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Exploring Google’s New How-to Snippets In Search And On Smart Displays: SERP Treatment, Fresh GSC Data, Video Templates, Monetization, and more

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Google is always working to enhance features in the search results (SERPs). Over the years, we have seen the SERPs change from ten blue links to a mix of images, videos, featured snippets, one-box results, immersive mobile results, and more. There are many features beyond ten blue links now, which was covered by John Mueller at Google I/O last week.  

Some of those new features are minor additions, while others rock the SERP. Well, there’s one new feature that was just released at Google I/O, and it’s a multifaceted feature that gives us a glimpse into the future of Google. It’s called How-to snippets and I’ll cover more about this new feature below.

How-To Snippets: Part of the answer carousel trifecta
Last year at the Google Dance in Singapore, Google announced three new formats for what they call “best answer carousels”. The three features were Q&A, How-to, and FAQ. They are powered by structured data and help users receive rich answers to their questions.

Q&A rolled out already, while How-to has been in testing for several months. Both How-to and FAQ were released last week at I/O, but my focus for this post is on How-to snippets. I believe they are an extremely important feature that impact the search results, and beyond. More about that soon.

There are several sites I work with that have implemented How-to markup (including thousands of How-tos in total) and I’ve been digging deeper to learn more about the new search feature, how it’s being implemented, what it looks like in the SERPs and on Google Assistant smart displays, and how it will impact publishers. Again, it’s live in the SERPs today, so you will definitely see more of How-to snippets as time goes on.

How-to snippets – Providing step-by-step instructions directly in the SERPs and on Google Assistant Smart Displays
First, if you’re on the “featured snippets are taking traffic away from publishers” side of the SEO debate, then you might want to brace yourself. How-to snippets can take up a lot of real-estate and provide a number of steps along the way (directly in the SERPs and on smart displays). As of today, you can see How-tos in the search results, but they have not been rolled out to smart displays yet. That’s coming later this month.

In the SERPs, Google isn’t providing all of the steps from the How-to, but the SERP feature does take up significant real-estate (with visuals when they are provided).

That’s fine for now, but on Google Assistant smart displays, you can walk through all of the steps in the How-to without visiting the site in question. And if you’re monetizing via eyeballs on your own site, then your revenue-warning antenna should have just gone up… :)

Remember, Assistant is extremely important to Google, including its booming smart displays like Google Home Hub, which was just renamed to Google Nest Hub.

Also, Google could expand the number of steps in the SERPs at any point for How-to snippets. So instead of just providing some of the steps like it does now, it could potentially include more (or all) of them. And if that happens, it could throw a major wrench into monetization, email signups, or any other conversion or micro-conversion that would occur on a site.

SERP Treatment: Show me the snippets!
From a SERP treatment standpoint, there are two core treatments as of today. You can see a list version that uses an accordion to reveal information for each step. And below the steps in the list version, you will see one link to visit the site for all of the steps.

Note, these are not all clients of mine… these are just How-to snippets I have seen in the wild from sites that have implemented How-to markup.

And the other treatment is when you have photos for each step. When you do, Google can provide a carousel of steps with visuals. Users can tap each element in the carousel to be taken to that step on the publisher’s website. This is accomplished via the How-to markup added to your pages.

Here are some additional examples of what How-to snippets look like in the wild (via sites that have implemented How-to markup):

As you can see, How-to snippets have eye-catching SERP treatment, provide a number of steps involved to complete a task, and could yield visit-less users for sites with the snippets.

For example, imagine there are just a few steps involved with the How-to. Then all of the steps could be listed right in the SERP. Time will tell how much site owners approve of this new feature… and I’m sure their monetization teams will be watching very closely.

Note, site owners could always just remove the markup if they feel they are losing traffic, but then that leaves important SERP real estate for other sites (like competitors). It’s probably going to be a tough decision for many site owners, especially when Google Assistant smart displays begin showing the full How-to.

On that note, here is what How-tos will look like once they arrive on smart displays. The full How-to will be available and users will be able to view the necessary tools, equipment, products, etc., along with each step in the How-to.

Here’s the video from Google I/O (at 7:40 in the video):

How-to Schema and The Rich Results Test
If you have How-to content on your site and you would like How-to snippets, then your first stop should be the Google Search Developers documentation for adding How-to markup. Google provides a wealth of data and code examples for setting up the necessary code.

For testing your markup, you can use the Rich Results Test, which enables you to either test a url or test a code snippet. Once you do, you can preview the How-to in the search results directly from the tool. It’s a great way to see your markup in action:

You can also view a preview of both types of How-to snippets, including thumbnail view (the carousel) and list view:

How-to Carousel
How-to List View

No Site? No Problem! Introducing How-To Video Templates – Repurposing Your How-to YouTube Videos For Search and Smart Displays
Some people have joked that in the future, Google might just pull information from publishers and provide that in the SERPs or on smart displays (no website needed). Well, Google sort of announced that at I/O.

If you have How-to YouTube videos and don’t have a site, then you can use video templates provided by Google to add your How-to information in a structured way. Once uploaded, Google can transform your YouTube video into a How-to that can be displayed in the SERPs or on Google Assistant smart displays. You can find more information about this in the developer document that was published when I/O started.

Future Monetization Opportunities:
As mentioned earlier, the full How-to will be available on smart displays, and it’s not hard to believe that there will be an opportunity for monetization via ads, or links to purchase the necessary materials, products, ingredients, etc. Or maybe even sponsored How-tos in the SERPs as a separate ad unit? Anything is possible…

That’s just my opinion, since Google hasn’t announced any monetization opportunities yet. But let’s face it, Google is an ad-driven company and providing advertising in How-tos makes a lot of sense.

Here are two mockups of how Google could provide ads in How-tos (in the SERPS). Smart displays would be clearly different, and could yield ads in between steps, the opportunity to buy materials, and more:

Side Note: How-To + Featured Snippets = MASSIVE SERP Coverage
If you’re wondering about how featured snippets impact How-tos, yes, you can land both featured snippets and How-to snippets in the same SERP. That’s at least for now… And when you do, you can take over massive SERP coverage. You’ll have the initial featured snippet in position 0 and then a How-to snippet that can rank in the top 10. Just an important side note.

