Site quality index

The SQI fluctuations may be seasonal and depend on changes in site visitor preferences. Examples of areas impacted by seasonal fluctuations include selling seedlings, holiday recipes, and selling and installing air conditioners.

To improve the metric:

1. Compare your SQIs across activity seasons, disregarding the SQI declines during low‑demand periods.

2. Analyze your competition. To do this, compare quality indicators:

   • If you and your competitors have comparable changes in the SQI, just continue developing your site and preparing it for a new season.
   • If your site's SQI has dropped much more than that of your competitors, the reason for this isn't just seasonal changes impacting your product or service.

Check the quality of pages that users open from search results. The purpose of such pages is to answer user's questions and provide additional information.

For example, for a children's bicycle store, sources of additional information can be:

• Specific product cards and bike series cards.
• Selections of models that meet user demands: "tricycles for children from 3 to 5 years old", "children's bicycles with a handlebar".
• Customer reviews.
• Comparison of prices and models.
• Reviews.

To analyze your landing pages:

1. Use the Yandex Metrica web analytics system.

   The following reports will help you analyze pages:

   • Search queries
   • Popular
   • Entry pages
   • Page depth
   • Time on site
   • Page load time

   To form hypotheses about user behavior, use Session Replay. To check hypotheses, create goals.

2. Analyze the search queries people use to search for your site. Check if information on your site pages matches the search queries.

   To do this, use the Query statistics tool in Yandex Webmaster and Wordstat.

3. Compare the pages of your site with the pages of your competitors and determine your competitive advantage.

Make sure that your site is indexed correctly by yandex:

• The target pages are known to the robot.

  Check the statuses of the URLs and track the statuses of pages using the Important page monitoring tool.

• Important text on pages isn't hidden from indexing.

  If important text is put in noindex or noscript tags, it won't be included in the search base. As a result, the user won't find this text using a search query. Here's an example of text hidden from indexing:

  <noindex>Important text</noindex>
  

• The site doesn't have duplicate pages.

• The robots.txt file doesn't contain an error.

  To check the file, use the Robots.txt analysis tool. To learn more about the requirements to the file, see Using robots.txt.

• There are no technical problems with hosting.

  To check if there are problems with hosting, use the Server response check tool.

For the indexing bot to learn about changes on the site faster, enable page crawling with the Yandex Metrica tag.

Site content optimization affects the formation of snippets. A snippet may influence the user's decision to go from search results to your site.

To help the search algorithms determine the user queries that match your site correctly, use:

• The title and H1-H6 tags for titles. Users will find faster the information they need.
• The description meta tag to describe site pages. Users will see in search results if the site answers their question.
• Semantic markup for content formatting, for example, Schema.org. Information in the snippet will be displayed in more detail.
• The title and alt attributes for image design.
• Human-readable page URLs.

If a site doesn't fit on the smartphone screen and loads slowly, the users leave it.

To check if a site works correctly on mobile devices, use the Yandex Metrica web analytics system:

• The Devices and Browsers reports contain information about which devices and browsers your site visitors use.
• In Session Replay, you can see:
  • How site pages are displayed on different devices and in different browsers.
  • How users interact with site pages.

To learn more, see Sites for mobile devices.