Webmaster Hangouts debuted a bilingual Telugu and English version. I have watched it and was impressed with the quality of information about content that ranks, the so-called medic update and a discussion of soft ranking factors.
There is a wealth of quality information shared. I may be writing more about what’s in that Webmaster Hangout but you should really take the time to view the entire hangout because there is a lot of quality information spoken in English, plus subtitles in the form of Closed Captioning should you need it to follow along.
For example, one person asked how important was usability and user experience as ranking factors.
The Googler said,
“I think, only for search ranking, user experience just in terms of how the design is and so on… it matters but I wouldn’t say too much.
…as long as you know it’s good enough for most people, that’s fine.
For example, let’s take Page Speed. …if it loads under a second and if there are like five different websites that load under different speeds under a second, then I wouldn’t say… the fastest loading website has a bigger advantage… Because all websites are loading pretty fast so that then is not really a big ranking boost for that particular instance.
So in a similar way I wouldn’t put too much search ranking SEO related weight under… usability.
Definitely it’s very important but it only comes after the main things like ranking, people linking to you, and so on.”
There is so much in those statements to unpack.
Here are some takeaways:
Site design impact on user experience, per this Googler, is a ranking factor but a factor that is equivalent to what John Mueller calls a soft ranking factor.
- The importance of soft ranking factors may depend on how equal these factors are on competing sites.
- That if other sites are competitive on soft ranking factors like page speed then it’s really all the other (presumably) more important factors that are going to decide.
This Googler had a direct way of speaking that was refreshing. There is much more to discover in the video than I have detailed.
I highly recommend you take some time to watch the video.
Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author
Screenshots by Author, Modified by Author
