How-To: Improving SEO with RUM

In this How-To video, we’re going to look at Real User Monitoring in the context of how you can apply it to a specific use case. Real User Monitoring, or RUM, is an event-based solution for monitoring customer experience. In other words, it measures the performance of a webpage from the perspective of the user’s machine.

In our previous video on RUM, we looked at how to set up a RUM tag. Today, we’ll specifically examine RUM data in the context of improving SEO scores.

SEO Optimization

Every day, someone somewhere is looking for your business. On an average day, people make 3.5 billion Google searches.

One of the most important elements in growing your customer base is organic search i.e., the parts of a search engine that cannot be influenced by paid advertising. Did you know that 91% of webpages are effectively “invisible”? This is due to their search engine optimization (SEO) rank landing them on a page very deep into a Google search… Beyond the point where people usually stop looking.

SEO optimization, however, can help boost organic traffic. Following good SEO practices enables businesses to gain visibility and viability in the online space.

RUM Data Inside Catchpoint

There are multiple ways to boost SEO and a lot to be said about it, but in this week’s How-To, we’re going to stay focused on connected elements within the Catchpoint software.

One key element that Catchpoint can help you identify is your bounce rate, i.e., the percentage of people who land on your website and do nothing on the page they entered. One reason for high bounce rates is high page load times. High latency won’t only lead to high bounce rates, though. It also directly impacts SEO since speed is now a landing page factor for a good search.

In this week’s video, we’ll take a look at RUM data in the software to see what it can tell you about the performance of your website.

Know Where to Focus Your Efforts

Catchpoint not only tells you your overall bounce rates, but it will do so on a highly granular basis. For instance, you can find out if high bounce rates are occurring on a geographic basis, or if they are particularly high for mobile users versus desktop. Knowing where to focus your efforts is critical to resolving issues.

If you filter connections to just mobile users, for instance, as in the screenshot above, we can see that mobile users are having the highest bounce rate among any other connection type. More specifically, we can see that Android users make up 95% of the drops in this category. Now, you can ask, “Is my site optimized for Android users?”

RUM is useful for helping you identify which element your users are getting stuck on and quantifying the impact it’s having on your overall site. You can take geographic, connection, and device/browser-based trends and compare them across dashboards with synthetic data. This will enable you to determine the root cause of the issue. Once you’ve applied a fix, you’ll know very quickly whether or not you’re achieving your desired technical results.

In This How-To Video: Learn How To Improve SEO With Real User Monitoring

• Understand which metrics play into SEO optimization.
• Learn more about the relevant data you’ll get from a RUM tag.
• Find out how to contextualize the data you get back, such as correlating page performance, engagement, and conversions.
• See how to provide uniform metrics to keep all parties aligned.

Let’s hop in!