Early How-to Data: GSC Performance Reporting
With the launch of How-to snippets, Google has added a new enhancements report for How-to markup and a search appearance filter in the performance reporting for How-to as well. Using both, you can troubleshoot How-to markup on your own pages, while also seeing traffic data like impressions, clicks, CTR, and position for your How-to snippets.

For example, here is a sample enhancements report listing errors, warnings, and valid How-to markup on a site. This image was from Google’s blog post about How-to snippets:

And here is the performance report with How-to listed as a search appearance filter:

I’m only seeing a few days of data so far, but as you can see, there are plenty of clicks to the site from How-to snippets. The click-through rates are pretty strong across some queries, but also pretty average for others. It really depends on the specific SERP, where the How-to snippet ranks, and which other features are displayed alongside the How-to.

For example, you might be competing with featured snippets, video carousels, interesting finds, and other features that can overshadow How-tos. I’ve even seen local one-boxes or local packs overshadow some How-tos.

Also, urls that rank in both featured snippets and How-tos in the same SERP could have skewed metrics. I believe you will see data for both combined in GSC (which can yield higher CTRs and clicks than if the data was just presented for the How-to snippet). I have to analyze more results to see if that’s the case, but I think I’m seeing that already.

So you’ll definitely want to analyze your own SERPs heavily to determine how much impact those How-tos are having (at least in the SERPs). Smart displays are another story. Here are some stats for two different How-to queries. The first ranks higher than the second, which is impacting CTR. They also have different SERP features competing with them.

And here’s an interesting example with an INSANE click through rate of 73%. This is what can happen when you mix breaking news with a How-to (if that ever fits with your site). It’s still early obviously, but that’s a crazy-high CTR!

Again, How-to has not rolled out to Smart Displays yet, and I’m not even sure how that will be reported in GSC (if at all). There should be additional reporting in my opinion, since it’s a different user experience. Most users will just go through the How-to on the smart display and never reach the site, so there may not be traffic data to report. I asked Google’s John Mueller about this in the last webmaster hangout video and he said he wasn’t sure how that will be reported in GSC. It’s still very new and didn’t know how that will be reported yet.

Here is the video (at 28:22 in the video):

I’m sure publishers would like to know how many times a How-to was triggered via Assistant, how far a person made it through the How-to, and if they did end up visiting the site via the link in the Google Home app (which gets added when a How-to is presented). I’ll update this post after How-tos roll out to smart displays.

That’s a good segue to an important topic – feeding Assistant.

The Big Picture – Feeding Google Assistant
Let’s expand our view of what’s going on and explore why would Google want to provide a list of steps like this directly in the search results. We know Google has already heard from many people that featured snippets could be stealing traffic. So why push the limits here with How-to snippets?

Well, Google Assistant is booming and it’s an important part of Google’s future. The family of Google Home devices has been a big success so far, and many people have at least one in their homes. Actually, many have multiple devices between Home, Home-mini, and Home Hub. And Google hasn’t figured out monetization… yet. They absolutely have to and I’m sure there are many people working on that right now.

Even though assistants like Home and Echo have soared, research shows that most people use them for very basic things. For example, to check the weather, get the news, check a sports score, get a quick answer, etc. There are over 80K skills available now for Alexa and over 4K for Google Assistant, but most people don’t even know those skills exist, how to trigger them, etc. So, all of these devices are still used for rudimentary tasks. Again, for now.

Well, one great way to enhance usage, and possibly open up monetization opportunities, is to provide richer answers in a step-by-step guide. For example, if you are looking for help with fixing your mobile phone, you can view and hear a breakdown of the steps involved, view products and materials that could help you fix the phone (with links to buy them), maybe see some ads along the way, etc. And as mentioned earlier, there are many YouTube How-to videos that could be repurposed into How-tos for smart displays. That’s why Google created the How-To Video Templates for video publishers (mentioned earlier).

Therefore, How-to snippets could feed Google Assistant with a ton of step-by-step guides. And by the way, when Google provides special SERP treatment like featured snippets, review snippets, authorship markup of the past, AMP, How-to snippets, and more, publishers typically clear their schedules to implement the necessary technical changes to receive those features. And I’m sure that’s exactly what’s going to happen here with How-to markup. That means Google Assistant could soon be fed millions of How-tos in a structured format (including videos if publishers use the new How-To Video Templates I covered earlier).

It should be very, very interesting to watch how this goes for publishers implementing How-to markup. Will they be ok with feeding the Google beast without much to gain, or will they rip the markup out in order to gain more traffic to their own sites? I’ll be watching closely, that’s for sure.

Summary – Keep an eye on How-to snippets. You can’t miss them in the SERPs (and soon on smart displays)
How-to snippets in the SERPs could be a big deal for Google, publishers, and users. One thing is for sure, it should be interesting to see how this plays out. For those sites that provide How-to content, you should absolutely have this on your radar and watch the rollout very closely. Your traffic could be on the line. And you should test How-to markup on your own site (including videos).

I recommend digging into How-to schema and getting familiar with how it works, how it should be structured, etc. Remember, this is a bigger and badder sibling to featured snippets, with a smart display spin. It will be hard to miss them in the SERPs and via Assistant. I’ll update this post with more information as the rollout continues and I have more data.

GG

A Holly Jolly Load Balancer Christmas – How Google Treated A Major Site Performance Problem From A Crawling And Ranking Perspective [SEO Case Study]

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Ah, the holidays. Who doesn’t love a festive atmosphere, ugly Christmas sweaters, eggnog, singing Christmas carols, and major performance problems that can take down your site?

Wait, what was that last part??

The holidays are always interesting for me SEO-wise. Every few years, I receive an SOS from a site owner right around Christmas Day based on a weird drop in traffic or rankings from Google. This year, it was on December 27 from a company I helped several years ago. It’s a large-scale site that has seen a lot of volatility historically, but has done a good job at turning things around. They have battled major algorithm updates in the past, and now battle new SERP features from Google itself.

Just two days after Christmas, I received a message from the site owner asking if there was some type of update over the holidays. Traffic dipped sharply on Christmas Day, which it typically wouldn’t do based on their niche, and had gone down more and more since. Traffic typically only goes down by about 20% on Christmas Day and it was down 50% this year. That’s typically not the case from a historical perspective for the site and they were worried that an algorithm update impacted the site again.

