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7 Insights Into How Google Ranks Websites via @sejournal, @martinibuster

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Google’s algorithm is built around understanding content and search queries and making the answers accessible to users in the most convenient manner.

These seven insights show how to develop a winning SEO and content strategy by leveraging what we know about Google’s algorithms.

The following are insights developed by studying patents and research papers published by Google itself.

Insight 1: Follow the Correct Intent

There are some content writing systems that mine the top-ranked websites and provide content writing and keyword suggestions based on the analysis of the top ten to top thirty webpages.

Some people who have used the software have told me that the information isn’t always helpful. And that’s not surprising because mining all of the top-ranked webpages in any given search results page (SERP) is going to result in a noisy data set that’s inaccurate and is of limited usefulness.

One of the issues with identifying user intent is that almost every query contains multiple user intents.

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Google solves this problem by showing links to webpages about the most popular user intents first.

For example, in a research study about automatically classifying YouTube channels (PDF), the researchers discuss the role of user intent in determining which results to show first.

In the below quote, where it uses the word “entity,” it’s a reference to what you normally think of as a noun (a person, a place, or a thing):

“A mapping from names to entities has been built by analyzing Google Search logs, and, in particular, by analyzing the web queries people are using to get to the Wikipedia article for a given entity…

For instance, this table maps the name Jaguar to the entity Jaguar car with a probability of around 45 % and to the entity Jaguar animal with a probability of around 35%.”

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In plain English, that means researchers discovered that 45% of people who search for Jaguar are looking for information about the automobile and 35% are looking for information about the animal.

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That’s user intent that is segmented by popularity.

The takeaway here is that if your content is about selling a product and the top-ranked pages are about how to make that product then it may be possible that the popular user intent for that keyword is how to make that product and not where to buy that product.

That insight may mean that new content is needed to target the underlying “how to make” latent question that is inherent in that search query.

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Insight 2: Link Ecosystem Has Changed

Blogging was at an all-time high twelve years ago. Many people were going online to churn out content and link out to interesting websites.

Aside from the recipe niche, that is no longer the case and that may be affecting the link signal that Google uses for ranking purposes. This is super important to think about.

Fewer People Searching for WordPress

There are fewer and fewer people searching for WordPress every year. This indicates that WordPress is declining in popularity in the general population.

The search volume for the keyword “WordPress” has declined by 71% since September 2011.

WordPress popularity is declining.Screenshot from Google Trends, September 2021WordPress popularity is declining.

Fewer People Searching for Blogs

It’s not just WordPress usage that is going down. There are also fewer people searching for blogs, with a pattern that mirrors the decline in searches for WordPress.

Screenshot of Google Trends showing decline in blogging popularity.Screenshot from Google Trends, September 2021Screenshot of Google Trends showing decline in blogging popularity.

The Link Ecosystem in Decline

There may be many reasons why blogging has declined in popularity.

It could be social media or it could be the introduction of the iPhone and Android changed how the public interacts online.

Screenshot of Google Trends showing ascendant popularity of Instagram.Screenshot from Google Trends, September 2021Screenshot of Google Trends showing ascendant popularity of Instagram.

The Link Ecosystem Has Declined

One thing that is indisputable is that fewer people are blogging and the link ecosystem has suffered a strong decline. What caused it is beside the point.

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Gary Illyes of Google confirmed that the motivation for turning the nofollow link attribute directive into a hint was so that Google can use those links for ranking purposes.

“Yes. They had been missing important data that links had, due to nofollow. They can provide better search results now that they consider rel=nofollowed links into consideration.”

It’s not unreasonable to consider the use of nofollow links for ranking purposes was done because there are fewer natural links being generated.

With fewer links being naturally generated, it is highly likely that it’s going to affect how websites are ranked and that Google would be increasingly selective about the links it uses.

Today, it is increasingly clear that link strategies that rely on blog links are more easily detected as spam since fewer people are creating blogs.

