Continuing the thought - if a company is ready to easily part with a potential client, then it is unlikely that it will spend money on improving the service and the quality of the services provided. And this is a definite minus for the commercial factors of the site.

In 2011 (shortly before the announcement of commercial rankings), Yandex announced that it would consider usability factors. And first of all, pay attention to the quality of advertising:

4. Number of goods (range)

The more products on the site, the more likely that the user will find what he needs.

But everything is not as obvious as it might seem at first glance. After all, the fact that there are few goods on the site does not mean that the store is bad. There are many sites that specialize in products designed for a narrower audience. The value of this factor, obviously, should depend on the subject and specifics of the request. For example, upon request "detergents" the number of goods will be more than requested "professional cleaners".

Another point to pay attention to is the availability of goods. If many store cards say "Out of stock", this can be a negative factor.

In a number of topics, for example, the sale of books, films, mobile devices, the availability of new products and the frequency of updates may matter - users are interested in up-to-date information.

5. Design and filling of the product card

It is important for the user that the product card contains all the information necessary to select the product, including the conditions of purchase.

This is how the minimum set for a high-quality product card from Yandex looks like:

Depending on the type of product, the completeness of information, of course, is evaluated differently. It is also important that all product cards are filled out, and not just promoted pages.

6. Delivery

The fact that delivery information is important for commercial sites, Yandex representatives wrote back in 2011:

Let's see how delivery on one site can be better or worse:

• Shipping Options. If the store cares about convenience, then it offers several delivery options so that the user can choose which option is best for him.
• Availability of points of issue and own service delivery. If the product is expensive, users often want to make sure that it is intact or clarify information with the seller.
• Availability free shipping . It is clear that if there is an opportunity not to pay for delivery, most users will not miss it.
• Delivery terms. Ceteris paribus, will you choose a store that is ready to deliver the order on the same day or in 4-7 days?.. It is also more convenient for users if the delivery service works on weekends and you can specify the desired delivery time.
• Shipping Details. On product cards, in addition to the words “delivery within 3 days” and a picture of a truck, there should be a page where delivery conditions will be described in detail. Do not forget to put a link to the terms of delivery in the menu of the site.

7. Availability of a support service

In this case, apparently, it is not just about the opportunity to communicate with the manager (the online consultant is made a separate paragraph), but about customer support after the purchase or conclusion of the contract.

It can be:

• technical support phone on the provider's website;
• the ability to ask a question through the feedback form;
• section "Frequently Asked Questions";
• the presence of a thematic forum;
• the ability to track the status of the order, etc.

And here's a great example. 😉 :

Yandex has technical support, where they respond quite quickly, while Google only has a forum where official representatives are rare guests. Who has this factor pumped better?

8. Online consultant

We do not know if Yandex takes into account the intrusive form of an online consultant as a negative factor. But if not, you probably need to do it and publish a separate post about it on the official blog. Essentially, it's the same intrusive adware of your service, which prevents you from viewing the main content.

How negative moment it may also be considered that the consultant is not available during working hours.

But in general, another way of communication is a plus in the treasury of convenience.

9. Discounts

Do users like discounts, promotions? I think for any manager the answer to this question is obvious. And if they love it, then the store where they are will be more attractive to users.

10. Readability of the domain name

Let's move on to more technical points. If the company has made sure that the name of the site can be easily remembered and the user already understands what the site is about from the name of the site, then this is definitely a positive thing.

11. Average URL Length

Commercial factors are considered as a whole for the site, so the average length of the URL is used here. Apparently there are limits. And if the site goes beyond them in one direction or another, it gets a minus. It is also perhaps obvious that this is not the only metric related to URL scores.

Probably taken into account:

• information content;
• compliance with the structure of the site.

12. Average Title Length

As with URLs, length is not the only measure of title quality. But there seem to be some limits. And if the figure is too small due to the fact that the headings are filled only on promoted pages, or too large, because in addition to information about the product, they include the name of all subcategories and the company's slogan, then the site can receive a negative rating for this parameter.

13. Match Title to page content

The title is included in the snippet. Suppose the user sees the word in the title "stock", went to the page. But instead of information about the action, I didn’t find anything, because all the headers are automatically substituted with a list of possible query clarifications, for example, "price", "buy", "catalog", "photo", "promotions", "reviews", "inexpensive".

Or I saw 3 direct occurrences of the word in the text and 4 more word forms, as the webmaster "sharpened" the page for the request. Anyway necessary information the user did not find.

14. Average URL nesting

Again the same question: well - how much is that? It is unlikely that there is an exact answer to it. As in the case with the length of the Title and URL, it seems to be about getting into the framework, which should depend on the subject of the site and its structure. For example, if a site has several levels of subcategories and the average nesting is 2, then the URLs do not reflect the structure of the site. More than 7-8 - too much unnecessary information.

Drawing conclusions

Optimize your business as a whole. No need to just try to "pump" commercial factors. We already wrote above that there are many factors and they have different meaning depending on the subject. By optimizing business factors, you will increase the degree of user satisfaction, the number of sales, and are more likely to fall into the very criteria that Yandex considers important in your subject.

Artificially pumped factors may simply not be useful. For example, we noticed that the reviews that the company itself adds to the pages have a much smaller effect on positions than real comments.