So I rushed to check their stats, noticed the drop in traffic, and quickly started checking the sources of traffic that dropped. The first thing I noticed was that the drop wasn’t just from Google… it was from all sources. That’s actually a good thing and we could quickly rule out some type of Google algorithm update.

Then I started checking the top landing pages that dropped and it wasn’t long before I noticed a serious performance problem. Some of the pages simply wouldn’t load. Then I searched Google for queries leading to the pages and tried to click through from the SERPs. I experienced the same issue… the site was simply hourglassing.

I messaged the site owner and explained the major performance problems I was experiencing and that the drop was from all traffic sources, and not just from Google. He took that information to his CTO so they could dig in and start isolating the problem. It wasn’t long before I heard back.

A Holly Jolly Load-Balancer Christmas!
No, that’s not the name of the next Christmas Vacation movie, although it does have a nice ring to it. :) The site owner and CTO uncovered a load balancer issue that was causing the performance problems we were seeing on the site. And that was causing a big drop in traffic as visitors couldn’t load many of the pages. And again, this is a site that people visit during the holidays, and on Christmas day, based on the type of content the site provides.

So, the good news is that it wasn’t some type of evil elf algorithm update. But the bad news was that the load balancer issue was causing many pages not to load for users and Googlebot. My client went to work on resolving the load balancer issue, but they couldn’t help but wonder how Google would treat the site from a rankings perspective.

For example, when Google sees a major performance problem over time, and it knows users cannot load the pages, some important questions come to mind. Will Google drop the site’s rankings, will the site plummet in the short-term, only to come back when the performance problems are corrected, will there be long-term damage SEO-wise, and how will crawling and indexing be impacted?

We’ve heard Google’s John Mueller explain situations related to this in the past. For example, John explained that Google can slow crawling when it comes across many 5XX errors. Here’s a tweet from John about this:

And that goes for 503s as well (a response code sites can return when maintenance is being completed and the site is down). John has explained that if Google sees 503s for an extended period of time, it can start dropping urls from the index. Note, returning 503s for a short period of time is totally fine (and is a good approach to use when you know your site will be down for maintenance). Just make sure you’re not returning 503s for an extended period of time.

Since this was a load balancer issue, and some visitors were able to load pages correctly, my client didn’t take the site offline (and didn’t use 503s). But it’s important to understand how Google would treat a site being down over an extended period of time. Here’s a video where John explains this (at 37:28 in the video):

And here’s John explaining how Google can automatically slow crawling when it sees that urls are temporarily unavailable. He also explains that Google will stop crawling if it sees that happening for a robots.txt file. Then Google will automatically increase crawling when the urls return 200s again. Here’s the video of John explaining this (at 38:43 in the video):

So what would happen in this case? Needless to say, we were eager to find out.

Tracking The SEO Impact Of Major Performance Problems
As you can probably guess, I was ultra-interested in seeing how this played out SEO-wise. So, I began tracking the situation on several levels to see how the load balancer issue was impacting the site from an SEO standpoint. For example, would rankings drop, would crawling slow down, and how would this all look when the performance problems were fixed?

Below, I’ll take you through the timeline, with data and screenshots, to show you how Google treated the problem. Note, every site is different, so this may not apply to all performance problems you run into. But, it should help you understand how those performance problems could impact crawling, indexing, and ranking. It’s also worth noting that the duration of performance problems would surely impact this situation. For this case, the site owner and CTO completely fixed the problem within seven days. But, it wasn’t all fixed at one time. More on that soon. Last, I unfortunately don’t have logs from the site yet. I’m still working on getting them, though, and will update this post if I do.

Blue Christmas – The Timeline of Events (with data and screenshots)
First, here is the drop in traffic when comparing year over year. The site usually doesn’t drop very much during Christmas Day (or week). You can see a seasonal drop of about 20% when compared to normal weeks, where this year yielded a drop of 50%. Yep, something was up…

YOY trending shows the unusual drop on Christmas Day in 2018.

Crawl Stats in GSC:
Here was the spike in time downloading a page and the drop in pages crawled per day. Pretty amazing to see that graph, right?

Crawl stats in GSC show a spike in time spent downloading a page
while pages crawled per day drop off a cliff.

And here were the impressions and clicks in GSC (which remained strong). This supports the notion that rankings were not being impacted during the performance problem. Impressions would have dropped if that were the case. I was also checking rankings manually and saw rankings remain strong overall. It seems that Google was pretty cool with understanding there was a performance problem and didn’t quickly impact rankings (even when it knew some users were running into page loading problems).

GSC Performance reporting reveals stable impressions and clicks from Google
while the performance problem was in place.

And here was search visibility trending in SEMrush over the timeframe, which supports the fact that rankings were not impacted in the short-term. Search visibility was stable throughout the performance problem:

Search visibility trending in SEMrush is stable throughout the problem (no drop in rankings).

And here is Sistrix trending, which is also stable throughout the problem:

Search visibility trending in Sistrix is also stable throughout the problem.

Note, the load balancer problem was not fixed all at one time. The situation improved over a five to seven-day period. So here are the crawl stats as the issue started to get resolved. Notice crawling increases, but not back to normal. That’s because the performance problems were still there to some extent. Notice time downloading a page improves, but also not back to normal.

Pages crawled per day increase as time spent downloading a page decreases
(as the load balancer problem is being fixed).
Pages crawled per day and time spent downloading a page continue
to improve as the performance problem is fixed.

And then once the problem was completely fixed, notice that the crawl stats return to normal. Time downloading a page drops back down to normal levels and pages crawled per day rise to normal levels. Awesome, all is good again in Google Land.


Pages crawled per day and time spent downloading a page return to normal levels
when the load balancer problem was completely fixed.

And here is what Google organic traffic looked like from before the load balancer issue to after it was resolved. Notice the drop during Christmas, a further drop, and then traffic returns to normal after the problem was fixed. There was no impact to Google organic traffic, rankings, etc. based on the performance problem. That was great to see.

Traffic from Google organic returns to normal once the
load balancer problem was completely fixed.

