A. Time on site, raw time on site
B. Raw bounce rate
C. Organic visits
D. Assisted conversions
Why not? Because by themselves, all of these can be misleading signals.
So a long time on your website could be because someone’s very engaged with your content. It could also be because someone is immensely frustrated and they cannot find what they need. So they’re going to return to the search result and click something else that quickly answers their query in an accessible fashion. Maybe you have lots of pop-ups and they have to click close on them and it’s hard to find the x-button and they have to scroll down far in your content. So they’re very unhappy with your result.
Bounce rate works similarly. A high bounce rate could be a fine thing if you’re answering a very simple query or if the next step is to go somewhere else or if there is no next step. If I’m just trying to get, “Hey, I need some pressure washing tips for this kind of treated wood, and I need to know whether I’ll remove the treatment if I pressure wash the wood at this level of pressure,” and it turns out no, I’m good. Great. Thank you. I’m all done. I don’t need to visit your website anymore. My bounce rate was very, very high. Maybe you have a bounce rate in the 80s or 90s percent, but you’ve answered the searcher’s query. You’ve done what Google wants. So bounce rate by itself, bad metric.
Same with organic visits. You could have a page that is relatively low quality that receives a good amount of organic traffic for one reason or another, and that could be because it’s still ranking for something or because it ranks for a bunch of long tail stuff, but it is disappointing searchers. This one is a little bit better in the longer term. If you look at this over the course of weeks or months as opposed to just days, you can generally get a better sense, but still, by itself, I don’t love it.
Assisted conversions is a great example. This page might not convert anyone. It may be an opportunity to drop cookies. It might be an opportunity to remarket or retarget to someone or get them to sign up for an email list, but it may not convert directly into whatever goal conversions you’ve got. That doesn’t mean it’s low-quality content.
So what I’m going to urge you to do is think of these as a combination of metrics. Any time you’re analyzing for low versus high quality, have a combination of metrics approach that you’re applying.