Analyze competitors. Knowing what services, services, communication methods are used by competitors in the TOP, you can understand what exactly the site lacks in order to get a higher assessment of the commercial components. The Yandex article states that vital and useful sites were excluded from the sample. It is very problematic to determine what kind of sites they are during the analysis. But we recommend taking this point into account in the analysis.

Take care of the quality of your services, make your work credible. Yandex considers these parameters to be a priority. Let's quote one of the translations of the article:

“The weight of reliability and level of service is twice as high as other indicators. This is due to the fact that we consider these properties to be more important in terms of user satisfaction, but do not consider this choice of coefficients as the only possible one.

Consider usability design. Of the listed criteria, design raises the most questions. I think it is unlikely that Yandex has learned to evaluate the beauty of the site, and we are still talking about moments that are closer to usability. For example, it may take into account:

• the presence of large images in the design, increasing the loading time;
• excessive use of multimedia elements;
• readability of the fonts used;
• structured text.

In favor of the fact that the design of the site, if taken into account, then from the position of usability, some explanations from Yandex also speak.

For example, in an announcement about a change in the ranking formula, the design and user interface combined into one item.

The recommendations “What is the difference between a high-quality site and a low-quality site from the point of view of Yandex?” the link in the paragraph “Think carefully about the design” leads to a message that Yandex when ranking will consider usability.

There are no clear criteria. But attempts to guess which color Yandex likes best are most likely doomed to failure. And it is better to focus on improving the convenience and usability of the site.

Always put yourself in your place potential client!

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It is hardly possible to list all the factors with great accuracy. But taking into account the advice of experts, we can list the main ones.

Following the rules of the game "to the cities", after the search program "Arzamas", it was necessary to come up with the name of the new Yandex search algorithm with the letter "C". Winter landscapes in 2009 inspired the development team for the name "Snezhinsk". So appeared Matrixnet.

Yandex search team leader Ivan Naimushin, Having received a lot of feedback from those who wanted to test the beta version of the search, we fixed several bugs by improving the search formula. In the new Snezhinsk formula, the approach to building Yandex rankings, including localized ones, has changed.

Denis Raskovalov, Head of Yandex Search Quality Department, said that:

“It was possible to create a more accurate and much more complex mathematical model, which led to a significant increase in the quality of the search. Thanks to the redesign of the search ranking architecture, it was possible to implement accounting several thousand search parameters for one document.

Several thousand parameters sounds, for optimizers, really sounds intimidating. Now, with the old promotion scheme, it is already more difficult to get into the Yandex TOP, and even more so to constantly maintain high positions.

The issuance of "Snezhinsk" is very different from the main one. Geodependence began to be taken into account more. The official release says:

“Continuing a good tradition, we have introduced additional regional factors in Snezhinsk based on users' interest in documents. They will improve the accuracy of searches in 19 cities with local rankings.”

According to the head of the Yandex search quality department, Dena Raskovalova, for April 2010, which he announced on the sidelines of the RIF, Yandex takes into account over 420 ranking factors. A little earlier Ilya Segalovich, also mentioned the number 400 in discussions. One must think that this number is slowly growing. It can be said that in Yandex it becomes a kind of hobby for the employees of the search department to come up with new factors, and then test and make a decision to include this or that factor in the ranking formula.

These factors act synchronously, in such a way that one of them can equalize or nullify the actions of the other. Therefore, with the new algorithm, it is necessary not to overdo it with some parameters, so as not to worsen others.

What should be guided by when promoting a site in Yandex

1. Do not abuse multiple use keywords from a query in one sentence. No more than one use in one sentence.
2. Keywords should be placed closer to the beginning of the document.
3. Avoid excessively dense accumulation of keywords, maintaining a distance between their uses of about 15–20 words.
4. Publish and natural content.
5. Yandex has a very negative attitude towards a sharp “link explosion”, so to speak.
6. Avoid buying links from bad donors.

And at the end of the video about Yandex and Russian SEO

Text Factors

If the text does not keyword, then the site will not be in the search results. If there is, search engines determine whether the text of the page and the entire site correspond to this keyword. The following are subject to verification: uniqueness content (how your texts, photos, videos differ from competing ones), relevance information, relevance request (how well and fully does your page respond to question asked). Trying to please the search engine, some SEOs make serious mistakes. For example, if you use too many keywords in your texts (SEO spam) or write meaningless texts, then your site will never take a leading position in the search.

In online stores, you can often see copied descriptions in product cards, poorly designed product cards, low-quality photos, etc. Do not be lazy and spend time and effort filling in information about all products. The more detailed and diverse it is, the better search engines and users will appreciate you. Online stores are often forgiven for non-unique descriptions and photos, but sites with unique content, all other things being equal, have advantages.

Site structure

This includes the correct site relinking(simple and human-friendly navigation through the resource, the correct use of keywords in anchors and the correct distribution of PageRank by landing pages), nesting level pages, availability pages for search robots, indication of the main mirror for all versions of the site, CNC(human-readable page addresses). Make the work of Yandex robot easier: create access rules in robots.txt and .htaccess files, place and update the sitemap in .xml format. Such sites are indexed faster, search robots see when and where changes have taken place and enter information into their database.

HTML and META data

This information is practically invisible to site users, but Yandex takes it into account when generating search results. Use unique, different META tags for different pages of the site. tags