The takeaway here is that when creating a link building strategy, it’s important to be aware that the link ecosystem is in decline.

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That means that freely given natural links are also in decline.

Link strategies must be more creative in terms of identifying who is left linking to websites and understanding why they are linking to websites.

Takeaway About Links

The time for being selective about getting links from so-called “authority” sites is long past.

Get what you can get as long as it is natural and freely given by any relevant website.

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Insight 3: Link Drought Link Building Strategy

Because there are fewer natural links being freely given it’s time to rethink the race to obtain the right anchor text and massive amounts of links.

While a freely given link with a relevant anchor text is useful it’s rarely going to happen naturally.

So maybe it’s time to move away from old traditional link building focused on anchor text and guest posting (which today means paid links).

Instead, it may be useful to cultivate links from news and magazines, relevant organizations, and some educational organizations.

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Now more than ever it’s time to focus on outreach regardless of whether the outreach results in links. Just take the traffic.

Insight 4: Search Results Show What People Want to See

Ever walk down a supermarket cereal aisle and note how many sugar-laden kinds of cereal line the shelves? That’s user satisfaction in action. People expect to see sugar bomb cereals in their cereal aisle and supermarkets satisfy that user intent.

I often look at the Fruit Loops on the cereal aisle and think, “Who eats that stuff?” Apparently, a lot of people do, that’s why the box is on the supermarket shelf – because people expect to see it there.

Google is doing the same thing as the supermarket. Google is showing the results that are most likely to satisfy users, just like that cereal aisle.

Sometimes, that means showing newbie 101 level answers. Sometimes that means showing something incredibly racist and sad.

For example, in 2009, Google had to apologize for showing an image of Michelle Obama that was altered to resemble a monkey every time someone searched on her name.

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Why did Google show that result? Because most people searching on the name Michelle Obama were the kind of people who were satisfied seeing an image of her that resembled a monkey.

Click-through rates and other metrics of user satisfaction indicated that’s what people wanted to see. So Google’s user intent algorithm gave it to them.

Remember those sugar-laden cereals in the supermarket? That’s what those kinds of results are. It’s what I refer to as a “Fruit Loops algorithm,” a popularity-based algorithm that gives users what they expect to see.

Satisfying user intent is what Google means when they talk about showing relevant results. In the old days, it meant showing webpages that contained the keywords that a user typed. Now it means showing the webpage that most users expect to see.

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Essentially, the search results pages are similar to the cereal aisle at your supermarket. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation.

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I think it’s useful to think of the search results as a supermarket aisle and considering what kind of “cereal” is most popular. It may influence your content strategy in a positive way.

Insight 5: Expand the Range of Content

Google’s search results are biased to show the content that users expect to see.

This is why Google shows YouTube videos in the search results. It’s what people want to see.

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It’s why Google shows featured snippets, it’s what satisfies the most people today who use mobile phones.

It’s not entirely accurate to complain that Google’s search results favor YouTube videos. People find video content useful, particularly for the how-to type of content. That’s why Google shows it.

It’s a bias in the search results, yes. But it’s a reflection of the users’ bias, not Google’s bias.

So if the user has a bias that favors YouTube videos, what should your online strategy response be?

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Write more content and build links to it? Or is the proper response to shift to the kind of content users want, in this case, video?

So if you see the search results are favoring a certain kind of content, pivot to producing that kind of content.

Learn to read the room in terms of what users want by paying close attention to what Google is ranking.

Insight 6: Drops in Ranking and NLP

Drops in ranking can sometimes be explained by a shift in how Google interprets what users mean when they search for something.

Google is increasingly using Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms which influences what Google believes users want when they search for something.

For example, I witnessed a near rewrite of what kind of content ranked at the top in a certain niche. Informational content zipped to the top, commercial content dropped to the bottom of the top 10.

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There was nothing wrong with the commercial sites that dropped, other than how Google understood user intent changed.

