User interaction is another element Google uses to determine your franchise website’s value.
With guidance from parts one through four of this series, you should have a good sense of how to create a platform that users will enjoy and trust. You can see the results in two major categories of measurement – traffic and user experience.
Monitor Your Traffic
Google takes two forms of traffic into account when judging your franchise website. The first is click-through. The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who see a link to a site and click on it. If 500 people see an ad and five click on it, the CTR is 5%. Backlinks, advertisements, and search engine results can result in click-throughs.
Direct traffic is the second category of hits Google measures. Direct traffic is when users intentionally go to one specific site, rather than happening across it. Google is only able to measure this through its own platforms, such as Google Chrome.
Google considers both forms of traffic in determining how popular and useful a site is.
View Users as Product Testers
Once users have entered your franchise website, Google algorithms track their movements. It gains insight into how your site stacks up by monitoring behaviors and reactions. It does this in a number of ways:
- Bounce Rates: If a user immediately bounces from our franchise website, it is likely not what they were expecting or seeking.
- Repeat Traffic: When users return to your site repeatedly, this speaks to the level of quality they have found your site to contain.
- Bookmarks: Using Google Chrome, algorithms can monitor how many people are bookmarking certain sites. This offers additional proof of the page’s value.
- Blocks: If a significant number of users have blocked a page, it will lower the page’s value.
- Comments: When many users leave comments, this suggests a great sense of engagement, something Google rewards.
- Duration: The amount of time a user spends on your website says a lot about how useful it is to your prospective franchisees.
Keep track of your website’s traffic to anticipate rankings. Providing a high-quality franchise website that keeps people coming back is a surefire method for making it to the top page of Google search results.
