Video Transcript: Mastering SEO Ranking in Your Writing

There's a new Google ranking factor that's huge right now, and when you take  advantage of it, you can find yourself with higher rankings and more traffic. And  if you ignore it, well, let's just say that you're missing out on a ton of high quality  traffic. I'm Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, the place where marketers turn  for higher rankings and more traffic, and in this video, I'm going to reveal what  this new ranking factor is, and three practical ways that you can take advantage  of it. I'll also show you the results of a real life case study that might surprise you keep watching. A while back, I published a post on my blog called how to get  high quality backlinks without guest posting, and like all of my blog posts, I made sure to optimize this post around a keyword. In this case, the keyword was high  quality backlinks, sure enough, thanks to the white hat links that I built to that  post, it quickly hit the first page for that keyword. But here's where things got  weird. One day I was checking my Google rankings, and I saw something that  made me almost fall out of my seat. Not only was I ranking for high quality  backlinks, but I also ranked on the first page for the keyword how to get high.  Say what? Needless to say, my post had nothing to do with getting high. But  then I realized why Google ranked me for that keyword. It's because I had the  keyword how to get high in my content. But here's where things got really  interesting. Most people that came to my site from Google spent nearly three  minutes on my site, but for this page, the average is only one minute and 12  seconds, less than half of my site wide average. So what's going on here?  When people search for how to get high, and clicked on my result, they quickly  realized that I wasn't going to teach them how to make their own Breaking Bad  style meth lab, so they quickly hit their back button and left this told Google in  black and white. People searching for how to get high hate this page, and  Google took action. A few weeks later, my page dropped like a stone for the  keyword how to get high. It literally went from number six to 12 to 21 to 33 in a  matter of days. But check this out. My ranking for the keyword, high quality  backlinks didn't drop. In fact, they continued to climb. Why? Because people  searching for high quality backlinks stuck to my site like superglue. How do I  know after my rankings for how to get high dropped the overall bounce rate and  time on page for my article significantly improved. Now, in a minute, I'll show you how you can easily keep Google searchers on your site longer. But for now, I  want to show you where things stand today. Today, my page ranks number one  in Google for the keyword, high quality backlinks and for the keyword, how to  get high I'm nowhere to be found. That's the power of this new ranking factor. So what's the takeaway lesson from this story? Even though backlinks continue to  be the cornerstone of Google's algorithm, it's clear that user experience signals  influence search engine rankings. Today, I'm about to show you three practical  ways that you can take advantage of these user experience signals, including  my favorite, the A P, P formula. But first, I want to tell you another quick story to  show you just how important user experience signals are today. A few years 

back, tech writer Steven Levy wrote an insider account of Google called in the  Plex in that book, Steven states, on the most basic level, Google could see how  satisfied users were. The best sign of their happiness was the long click. In other words, when people click on your site in Google and stick around, it sends a  very strong message that your page makes searchers happy, but when people  quickly leave your site like they're on a pogo stick, it tells Google the opposite. It  shows them that your page isn't a good fit for that keyword. The question is, how can you get people to stick to your site so that Google sees you as the best  result for that keyword? The answer the three insanely actionable techniques  that I'm going to show you right now, first up, we have bucket brigades. Before I  got into SEO, I used to work as a freelance copywriter, and I had a problem. A  lot of my clients would hire me to write these crazy long, 6000 word sales letters. You know, those sales pages that are like, 25 pages long, and you have to keep  scrolling and scrolling to get to the end. I wrote those all the time. The problem I  had was this, it's really hard to keep people on a page that's 6000 words long,  people don't have the attention span to skim that much content, never mind read it. And I tried every trick in the book to keep people's attention. I tried images, I  tried videos, I tried storytelling, I tried everything, but the sales letters just  weren't compelling enough to keep people from hitting their back button. And  then one day, I had a breakthrough. I discovered a little known technique called  bucket brigades that copywriters have been using for decades, and these  bucket brigades instantly made my content much more compelling. So what are  they? Bucket brigades are words and phrases that keep people on your page,  specifically, they make your visitors want to keep reading. For example, I have a  post on my site called How to boost conversions by 529% and the average time  on page for that article is almost four minutes. And a good chunk of that above  average time on page is due to bucket brigades like this and this and this. When you see one of those bucket brigades, it opens up a little information gap in your mind, and you can't help but read the next sentence. Bottom line, whenever you  have a place in your content where people might get bored and hit their back  button Add a bucket brigade. Here are a few other bucket brigades that you can  include in your content once you've added some bucket brigades to your  content, it's time for strategy number two, benefit driven subheadings. Let me  ask you something, which of these two posts would you rather read? If you're  like most people, you prefer the one on the left? Why? Because the content on  the left is broken up with subheadings. In my experience, subheadings are  huge. You can never use enough of them. For example, my post, 17 insanely  actionable list building strategies, has an average time on page of over five  minutes. The number one reason because the post contains lots and lots of  subheadings, but not just any subheadings. Benefit driven subheadings, I'll  explain. Most people use random subheadings like this. Sure that does break  your content up into easy to read chunks, but random subheaders like that won't

grab your reader's attention and make them say to themselves, wow, there's a  ton of value here. Fortunately, there's a quick fix for that include benefits in your  subheaders. For example, in my list building post, I use benefit rich copy in  almost every subheading instead of a bland subheading like focus on your thank you page, I put the benefit front and center. Okay, so I saved the best for last the app formula. Here's the truth. When someone visits your page from Google, you have two seconds to convince them to stick around, not 10, not five, two. And if  you lose them in those two seconds, you lose them for good. But if you hit your  visitor off with something amazing right off the bat, they're much more likely to  stick around. And as you saw earlier in this video, this boost in time on page can be huge for your Google rankings, and whenever I need to improve the time on  page for one of my articles, I turn to the A P P formula. So what is it? The A P P  formula is a proven content introduction framework that's designed to do one  thing, keep Google visitors on your page longer. Here's what the A P P formula  looks like. As you can see, APP stands for agree, promise and preview. Now I'm  going to break each of these three elements down and show you a real life  example of how I use the A P P formula to keep Google searchers on my page.  First up, we have agree. You want to start your intro off with an idea or concept  that someone searching for your keyword will agree with. This shows that you  understand their problem, and when someone sees that, you understand them  and their problems, they're much more likely to stick around. For example, a  while back, I published a blog post that showed people how to create a high  converting squeeze page. Here's the intro from that post. See how I say, I think  you'll agree with me when I say it's really hard to convert ice cold traffic into  email subscribers. That's something that anyone trying to build an email list can  relate to. Now that you've got them nodding their head in agreement, it's time for the promise. The promise is where you give your reader a peek into a better  world. Here's an example from my squeeze page post. Most people think that  you need to run hundreds of AB tests to get more email signups, but my promise shows that there is an easier way. Finally, hit them with the preview. There's no  need to beat around the bush here, your preview just needs to tell your reader  exactly what you have in store for them. For example, here's the Preview from  my social squeeze page post, and once you put the finishing touches on your  preview, you're set. You now have an introduction that keeps Google searchers  on your site, and a page that Google will want to show to more people. If you  like this video, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel right now. Just  click on the subscribe button. Also, if you want exclusive SEO and traffic  techniques that I only share with subscribers, head over to backlinko.com and  sign up for the newsletter. It's free. Now I want to turn it over to you. Which of  the three strategies from this video are you going to use? First, Are you pumped  to try bucket brigades? Or maybe you want to give the app formula a shot? Let  me know by leaving a comment right now again when I'm not saying it right in 

fact, Oh, didn't drop. It's too, too, too crazy. Not 10, not do you understand what  I said. There was that too fast.