 Good morning. Thank you. So I think most of us in this room, maybe all of us in this room, hopefully after Will's talk this morning, all of us in this room, would agree that user experience matters a great deal for SEO. Certainly in recent years, we've seen Google give a lot of priority to user experience as they've started to focus on things like page speed and mobile friendliness and the quality of the content on our site. Even the use of SSL certificates can be seen in a user experience light. And when you think about it, user experience and SEO have always gone together. Good user experience is all about discoverability, making sure that the people who need to find your site can. That's SEO. Good user experience is about speaking your visitor's language and making sure that you're really speaking to them the way they talk. That's keyword research and also has a lot to do with really how you write good quality content on your site. And we can probably come up with lots of other examples here of how user experience and SEO really relate and go together. But the point is that it's always been important to deliver a good experience to the people both when they find your site on a search result and after they click on that search result. There are people who object to this. And one of the most common objections that I hear is none of that's true. I don't need user experience. I need rankings and I need traffic. Other people tell me, yeah, somebody else already is taking care of that user experience thing. Some other designer, developer, agency, whoever it is, they've got it. So really, you can just keep your hands off because SEO, it just stops at the SERP. We need to think about those objections. But the other objection that comes up is a big one. And it's one that comes up even for those of us who know that user experience does matter and who know that user experience and SEO go together. And that's the question of, well, how do you measure it? What the heck is good user experience? And I think this comes up because user experience can seem like a very nebulous topic. It's kind of hard to pin down and really figure out what do we mean when we say user experience? It's very relative and it's very subjective. In contrast with SEO, at least classic SEO, we have clear, objective, quantifiable metrics we can point to. We did some work and we got more organic traffic. We have more backlinks. We have higher rankings, higher domain authority. Whatever it might be. But what are those clear, objective, quantifiable metrics that can help us understand our user experience? I took that question on as a challenge because I wanted to be able to show my clients first that user experience does, in fact, matter. But second, that user experience matters alongside and as part of your SEO work. There are ways to measure user experience with things like usability tests or surveys. And while these are really great ways to understand who your visitors are or understand what your visitors might be thinking, how do they connect? Really directly connect to your SEO. The other issue with usability tests or surveys is that they're typically only invested in during large-scale redesign or redevelopment projects. But user experience is a long-term and ongoing process. So we need metrics that work for us on a long-term and ongoing basis. You could use things like key maps or recordings to get at this information. And while these are great tools, just because somebody clicked here or scrolled there, what does that really tell me about how my user experience works alongside my SEO work? So as an alternative, I turn to event tracking and Google Analytics. And there's a lot that we can measure with event tracking, but I want to cover three examples of ways we can use event tracking to really understand something meaningful and interesting about our user experience on our site. I'm gonna cover a fair amount of code as I go through everything. So if you want to download in this code or use any of it, there'll be links to all of it on these slides if you wanna download those. So let's begin by talking about how we measure how people browse through or navigate our site. Certainly a key part to creating a great experience is making sure that the people who visit our site can find whatever it is they came to our site to find. And that means we need to track all the different ways people navigate through our site, starting with tracking all the things that people are clicking on. There's a good script that can give us a way to start doing this. And what this script does by default is it tracks all the clicks on outgoing links, downloads, jump links, couple other types of links. The one type of link that's not tracked by default are internal links, all the links that keep people on your site. Those are the ones we really wanna know about when we're thinking about how people navigate our site. So with a quick modification to this code, we can start to track internal links as well. And then in Google Analytics, we can see all the different types of links people click on as an event category. And if you click on that event category, you can see each individual link as the action, and you can figure out how many times people are clicking on those links. Now it's a good starting point to understand how people really navigate and use our site. But it's not the full story. Just because people click on a link doesn't really tell us a whole lot of information. We need to know more. And one piece of information that we can add in is how long does it take people to click on a particular link? So we can modify this script just a little bit more to include a timer. And if the timer actually starts to track the time people are actively on the page using visibility change, then we can really see something more interesting than just a timer that tracks the entire time people are on the page and possibly have it open in a background tab. And now with that information, passed along as part of the event label, we know something way more interesting than did people click on a particular link? We know how long it took people to decide that they should click on a particular link on our site. And we can add up all that information and come up with an average minutes or average seconds that it takes people to click on any given link on our site. And from here, we can start to figure out, well, is it too much time before people click on a link or too little time before people click on a link? Either way could suggest a lot of confusion or a lot of frustration with how people are navigating our site. But along with that, we also wanna know the activity that happens after people click on a given link on our site. So for this, we could use something like sequences or navigation paths or behavior flow to get at that information. But a more effective way I've found to really start to understand this is to set a cookie when people click on an internal link. And what you can do is you can let that cookie collect information about the page that people clicked to and then send that back as an event. And what you can do with this is you can start to figure out, well, did people stay on the page that they clicked to or not, if they clicked and then they clicked away really fast from your website or they didn't spend a lot of time over there, that suggests that there's some problems with the experience people are having on that page they clicked to. And where this is really helpful is on landing pages. Too often on landing pages, I think we get hung up on, well, what's the bounce rate and what are people doing there? But we also wanna know something about the experience people have after they're on that landing page. So you can see in this example that people who were on My Sites homepage who landed on My Sites homepage from a search result and then continued on to another page spent about a minute on that other page. So taking together that landing page and these other pages makes it seem like there's a good experience. But if we drill in on this a little bit more, we can see that people who landed on My Sites homepage and then continued on to My Sites about page ended up spending way less time on that page. And all of a sudden that starts to tell me, well, maybe