iGB Affiliate 72 Dec/Jan 2019 | Page 21

TRAFFIC they’re satisfied, they will come back and its monopoly will continue. Hopefully by now you’re onside with the argument that engagement drives rankings. If you are, welcome to my world – and if you’re not, well, that’s okay too. Why do some affiliates rank and others crash? I’m not going to try to answer specific use cases because there are too many variables here, but I will go through a methodology I use for working out why some sites rank and others don’t. Above all, signals manifested by search user satisfaction – click-through rates, dwell times and repeat visits – seem to drive rankings. When I take this idea about satisfaction driving rankings, I think about why a search user would click on a given result, stay on a given page and return in the future. Every search query is a question. And every search ‘question’ will have different answers and characteristics depending on the country territory and the particular user’s ‘search bubble’ (i.e. those unique search results that are only shown to an individual user). Some search questions bring up answers that engender a high bounce rate, such as ‘odds for a football match’, and other questions bring up answers that are deep dive, such as ‘how to do betting arbitrage’. Whatever the question is, there will “Google just wants satisfied users; if its users are satisfied, they will come back to Google and its monopoly will continue” nearly always be a set of search results and a prevailing set of characteristics. When there’s little differentiation If you’re an affiliate and you want to rank for ‘online casino bonus’, just bear in mind your page or site is probably very similar to every other casino bonus affiliate out there. All of you have to have a list of bonuses because that’s how you make your money. But how do you rank? Well, beyond the initial auditioning of the domain, the only real differentiators are: • attractive title and description tags; • site experience (colours used, fonts, overall layout); • brand awareness; and • Google users getting what they want. Incidentally, brand awareness is not just being on TV. You can have brand awareness by being seen across numerous key phrases, so people can iGB Affiliate Issue 72 DEC 2018 / JAN 2019 17