Key learnings… and Spiked Eggnog:
Needless to say, it was fascinating to watch how Google reacted to the major performance problems over time. Here are some key learnings from the situation:

  • Google understands that temporary glitches can happen (like the performance problems this site was experiencing).
  • Google can slow crawling, when needed, and check back to see when it can crawl more. The crawl stats in GSC clearly showed that happening.
  • For this situation (only a week or so), the site wasn’t impacted SEO-wise. Rankings remained strong, search visibility was stable, and as the problem was fixed, Google returned crawling back to normal levels.
  • Google organic traffic then returned to normal levels as the performance problem was fixed completely. There was no impact rankings-wise based on this incident.
  • That said, if this problem remained beyond a week or two, it’s hard to say how rankings would be impacted. Google could very well begin to drop rankings as it wouldn’t want to send users to a site or pages that don’t resolve. But, if you have a short-term performance issue, it seems you should be ok. I would just work to fix the problems as quickly as you can.
  • This is a reminder that Murphy’s Law for SEO is real. The load balancer problem happened on Christmas Day. You just need to be prepared for Murphy to pay a visit. And then move quickly to rectify the problems he brings along.

Summary – All I want for Christmas is to never deal with a load balancer issue again.
If you run into serious performance problems and are worried about the SEO-impact, know that Google does understand that bad things happen from time to time. As Google’s John Mueller explained, Google can slow crawling while the problems exist and then check back to see when it can return crawling to normal.

For this specific case, that’s exactly what we saw. Rankings and search visibility remained strong, but crawling slowed. Then as the performance problems were fixed, crawling returned back to normal. And all was good again in Google Land.

So, until next holiday season… here’s ho-ho-hoping you don’t run into this type of problem anytime soon. I know everyone involved with this case feels the same way. :)

GG

Searching For Buried Treasure – How To Find More Of Your Featured Snippets Using Google Search Console (GSC), Analytics Edge, And SEMrush Position Tracking

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Searching for buried SEO treasure.

A few years ago, I wrote a post about how to surface your featured snippets via SEMrush’s powerful SERP features widget. I love using SEMrush to plug in any domain and view (many of) the featured snippets it has. It’s a quick an easy way to conduct competitive analysis from a featured snippets standpoint. Remember, GSC does not provide a way to filter for featured snippets. Therefore, you must rely on third party tools to surface them for you.

Now, SEMrush’s SERP features widget is awesome, but here’s the issue. SEMrush, and other tools, don’t surface ALL of your featured snippets automatically. And that’s especially true for smaller to medium-sized sites. Unfortunately, many site owners are left in the dark with how many featured snippets they have and which queries and landing pages are yielding featured snippets.

SERP features widget in SEMrush.

It’s important to understand the featured snippets you have attained so you can analyze the content, the snippets, and try to gain more. As I’ve covered in various posts, as well as in my SMX presentations, featured snippets can drive a boatload of traffic and gain near-instant credibility in the SERPs. Position 0 is powerful.

So, with GSC not providing a way to filter by featured snippets and competitive analysis tools not surfacing all of a site’s featured snippets automatically, what’s a site owner to do?

The answer is to USE THE TOOLS TOGETHER TO UNCOVER MORE OF YOUR FEATURED SNIPPETS!

That’s what I’ll cover below. It’s quick, easy, and you can continually use this process to hunt down your latest featured snippets. Let’s begin.

How To Use GSC, Analytics Edge, And SEMrush Position Tracking To Identify Featured Snippets
SEMrush provides a ton of functionality for SEOs and site owners. For our purposes today, we’ll be using its Position Tracking functionality based on GSC data to surface more of your wonderful featured snippets. The process involves:

  • Exporting your top queries from Google Search Console for the past 28 days.
  • Filtering them by average position and click through rate.
  • Setting up position tracking for your domain in SEMrush and using the filtered queries from GSC as your keyword list.
  • Letting SEMrush position tracking do its thing!
  • Reviewing the reporting in SEMrush, which will surface any queries yielding featured snippets (along with the landing pages that are ranking for them).

Exporting Google Search Console Data
Analyzing your queries in Google Search Console is obviously extremely important. The problem is that you are limited to the top one thousand results per report. That’s severely limiting for most sites. In order to get around that limit, you can tap into the Search Console API to download ALL of your queries. There are several ways to accomplish this, but my favorite is using Analytics Edge in Excel. It’s a cost-effective solution that works incredibly well (and fast).

I’ve written several blog posts about how to use Analytics Edge, so go and check those posts out to learn how to download all of your queries. Once you have Analytics Edge installed, it should only take a minute or two to download all of your queries. You’ll end up having a spreadsheet full of glorious GSC keyword data. For example, I exported 66K queries in about thirty seconds. :)

Exporting many queries from GSC via Analytics Edge.

Next, we want to gather our list of queries to use in SEMrush for position tracking. Featured snippets in GSC will be listed in position 1. Google will provide the ranking of the actual featured snippet here and NOT the organic listing. For example, you might have the featured snippet, but your organic listing might be #4. GSC would provide #1 for the query. You can read more about how Google determines clicks and impressions in this help center document to learn how GSC provides the position for featured snippets.

Therefore, you should first filter your spreadsheet by average position and use a number filter selecting “is less than 2”. This will give us any queries where you site is ranking between 1 and 2 over the past 28 days.

Filtering by average position in Excel.

Next, layer on a second filter in your spreadsheet for click through rate. Featured snippets typically have a higher click through rate since they are given special SERP treatment and take up a lot of SERP real estate. So for the second filter, use “greater than 20%” for click through rate.

Filtering by click through rate in Excel.

Quick Tip:
You can also filter out branded queries if you want for this exercise. Many branded queries will rank highly and also have a high click through rate, but won’t yield featured snippets. If you want to save some space in SEMrush for other queries (since there is a limit for position tracking based on your package), then feel free to filter them out. You can do that by adding a “does not contain” text filter on your queries column and enter your brand.

Filtering out brand queries in Excel.

Now that you have a list of queries ranking highly (position 2 or less) that also have a high click through rate, then you are ready to hunt down featured snippets and uncover buried treasure in SEMrush. Let’s track some positions.

How To Set Up Position Tracking In SEMrush (And Find Featured Snippets)
First, you’ll want to create a project for the domain you are tracking. You can find the Projects link in the left-side navigation in SEMrush. Once you create a project, you’ll be presented with all of the different tools you can use in your project. We’re going to be focused on Position Tracking so we can identify which queries are yielding featured snippets.

Projects in SEMrush.

Next, click Position Tracking and go through the process of adding your filtered keyword list. You can start by just selecting desktop tracking in the United States, or tailor that for your own needs. I typically add desktop tracking first, and then layer on mobile. It’s very easy to do since you can just use the desktop list by clicking a button in SEMrush when setting up mobile.

