Top 5 different Ways Google Scores your
Contents
What if Google assigned a "content score" to
every page on your website?
Experts now think that's exactly what Google
does. Every page, every post on your site gets
assigned a numerical ranking. For simplicity's
sake, let's assume that score is on a scale of
1-10, like the AdWords Quality Score.
It makes sense. Google, the company that even
scores people interviewing for a job, almost
certainly rates every page on your site to
determine where your page shows up in Google
search results.
To get more organic traffic to your site, then,
you need to know the answer to this critical
question: How do you improve your Google
content score?
We have analyzed hundreds of thousands of
client pages on our content platform, and boiled
the answer down to five metrics.
No 1 - Actions
Consider "actions" to be any action the user
takes on your page, usually a click or a
conversion. Focusing on a call to action is
probably the most important thing you can do to
improve your content score.
Almost no one reads content on the Web;
instead, we scan. Most of us read the first few
sentences of an article, then skim the rest of
the page. At the bottom of the page is a
decision point: We either click a link to get
more information, or we close the tab or hit the
Back button:

Though you may think it's common sense to
guide your readers into taking some action at
the end of your article, most marketers
apparently don't have common sense. The best-
practice is to have a single, clear, irresistible
call to action at the end of your article, just as
this one does.
No 2 - Bounce Rate
Put yourself in Google's shoes: It just wants
users to get the most relevant search results.
We've all had the experience of doing a Google
search, clicking the first result, then the second
result, the third result, and finding them all
useless.
When we don't find what we're looking for, we
leave the page. How often that happens to a
page is called the "bounce rate," and it's been
an important statistic that Google has tracked
since the first release of Google Analytics.
Most marketers misunderstand what bounce
rate really is: It's the percentage of visitors who
view only that one page on your site.

In other words, it's only a "bounce" from
Google's perspective. Someone searches, hits
your page, then "bounces" back to Google. The
most important thing for marketers, then, is to
be sure you're not just engaging users
No 3 - Time on Page
This article is about 1,000 words, and the
average reading speed is about 200 words per
minute. Let's imagine that most people spend
about five minutes on this page: We'd be pretty
happy with that result.
Now let's imagine that people are spending
about 15 seconds on this page, but the bounce
rate is still low. That might indicate a lot of
people are clicking a link at the top, so it says
to Google that something is satisfying the
user's search query, but probably not so much
the page itself.
Consider the possible scenarios:

The best scenario is high time on page,
combined with low bounce rate: Your content is
engaging people and convincing them to take
action.
No 4 - Traffic
We've developed the 95/5 principle of content:
After all the hard work on developing content
for their blog, most marketers find that only 5%
of their posts get ranked in Google and end up
driving 95% of their traffic.
The challenge is that if you have strong SEO
rankings, you get more traffic, but you won't get
strong SEO rankings until you have more traffic.
It's a hall of mirrors!
The solution is to kickstart traffic with content
promotion.
Promotion does not mean putting up a blog post
and hoping people will find it. Promotion means
actively driving traffic to your content: It means,
in order of effectiveness...
Paid social media promotion (Facebook
boosting, LinkedIn ads)Paid article promotion
(like this article)Email newslettersInfluencer
promotion (quoting a thought leader and getting
her to retweet the article)Free social media
promotion (just tweeting it out yourself)Manual
promotion (reaching out to journalists or other
website owners)
No 5 - Links
Imagine Adam has an academic research paper
that's been cited by five other studies, whereas
Bob's paper has been cited by only three.

Clearly, Adam's paper has more academic merit
(or at least Adam has better PR). That was the
insight behind the original Google algorithm:
More people pointing to your content means
better content.
Google's Andrey Lipattsev has confirmed as
much: The two most important ranking factors,
he says, are "content, and links pointing to your
site."
It's also incredibly hard to game the system
with links. Good-quality links are gold, and you
really have to earn them with good content. Any
links that can be bought, sold, or scaled are
generally worthless. (Remember that next time
you consider hiring a link-building agency.)