SEO Insights: January 2025 Report

Over the last few years, the term “engagement” has mostly been applied to and considered in the context of social media.

It has, and still is, a measure of the interactions that users have with social media posts.

For the general, non-online marketers out there, “engagement” is more likely referring to a measure of your love for your partner!

However, with the introduction of Google’s GA4 analytics, which replaced the long-standing Google Analytics software, engagement became a term increasingly used in terms of SEO and PPC.

Bounce Rate

Historically, engagement was measured in terms of metrics such as ‘time on page’ and ‘bounce rate’. In fact, when GA4 was launched, it didn’t even include our beloved bounce rate metric, which, for context, refers to the percentage of users that leave the page without viewing another page on the website.

Viewed in isolation, bounce rates can be considered a useless metric. Maybe the expectation is that a user leaves after finding what they are looking for. A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing.

Google did eventually reintroduce bounce rate in GA4 but it’s now just one of many metrics that appears in the reports under the “Engagement” section of the software.

Engagement for SEO

Does engagement impact rankings and traffic from search engines? Definitely. Although Google doesn’t always get it right, and we can highlight plenty of examples where the search results are low quality, Google’s goal is to return the most relevant and useful search results to a user.

A bad experience for the user will lessen the trust and potential usage of the search engine.

Google’s main focus with organic search results is ensuring that when a user clicks through to a website from the search results, and that they appear to find the result useful and helpful.

When know that Google measures all interactions with the search results to maintain quality and continuously improve them for each search query. The next stage is to assess the quality of the websites themselves that users are clicking through to.

The engagement with those websites is key in determining user satisfaction.

Engagement considerations for SEO

When considering how to approach engagement in terms of SEO, it’s important to determine first what you, and Google, expects the user to do or find on your website. Are they….

• Looking to buy something.
• Get an answer to a question.
• View images or a video.
• Read a review of a product.
• Book an appointment.
• Etc.

Look at the websites that Google is currently ranking for a search term and then see if your website/page matches what Google is expecting to show. From then, consider how you could possibly make it better.

However, it’s important to remember that more isn’t always better. Just adding more to a page may not be the answer.

Sometimes, short, specific and “to the point” style content is much better than a huge page where the user has to scroll and scroll to find what they are looking for.

You can use free software such as Microsoft Clarity to view how users are engaging with the pages of your website. Thoroughly understanding how you can improve the user experience, making the important content easily accessible, and delivered quickly, is a great starting point to improving user engagement.

Of course, if you really understand user behaviour, it won’t just impact the organic rankings…it will also improve the conversions, which is ultimately what’s it’s really all about.

Engagement is an area of SEO that we’ve always focused on for our clients. We use the latest methods and tools to analyse and refine the user experience, ensuring pages match search intent, are targeted and helpful and are effectively set up to convert traffic to leads.