Setting up position tracking in SEMrush.

Adding keywords when setting up position tracking in SEMrush.

Quick Tip:
Depending on your package in SEMrush, there’s a limit for the number of keywords you can track. For example, a Pro account can track 500 keywords, a Guru account can track 1500 keywords, etc. For this specific project, you won’t be focused on long-term tracking, so you can always swap out keywords to simply check if they are yielding featured snippets. So just make sure your initial keyword list is under the limit you have in your package. You can always swap out one list for another to uncover more featured snippets.

The Easy Part – Let SEMrush Position Tracking Do Its Thing!
Once you enter your keywords and launch position tracking, you only have a to wait a few minutes for your featured snippet data to arrive (if you have any!) Once SEMrush tracks the keywords in your list, you’ll have a boatload of data for those queries, including if they are yielding featured snippets.

There are multiple ways to find your current featured snippets in the reporting based on the keyword list you just entered. From the Overview screen, you can view the entire list of keywords along with their position, the SERP features for that query, and if your site has any of those important SERP features (like featured snippets).

For example, you’ll see a crown icon if the SERP contains a featured snippet for the query at hand. And, you’ll see a second crown next to your ranking if you have won the featured snippet.  You will also see the landing page that’s yielding the featured snippet.

Finding featured snippets in SEMrush position tracking.

You can also click the featured snippet tab to see a full breakdown of your featured snippets reporting. That will include opportunities you have to gain featured snippets from the competition, as well as when your site is already featured. Clicking the button labeled “Already featured” will filter just the keywords where your site has the featured snippet.

Viewing the featured snippets tab in SEMrush.

And clicking the position and crown enables you view a snapshot of the SERP captured by SEMrush. Awesome, right?

Viewing the SERP snapshot for featured snippets in SEMrush.

Summary – Finding featured snippet buried treasure via GSC and SEMrush
SEMrush and other tools can automatically surface some of your featured snippets, which is great. But to gain a stronger view of your featured snippet coverage, it’s smart to combine Google Search Console data with SEMrush position tracking. You might be surprised when viewing all of the featured snippets you have right now. Now go dig up that buried treasure. :)

GG

 

How To Find The True Size Of Your Site Using GSC’s Index Coverage Reporting (And Why It’s Important For SEO)

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How large is your site SEO-wise?

So, how large is your site? No, how large is it really??

When speaking with companies about SEO, it’s not long before I ask that important question. And I often get some confused responses based on the “really” tag at the end. That’s because many site owners go by how many pages are indexed. i.e. We have 20K, 100K, or 1M pages indexed. Well, that’s obviously important, but what lies below the surface is also important. For example, Googlebot needs to crawl and process all of your crawlable urls, and not just what’s indexed.

Site owners can make it easy, or very hard, for Google to crawl, process, and index their pages based on a number of factors. For example, if you have one thousand pages indexed, but Google needs to crawl and process 600K pages, then you might have issues to smooth over from a technical SEO perspective. And when I say “process”, I mean understand what to do with your urls after crawling. For example, Google needs to process the meta robots tag, rel canonical, understand duplicate content, soft 404s, and more.

By the way, I’ll cover the reason I said you might need to smooth things over later in this post. There are times a site has many urls that need to be processed that are being properly handled. For example, noindexing many pages that are fine for users, but shouldn’t be indexed. That could be totally ok based on what the site is trying to accomplish. But on the flipside, there may be sites using a ton of parameters, session IDs, dynamically changing urls, or redirects that can cause all sorts of issues (like creating infinite spaces). Again, I’ll cover more about this soon.

And you definitely want to make Google’s job easier, and not harder. Google’s John Mueller has mentioned this a number of times over the past several years. Actually, here’s a video of John explaining this from last week’s webmaster hangout video. John explained that you don’t want to make Google’s job harder by having it churn through many urls. Google needs to crawl, and then process, all of those urls, even when rel canonical is used properly (since Google needs to first crawl each page to see rel canonical).

Here’s the clip from John (at 4:16 in the video):

John has also explained that you should make sure Google can focus on your highest quality content versus churning through many lower quality urls. That’s why it’s important to fully understand what’s indexed on your site. Google takes all pages into account when evaluating quality, so if you find a lot of urls that shouldn’t be indexed, take action on them.

Here’s another video from John about that (at 14:54 in the video):

Crawl Budget – Most don’t need to worry about this, but…
In addition, crawl budget might also be a consideration based on the true size of your site. For example, imagine you have 73K pages indexed and believe you don’t need to worry about crawl budget too much. Remember, only very large sites with millions of pages need to worry about crawl budget. But what if your 73K page site actually contains 29.5M pages that need to be crawled and processed? If that’s the case, then you actually do need to worry about crawl budget. This is just another reason to understand the true size of your site. See the screenshot below.

Potential crawl budget issues.

How Do You Find The True Size Of Your Site?
One of the easiest ways to determine the true size of your site is to use Google’s index coverage reporting, including the incredibly important Excluded category. Note, GSC’s index coverage reporting is by property… so make sure you check each property for your site (www, non-www, http, https, etc.)

Google’s Index Coverage
I wrote a post recently about juicing up your index coverage reporting using subdirectories where I explained the power of GSC’s new reporting. It replaces the index status report in the old GSC and contains extremely actionable data. There are multiple categories for each property in GSC in the reporting, including:

  1. Errors
  2. Valid with warnings
  3. Valid and indexed
  4. Excluded

By reviewing ALL of the categories, you can get a stronger feel for true size of your site. That true size might make total sense to you, but there are other times where the true size might scare you to death (and leave you scratching your head about why there are so many urls Google is crawling).

Below, I’ll run through some quick examples of what you can find in the index coverage reporting that could be increasing the size of your site from a crawling and processing standpoint. Note, there are many reasons you could be forcing Google to crawl and process many more pages than it should and I’ll provide just some quick examples in this post. I highly recommend going through your own reporting extensively to better understand your own situation.

Remember, you should make it easier on Googlebot, not harder. And you definitely want to have Google focus on your most important pages versus churning through loads of unimportant urls.

