Engagement is key to higher search engine rankings. Engagement signals like social media mentions, time on site, and bounce rate can influence ranking factors like popularity, citations, and authority. To increase engagement, companies should identify underperforming content, cross-reference it with keyword data, and focus on improving the user experience through things like blogs, site search, social listening, surveys, and relevant content that provokes interaction. While backlinks still matter, strong engagement through useful and shareable content can lead to rankings even without link building. Popularity and branding can also boost rankings when other factors are equal.

1. Engagement: The Key To
Higher Rankings

2. Popularity
Citations
Social
Authority
Engagement
Anchor Text
Keywords
Links
Ranking Signals

4. PopularityEngagement
Ranking Signals

5. SEO Task List
Find relevant keywords
Add keywords to content
Build links (From anywhere)
Anchor text

6. £
Traffic You have to
Engage
YOUR SITE
Engage

7. “There is no
shortcut to
success.”

8. …Return to Search

9. Anyone Remember Panda?
Low quality content
Unclear or no call to actions
Poor navigation
Does your content serve the user
…they leave

10. Where do we
Start?

11. Identify Poor Performance

12. Cross Reference with Keyword Data

13. Most Panda issues can
be solved through better
Engagement

14. How do we increase
Engagement?

15. Google
Analytics
Social
Listening
Market
Research
Customer
Feedback
Focus
Groups
Who are you trying
to Engage?

16. Blogs
Site Search
Competitors
Market
Research
Forums
Social Sites
Reviews
Keywords

17. Audience Reporting

18. Consumer Surveys

19. Relevant
User Experience
Fast
Comprehensive
Want
What

20. Can you get rankings without
Links?

21. Content Strategy
Manual Action/Panda
Manual Action Revoked
Content Strategy
No Link Building

22. Put your best content in
front of people.

23. Rankings without Links
20%
Bounce Reduction
200%
Time on Page

24. If you have enough links
to be in the top 5 you have
enough to be at the top.

25. What about
Popularity?

26. Your website has to be Popular

27. 60,500
22,200
14,800
12,100
33,100
14,800
All things being equal,
branding wins…

28. Useful
Entertaining
News
Worthy
Insightful Provoke
Engagement
Audience
Led
Creative

29. TV
Outreach
PR
Display
Social
Paid Search
Creative
Apps

30. You’ll always rank position
‘1’ for brand search

32. 2014 – The year of
building better websites.

33. Tim.grice@branded3.com
@Tim_Grice
Thank You!