Are push notifications good for a website’s SEO?
Do push notifications create a direct impact on my website?
Such similar questions can be expected from marketers who send push notifications to engage their users.
Before understanding the impact of push notifications on your website SEO, let us quickly understand SEO.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization is a process to increase your site visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs).
There are more than 200 Google algorithms that monitor and track various factors to rank a page.
There are two types of SEO; On-page and Off-page SEO.
In Off-page SEO, marketers look to build a website’s presence through external activities like link building, local SEO, social media marketing, etc.
On-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to the internal practices implemented on a website to improve search rankings.
On-page SEO covers two major aspects which are:
- Technical SEO
- Content Marketing
But, one question you must be getting is, what is the push notifications impact in website on-page SEO? Does it even have a direct impact on SEO?
The simple answer is No. However, a strategic answer would be Yes! But how?
Push notifications are used to engage the site visitors and re-engage the existing users. The push of desktop notifications is indirectly linked to improving the site’s SEO.
On-page SEO considers various options to rank a web page.
Mutual parameters between on-page SEO and its relation to push notifications are discussed below.
Increased time spent on site
The time spent on a website is an important SEO factor for Google. The more users spend time on your website, the more Google understands your content.
It analyzes if your content is useful enough for site viewers to remain on your site. Or, if your content solves any of your user’s concerns and problems.
Now, how do we make it possible to use push notifications?
Push notifications are linked to a specific landing page like sales copy, homepage, etc.
Every time you send a persuasive push notification, it pushes the users to your web page. This, in turn, increases the time spent on your website.
A study by On crawl reveals time spent by users on websites while coming through different channels of marketing. It shows that users sent to the website through web push spend an average of 46 seconds on site. The time spent through notifications is more than even email marketing and social media marketing.
Decreasing bounce rate
Bounce rate indicates the percentage of site users who exited your web page without clicking on any link.
The more bounce rate your site has, the more it will harm your overall SEO.
Push notifications are a great medium to drive users to the website. But, only driving your users to the web page is not enough.
The content you promote through your push notification campaigns should be prioritized in terms of quality.
If you do all the efforts to send users to a specific blog, and the blog doesn’t capture the user pain points. Then, using an effective push notification campaign can not do much to your bounce rates.
Therefore, it’s important to understand the decrease in bounce rate is by promoting content that provides useful information.
This will make sure, that every time you send the next push campaigns, users would expect something better at your end. And thus, reduces the overall website bounce rates.
Pushing fresh content through push notifications
A new content that goes live, can rank on top of SERPs if the content is unique and fresh.
The more visitors arrive at your newly published web page content, the more signal Google receives on the usefulness of your content.
Therefore, to increase the visits to your newly published content in a short time, push notifications are handy to serve the purpose.
You can see similar promotions in the news and media space where the search engines will recommend you to the trending news alert in the device notification space.
Out of three major engagement channels of push notifications, emails, and SMS, the push notifications are seen to perform better than the other two channels.
Pageviews
Pageviews show the total number of views a web page has received for a specified time. Using Push notifications one can strategically increase the number of page views for particular page content and calculate the push notifications impact over the time period.
You can always promote old blogs using push notifications. Change the notification copy from time to time for multiple promotions. This will ensure your particular page URL receives maximum page views.
It’s imperative to mention that push notifications do not aid in SEO directly, however, using the best content marketing practices, one can achieve the perfect blend of user engagement.
New users vs. returning users
Another engagement metric that Google considers for SEO is the new users vs. returning users.
When you send a push notification, it engages your existing users. Therefore, every push update adds more returning users to your website analytics.
Through Google Analytics, you can check your new vs returning users. Once you monitor your new vs retiring visitors percentage and achieve a stable reading, keep that percentage as your ideal reference.
Therefore, to achieve better results, notifications contribute to a healthy score for new vs. returning users percentage.
Also, keeping your customers engaged from time to time can result in increased comments on blogs, posts, etc. which is again a parameter that Google uses for SEO benefits.
Summary
A well-crafted notification can improve your search engine result rankings. When it comes to SEO benefits by using push notifications, it is clear that push notifications affect Google ranking factors in some way or the other. And the change in these ranking metrics is what impacts the SEO.
One thing each one of us should know is that push notifications alone are not responsible for the engagement you receive through this channel. This has to be synced with the right content marketing strategies. And, collectively you achieve improved SEO parameters, thus the scope for better web page ranking.