Errors
There are a number of errors that can show up in the reporting, including server errors (500s), redirect errors, urls submitted in sitemaps that are soft 404s, have crawl issues, are being blocked by robots.txt, and more. Since this post is about increasing the crawlable size of your site, I would definitely watch out for situations where Google is surfacing and crawling urls that should never be crawled (or urls that should resolve with 200s, but don’t for some reason).

There are also several reports in this category that flag urls being submitted in xml sitemaps that don’t resolve correctly. Definitely dig in there to see what’s going on.

Errors in GSC's index coverage reporting.

Indexed and Valid
Although this report shows all urls that are properly indexed, you definitely want to dig into the report titled, “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap”. This report contains all urls that Google has indexed that weren’t submitted in xml sitemaps (so Google is coming across the urls via standard crawling without being supplied a list of urls). I’ve found this report can yield some very interesting findings.

For example, if you have 200K pages indexed, but only 4K are submitted in xml sitemaps, then what are the other 196K urls? How is Google discovering them? Are they canonical urls that you know about, and if so, should they be submitted in sitemaps? Or are they urls you didn’t even know existed, that contain low-quality content, or autogenerated content?

I’ve surfaced some nasty situations by checking this report. For example, hundreds of thousands of pages (or more) indexed that the site owner didn’t even know were being published on the site. Note, you can also fine some urls there that are fine, like pagination, but I would definitely analyze the reporting to gain a deeper understanding of all the valid and indexed urls that Google has found. Again, you should know all pages indexed on your site, especially ones that you haven’t added to xml sitemaps.

Indexed not submitted in GSC's index coverage reporting.

Excluded – The Mother Lode
I’ve mentioned the power of the Excluded category in GSC’s index coverage reporting before, and I’m not kidding. This category contains all of the urls that Google has crawled, but decided to exclude from indexing. You can often find glaring problems when digging into the various reports in this category.

I can’t cover everything you can find there, but I’ll provide a few examples of situations that could force Google to crawl and process many more urls than it should. And like John Mueller said in the videos I provided above, you should try and make it easy for Google, focus on your highest quality content, etc.

Infinite spaces
When I first fire up the index coverage reporting, I usually quickly check the total number of excluded urls. And there are times that number blows me away (especially knowing how large a site is supposed to be).

When checking the reporting, you definitely want to make sure there’s not an infinite spaces problem, which can cause an unlimited number of urls to be crawled by Google. I wrote a case study about an infinite spaces problem that was impacting up to ten million urls on a site. Yes, ten million.

Infinite spaces based on site search problems.

Sometimes a site has functionality that can create an unlimited number of urls with content that’s not unique or doesn’t provide any value. And when that happens, Google can crawl forever… By analyzing the Excluded category, you can potentially find problems like this in the various reports.

For example, you might see many urls being excluded in a specific section of the site that contain parameters used by certain functionality. The classic example is a calendar script, which if left in its raw form (and unblocked), can cause Google to crawl infinitely. You also might find new urls being created on the fly based on users conducting on-site searches (that was the problem I surfaced in my case study about infinite spaces). There are many ways infinite spaces can be created and you want to make sure that’s not a problem on your site.

Parameters, parameters, parameters
Some sites employ a large number of url parameters, when those parameters might not be needed at all. And to make the situation worse, some sites might not be using rel canonical properly to canonicalize the urls with parameters to the correct urls (which might be the urls without parameters). And as John explained in the video from earlier, even if you are using rel canonical properly, it’s not optimal to force Google to crawl and process many unnecessary urls.

Or worse, maybe each of those urls with parameters (that are producing duplicate content) mistakenly contain self-referencing canonical tags. Then you are forcing Google to figure out that the urls are duplicates and then handle those urls properly. John explained that can take a long time when many urls are involved. Again, review your own reporting. You never know what you’re going to find.

When analyzing the Excluded reporting, you can find urls that fit this situation in a number of reports. For example, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, “Google chose a different canonical than user”, and others.

Parameters in GSC's index coverage reporting.

Excessive redirects
There are times you might find a massive number of redirects that you weren’t even aware were on the site. If you see a large number of redirects, then analyze those urls to see where they are being triggered on the site, why the redirects are there, and determine if they should be there at all. I wouldn’t force both users and Googlebot through an excessive number of redirects, if possible. Make it easy for Google, not harder.

Redirects in GSC's index coverage reporting.

And some of those redirects might look like this… a chain of never-ending redirects (and the page never resolves). So one redirect might actually be 20 or more before the page finally fails…

Redirects chain for url that never resolves.

Malformed URLs
There have been some audits where I find an excessive number of malformed urls when reviewing the Excluded reporting. For example, a coding glitch that combines urls by accident, leaves out parts of the url, or worse. And on a large-scale site, that can cause many, many malformed urls to be crawled by Google.

Here is an example of a malformed url pattern I surfaced in a recent audit:
https://www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/

Soft 404s
You might find many soft 404s on a site, which are urls that return 200s, but Google sees them as 404s. There are a number of reasons this could be happening, including having pages that should contain products or listings, but simply return “No products found”, or “No listings found”. These are thin pages without any valuable content for users, and Google is basically seeing them as 404s (Page Not Found).

Note, soft 404s are treated as hard 404s, but why have Google crawl many of them when it doesn’t need to? And if this is due to some glitch, then you could continually force Google to crawl many of these urls.

Example of a soft 404.

Like I said, The Mother Lode…
I can keep going here, but this post would be huge. Again, there are many examples of problems you can find by analyzing the Excluded category in the new index coverage reporting. These were just a few examples I have come across when helping clients. The main point I’m trying to make is that you should heavily analyze your reporting to see the true size of your site. And if you find problems that are causing many more urls to be published than should be, then you should root out those problems and make crawling and processing easier for Google.

Make it easy for Google.

Sometimes Excluded can be fine: What you don’t need to worry about…
Not everything listed in the index coverage reporting is bad. There are several categories that are fine as long as you expect that behavior. For example, you might be noindexing many urls across the site since they are fine for users traversing the site, but you don’t want them indexed. That’s totally fine.

Or, you might be blocking 60K pages via robots.txt since there’s no reason for Googlebot to crawl them. That’s totally fine as well.

And how about 404s? There are some site owners that believe that 404s can hurt them SEO-wise. That’s not true. 404s (Page Not Found) are totally normal to have on a site. And for larger-scale sites, you might have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even a million plus 404s on your site. If those urls should 404, then that’s fine.