there's a problem there. The landing page looks okay. The bounce rate, everything is fine on that landing page, but it's this other page people clicked to that's potentially a problem. That page is the one that's driving people away from My Sites. That's costing me converters. That's also a page that's potentially sending people back to a search result where they're gonna click on somebody else's website. And that's potentially going to affect my search rankings and performance. Let's move on and talk about another example of how we can really start to understand something about the content on our site. Yes, we wanna know how people are clicking and navigating through our site, but there's more to the experience than that. And we wanna make sure that people are reading all the content that we've written, that they're scrolling through our design, that they're seeing everything we want them to see. And as a way to start doing that, we can use a scroll tracking script. And there's a lot of ones out there. One I particularly like is this one from Parsnip. Some of you might be using it. And what these scripts do is they let you know how far down the page people have scrolled. And you can modify these just a little bit to make it a little more interesting to know not just how far they scroll down the page, but if people scroll to a particular part of the page. So you can say, well, did people scroll to the 27th paragraph in a really long blog post? Did they scroll to a feature at the end of my page? Or in this example, did they scroll to a call to action? Now that's helpful, but beyond just knowing how far people scroll down the page or if they scroll down the page, we wanna know something more about the experience people have so we can add in some timing information. And one piece of timing information we wanna factor in is the time it takes people to scroll through my page. So I can say, well, people took 39 seconds to scroll to that lower call to action. And then once they got there, we can start timing it there. I mean, say, well, people spent 36 seconds looking at that lower call to action box that we're tracking in this example. And for a call to action, 36 seconds is probably plenty of time, maybe even a little too much time. But if this was a really long paragraph of text or if that was a five minute video that people scroll to, 36 seconds definitely is not enough time. But beyond knowing the time that people spent to it, this is where we can add click information in alongside the scroll information. And so in this example, we can say, well, look, 23 people scrolled to this part of the page and 11 of those people clicked. Not a bad click through rate. If only we got more people scrolling to it, maybe we could get more people clicking. That's helpful, but we wanna know the bigger picture around scrolling activity and the experience people have because so far all the things we've talked about have missed out on a really big piece of scrolling through our site. And that's that people don't just scroll down the page. Sure, they scroll down, but they scroll back up as well. And we wanna make sure that we're tracking all the scrolling activity that's happening in both directions. And one really helpful thing we wanna track is the way in which people scroll back up the page right before they leave our site, the exit scroll point. And so with that exit scroll point, what we can do is say, well, look, we know that people scrolled 70% of the way down the page. That's the maximum scroll point that they reached. But when they left our site, they had scrolled back up to the 40% mark of our page. And if we add in the secondary dimension of browser size, we can start to see, well, what's there? What's at that part of the page? And that tells me two interesting things about my site's experience. First, it tells me which part of the page people are leaving from, not just looking at the exit page, but the specific part of the exit page I need to improve to keep people around. But the second thing that this tells me is something about what these people are interested in who are on my site. They scrolled back up to see something at that part of the page. They were curious about that. They had a question about that part of my page. And I can use that information to figure out, how should I rewrite the content on this page? Or how should I promote this page? Or how should I build links to this page? Or is there something about that part of the page that I can learn what people are interested in, which can influence how I want to adjust my product, or my services, or my sales, or some other part of my business? Finally, let's talk about an example of when things break in our site's experience. Yes, we want to know when people are successfully able to navigate our site and when they're able to read through all the content that we've created. But ultimately, some things are going to go wrong. And when things go wrong, we want to know two pieces of information. First, we want to know, well, what did go wrong and how often did that error occur? But second, we want to know, well, what kind of problems were there and how did those affect our site's experience? And when we're talking about errors, we want to look not just at the technical errors that occur, but we want to look at the user errors. But times our users slipped up or made a mistake. And one place where we see a lot of errors, a lot of slips, a lot of mistakes occur is on forms. And no matter what type of form we're talking about, there's lots of different ways things can go wrong. And whenever an error is returned to a visitor on our form, we want to send back an event. And this event can just tell us which specific errors occurred. And the easiest way to do this is to give each error a unique ID number. And so we can say, well, people forgot a digit on their phone number, they made a mistake, that gets one ID number. People maybe got an error with an international phone number failing to verify. That would be a different ID number. And then in Google Analytics, we can see all the different combinations of errors that people got. We can tally these up to figure out, well, how frequently did each error occur? But this is where we want to know more information about, well, how did that really affect the experience people had filling out that form? So we can segment that event tracking report to see how many of those people who got those errors ended up completing the form. And then we can compare those two numbers. So we can see in this example that people who got error ID number five, well, that occurred pretty frequently with 22 occurrences. But 20 of those people were able to move beyond the error and complete the form. So yes, the error is occurring, but no, it's not really affecting our site's experience all that much. In contrast, error ID number four occurred a lot too, but only seven of the 29 people who got this error were able to move beyond the error and actually complete the form. So all of a sudden, that error looks like a much bigger priority to fix to really improve our site's experience. Now this tells us something about user experience, but it also helps us understand something about our SEO as well, because with this we can say, look, we got good quality traffic to our site from search. And we know that because we got them to our site, we got them to this form, we even got them filling out this form. Now we can say, look, the reason they're not completing this form isn't because we did our SEO work wrong, we targeted the wrong terms, we retargeted the wrong people in the search result. No, it's because of this specific error on this specific field of this specific form. All of a sudden we have a much better way to really diagnose and understand problems. But this also tells us something about how user experience affects our bottom line. In the case of this form, I can say, look, the reason people aren't completing it is because of this error. It's because of this bad experience that's happening. And with that, user experience is no longer a nebulous concept that's tough to pin down. It's something where you can really demonstrate how it affects your bottom line, how it affects your marketing, and how it affects your SEO. Thank you.