Whilst developing a new website, have you ever gone on holiday or stopped working on a site for a period, only to find it rises in rankings? Then when you return enthusiastically to work on it again, the positions drop? Well beware of your own metrics!

User engagement

This is all to do with engagement metrics on your site.

A very important part of SEO to Google is user engagement, they go to huge levels to try and measure how any visitors interact with your website. If the signals are good, such as dwell time, pages visited, scrolling down the pages, etc, when combined with good CTR (click-through rates), you will get a ranking boost.

So baware, the problem arises when a website is new and does not yet have any substantial traffic, where in fact you are the main visitor of that website, adding content, checking things over, etc.

Google does not remove your visitor metrics from everyone else’s, so how you interact with your own website affects your metrics and maybe your rankings.

For example, have you ever checked where you rank for a specific search term, clicked on your page to make sure it loads fast and then bounced back to Google? If you have, stop it now! These actions increase the bounce rate and lower your engagement score.

Have you ever visited a single page to check spelling or design, then clicked away? Then don’t do it anymore. Again, these are bad metrics.

Do What The SEO Professionals Do

When speaking to professional SEO consultants, strategists, and developers, you will often hear them talk about developing a website, then just leave it, sometimes for months. It takes months for Google to find changes anyway and apply them to the overall authority of a site, but if the engagement signals are natural, it can help with rankings too.

The good news is, that when traffic rises and you stop being the main visitor, these issues reduce in importance, and when high volumes are achieved non-existent.

But until those days arrive, every time you visit your own site, think about what engagement signals you are sending to Google, visit a few more pages, linger on them for a bit, scroll down as if reading the content, etc. You could opt not to use the Google search console or analytics until the site is fully ready, but some metrics will still be collected.

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