Here’s an example of a site I helped with many 404s at any given time. They do extremely well SEO-wise, but based on the nature of their site, they 404 a lot of urls over time. Again, this is totally fine if the urls should 404:

Massive number of 404s on site doing well in organic search.

There have been several large-scale clients I’ve helped that receive over a million clicks per day from Google that have hundreds of thousands of 404s at any given time. Actually, a few of those clients sometimes have over one million 404s showing in GSC at any given time. And they are doing extremely well SEO-wise. Therefore, don’t worry about 404s if those pages should 404. Google’s John Mueller has covered this a number of times in the past.

Here’s a video of John explaining this (at 39:50 in the video):

There are other categories that might be fine too, based on how your own site works. So, dig into the reporting, identify anything out of the ordinary, and then analyze those situations to ensure that you’re making Google’s life easier, and not harder.

Index Coverage Limits And Running Crawls To Gain More Data
After reading this post, you might be excited to jump into GSC’s index coverage reporting to uncover the true size of your site. That’s great, but there’s something you need to know. Unfortunately, there’s a maximum one thousand rows per report that can be exported. So, you will be severely limited with the data you can export once you drill into a problem. Sure, you can (and should) identify patterns of issues across your site so you can tackle those problems at scale. But it still would be amazing to export all of the urls per report.

I know Google has mentioned the possibility of providing API access to the index coverage reporting, which would be amazing. Then you could export all of your data, not matter how many rows. In the short-term, you can read my post about how to add subdirectories to GSC in order to get more data in your reporting. It works well and you can read that post to learn more.

And beyond that, you can use any of the top crawling tools to launch surgical crawls into problematic areas. Or, you could just launch enterprise crawls that tackle most of the site in question. Then you can filter by problematic url type, parameter, etc. to surface more urls per category.

As I’ve mentioned many times in my posts, my three favorite crawling tools are:

  • DeepCrawl (where I’m on the customer advisory board). I’ve been using DeepCrawl for a very long time and it’s especially powerful for larger-scale crawls.
  • Screaming Frog – Another powerful tool that many in the industry use for crawling sites. Dan and his crew of amphibious SEOs do an excellent job at providing a boatload of functionality in a local crawler. I often use both DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog together. 1+1=3
  • Sitebulb – The newest kid on the block across the three, but Patrick and Gareth have created something special with Sitebulb. It’s an excellent local crawling tool that some have described as beautiful mix between DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog. You should definitely check it out. I use all three extensively.

 Summary – The importance of understanding the true size of your site.
The next time someone asks you how large your site is, try to avoid giving the quick response with simply pages indexed. If you’ve gone through the process I’ve documented in this post, the number might be much larger.

It’s definitely a nuanced answer, since Google might be churning through many additional urls based on your site structure, coding glitches, or other SEO problems. But you should have a solid grasp on what’s going on and how to address those issues if you’ve dug in heavily. I recommend analyzing GSC’s index coverage reporting today, including the powerful Excluded category. There may be some hidden treasures waiting for you. Go find them!

GG

 

How To Use Scroll Depth Tracking, Adjusted Bounce Rate, and Average Time On Page As A Proxy For User Engagement and Content Quality

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How to use scroll depth tracking to understand user engagement.

I was helping a company a few months ago that got hit hard by recent algorithm updates. When digging into the audit, there were a number of problems that were surfaced, including content quality problems, technical SEO problems, user experience issues, and more. From a content quality perspective, the site had an interesting situation.

Some of the content was clearly lower-quality and needed to be dealt with. But they also had a tricky issue to figure out. They target a younger audience and a lot of the content was long-form. And I mean really long-form… Some of the articles were over three thousand words in length. I asked my client if they did any type of user testing in the past to determine if their target audience enjoyed their long-form content or if they wanted shorter and tighter articles. It ends up they never ran user testing and didn’t really know their audience’s preference for content length. Like many site owners, they were pretty much guessing that this was the right approach.

The site owner said, “I wish there was a way to determine how far people were getting into the content…” That’s when I responded quickly with “you can do that!” Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but many just use the standard setup. But if you leverage Google Tag Manager, you can set up some pretty interesting things that can be extremely helpful for understanding user engagement.

That’s when I recommended using a three-pronged approach for helping identify user engagement, content consumption, etc. I told my client we could triangulate the data to help identify potential problems content-wise. And the best part is that it doesn’t take long to set up and we used one of the most ubiquitous tools on the market – Google Analytics (with the help of Google Tag Manager).

Note, there’s nothing better than running actual user testing. That’s where you can watch users interacting with your site, receive direct feedback about what they liked or didn’t like, and more. It’s extremely powerful for truly understanding user happiness. But that shouldn’t stop you from leveraging other ways to understand user engagement. What I’ll explain below can be set up today and can provide some useful data about how people are engaging with your content (or not engaging).

Triangulating The Data
The three analytics methods I recommend using to help identify problematic content include Scroll Depth Tracking, Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR), and then Average Time On Page. I’ll go through each of them below so you can get a feel for how the three can work together to surface potential issues.

Note, there isn’t one metric (or even three) that can 100% tell you if some piece of content is problematic. It’s part art and part science. There are times you can easily surface thin or low-quality content (like thousands of pages across a site that were mistakenly published containing one or two lines of text). But then you have other times where full articles need to be boosted since they are out of date or just not relevant anymore.

Therefore, don’t fully rely on one method to do this… Also, it’s not about word count, it’s about value to the user. Google’s John Mueller has explained this several times over the past few years. Here’s a post from Barry Schwartz covering John’s comments where he explains that it’s about value versus word count. Here’s the tweet that Barry is referring to:

And once you identify potential issues content-wise and dig in, you can figure out the best path forward. That might be to enhance or boost that content, you might decide it should be noindexed, or you might even remove the content (404).

Scroll Depth Tracking
In October of 2017, Google Tag Manager rolled out native scroll depth tracking. And the analytics world rejoiced.

Celebrate Scroll Depth Tracking!

Using scroll depth tracking, you could track how far down each page users were going. And you have control over the triggers percentage-wise. For example, you could track if users make it 10, 25, 50, 75, and then 100 percent down the page. And then you could easily see those metrics in your Google Analytics reporting. Pretty awesome, right?

Setting up scroll depth tracking in Google Tag Manager

For my client, this alone was amazing to see. Again, they wanted to make sure their core audience was reading each long-form article. If they saw that a good percentage of users stopped 25% down the page, then that wouldn’t be optimal… And if that was the case, then my client could adjust their strategy and potentially break those articles up and craft shorter articles moving forward.

I won’t cover the step-by-step instructions for setting up scroll depth tracking since it’s been covered by many people already. Here’s a great post from Simo Ahava on how to set up scroll depth tracking via Google Tag Manager.  It doesn’t take long and you can start collecting data today.

Here is a screenshot of the tag in Google Tag Manager when I set this up. Just remember to set Non-interaction hit to true so scrolling events don’t impact bounce rate. We’ll use Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) to address that instead:

Using Google Tag Manager to set up scroll depth tracking.

And here are two example of scroll depth tracking in action. The first is a post where many readers are engaged and a good percentage are making their way down the page. Note, the values are events and not sessions or users. That’s important to understand. Also, the screenshots below are from two different sites and each site owner has chosen different scroll depth thresholds.:

Engaged users via scroll depth tracking.

And on the flipside, here’s a piece of content where many aren’t making their way down the page. It’s a lower quality page that isn’t seeing much engagement at all. There’s clearly much less traffic as well.

Scroll depth tracking showing unengaged users.

Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR)
Ah, an oldie but goodie. In 2014 I wrote an article about how to set up Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) via Google Tag Manager. You can check out that post to learn more about the setup, but ABR is a great way to get a stronger feel for actual bounce rate. My post explains the problems with standard bounce rate, which doesn’t take time on page into account. So standard bounce rate is skewed. ABR, on the other hand, does take time on page into account and you can set whatever threshold you like based on your own content.

For example, if you write longer-form content, then you might want to set the threshold to longer (maybe a minute or longer). But if you write shorter articles, then you might want to set the ABR threshold to shorter (like 30 seconds or less). Once the time threshold is met, Google Analytics will fire an event causing the session to NOT show up as a bounce (even if the person only visits one page).

It’s not uncommon to see Bounce Rate in Google Analytics drop off a cliff once you implement ABR. And that makes complete sense. If someone visits your article and stayed on the page for six minutes, then that shouldn’t really count as a bounce (even if they leave the page without visiting any other pages). The person was definitely engaged. Here’s what that drop looked like for a client that implemented adjusted bounce rate this summer:

Bounce rate drops when adjusted bounce rate is implemented.

Here is an example of two highly-engaged posts of mine about major algorithm updates. The adjusted bounce rate is just 12% for one and 13% for the other. Many people visiting these pages spend a lot of time reading them. So even if that’s the only page they read, it shouldn’t be counted as a bounce.

Adjusted Bounce Rate example

So, now we have two out of three metrics set up for helping gauge user happiness. Next, I’ll cover the third, which is Average Time On Page (a standard metric in Google Analytics). When combining all three, you can better understand if visitors are staying on a page for a certain amount of time, how far they are scrolling down the page, and then how long they are staying overall on that page.

Average Time On Page
I find there’s a lot of confusion about time metrics in Google Analytics. For example, why Average Time On Page might be one time, and then Average Session Length is shorter than that. How can that be? Well, Mike Sullivan from Analytics Edge wrote a post about this a while ago. I recommend reading that article to get a feel for how the metrics work. In a nutshell, Average Time On Page excludes bounces (one-page visits). That’s because Google Analytics needs a page hop to calculate how long somebody remained on a page. Remember, we are setting up scroll depth tracking to be a non-interaction hit, so it won’t impact bounce rate or time metrics

Therefore, Average Time On Page will tell you how long users are staying on a piece of content when they visit another page on the site. Sure, it excludes bounces (so it’s not perfect), but it’s still smart to understand time on page for users that click through to another page on the site.

As an example, here’s my post about the August 1, 2018 algorithm update. The Average Time On Page is 12:48 for the responsive page and 17:52 for the amp version. In web time, that’s an eternity.

Average time on page high for engaged posts.

And on the flip side, here’s a page from a different site that needs some help. It hasn’t been updated in a while and users are identifying that pretty darn quickly. Even for people that click through to another page, the Average Time On Page is just 0:55. That’s a major red flag for the site owner.

Low avg time on page.

Some final tips:
Now that I’ve covered three methods for better understanding user happiness and engagement, I wanted to cover some final tips. Once you are collecting data, you can slice and dice the information in Google Analytics several ways.

  • First, review all three metrics for each piece of content you are analyzing. If you find high adjusted bounce rate, low scroll depth, and low average time on page, then there’s clearly an issue. Dig in to find out what’s going on. Is the content old, is there a relevancy problem based on query, etc.?
  • You might find content where scroll depth looks strong (people are scrolling all the way down the page), but adjusted bounce rate is high. That could mean people are quickly visiting the page, scrolling down to scan what’s there, and then leaving before your ABR time threshold is met. That could signal a big relevancy problem.
  • You can use segments to isolate organic search traffic to see how users from Google organic are engaging with your content. Then you can compare that to other traffic sources if you want.
  • You can also segment mobile users and view that data against desktop. There may be some interesting findings there from a mobile perspective.
  • Heck, you could even create very specific segments to understand how each one is engaging with your content. For example, you could create a segment of female visitors ages 18-34 and compare that to male users. Segments in Google Analytics can be extremely powerful. I recommend reviewing that topic in detail (beyond just what I’m covering today with scroll depth tracking, ABR, etc.)

Summary – Using Analytics As A Proxy For User Engagement, User Happiness, and Content Quality
I always recommend conducting user studies to truly find out what your target audience thinks about your content. You can watch how they engage with your content while also receiving direct feedback about what they liked or didn’t like as they browse your site. But you can also use analytics as a proxy for engagement and user happiness (which can help you identify content quality problems or relevancy issues).

By combining the three methods listed above, you can better understand how users are engaging with your content. You’ll know if they are staying for a certain amount of time, how far they are scrolling down each page, and then you’ll see average time on page (excluding bounces). It’s not perfect, but it’s better than guessing.

And once you collect the data, you may very well choose to refine your content strategy. And the beautiful part is that you can start collecting data today. So go ahead and set up scroll depth tracking and adjusted bounce rate. Then combine that with average time on page so you can use the three-pronged approach I covered in this post. Leverage the power of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (GTM). You never know what you’re going to find.

GG