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Trying to “fix” the commercial sites by adding more links, disavowing links, or adding more keywords to the page is unlikely to help the rankings.

Fixing something that isn’t broken never helps.

That’s why sometimes, it’s a good idea to study the search results first when diagnosing why a site lost ranking.

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There might not be anything to fix. But there may be changes needing to be considered.

If your site has dropped in rankings, review what Google is ranking.

If the kinds of sites still ranking feature different content (focus, topic, etc) then the reason why your site dropped may not be about something that’s wrong.

It may be about something that needs changing.

Insight 7: Click Data Helps Determine User Intent

This is why I use the phrase “Fruit Loops Algo” to refer to Google’s user-intent-focused algorithm. It’s not meant as a slur. It’s meant to illustrate the reality of how Google’s search engine works.

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Many people want Fruit Loops and Captain Crunch breakfast cereals. The supermarkets respond by giving consumers what they want.

Search algorithms can operate in a similar manner.

A Better Definition of Relevance

That’s not keyword relevance to search terms you’re looking at — it’s relevance to what most users are expecting to see.

Sometimes that is expressed in how many links a site receives.

But I’m fairly confident that one of the ways user intent is understood is by click log data.

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Here’s a patent filed by Google that discusses using click data to understand user intent, Modifying Search Result Ranking Based on Implicit User Feedback .

“Internet search engines aim to identify documents or other items that are relevant to a user’s needs and to present the documents or items in a manner that is most useful to the user. Such activity often involves a fair amount of mind-reading—inferring from various clues what the user wants.

…user reactions to particular search results or search result lists may be gauged, so that results on which users often click will receive a higher ranking. The general assumption under such an approach is that searching users are often the best judges of relevance, so that if they select a particular search result, it is likely to be relevant, or at least more relevant than the presented alternatives.”

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Understanding user intent is so important that Google and other search engines have developed eye-tracking and viewport time technologies to measure where on a search result mobile users are lingering. This helps to measure user satisfaction and understand user intent for mobile users.

Is Google or the User Biased Toward Brands?

Some people believe that Google has a big brand bias. But that’s not it at all.

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If you consider this in light of what we know about Google’s algorithm and how it tries to satisfy user intent, then you will understand that if Google shows a big brand it’s because that is what users expect to see.

If you want to change that situation then you must create a campaign to build awareness for your site so that users begin to expect to see your site at the top.

Yes, links play a role in that. But other factors such as what users type into search engines also play a role.

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Someone once argued that Google should show results about the river when someone typed Amazon into Google. But that is unreasonable if what most people expect to see is Amazon the shopping site.

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Again, Google is not matching keywords in that search query. Google is identifying the user intent and showing users what they want to see.

Key Takeaways

Understand the Search Results

The 10 links are not ordered by which page has the best on-page SEO or the most links. Those 10 links are ordered by user intent.

Write for User Intent

Understand what users want to accomplish and make that the focus of the content. Too often publishers write content focused on keywords, what some refer to as “semantically rich” content.

In 2015 I published an article about User Experience Marketing in which I proposed that focusing on user intent will put you in line with how Google ranks websites.

•What user intent is the content satisfying?
•What task or goal is the content helping the site visitor accomplish?”

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Understand Content Popularity

Content popularity is about writing content that can be understood by the widest audience possible. That means paying attention to the minimum grade level necessary for understanding your content.

If the grade level is high, this means your content may be too difficult for some users to understand.

I am not saying that Google prefers sites that a sixth-grader can understand. I am only stating that if you want to make your site easily understood by search engines and the most users, then paying attention to the difficulty of your content may be useful.

Google is not a keyword-matching search engine. Google is arguably a User Intent Matching Engine. Knowing and understanding this will improve everyone’s SEO.

There is a profound insight into understanding this and adapting your search marketing strategy to it.

Use What Is Known About Google’s Ranking Algorithms

Google publishes an astonishing amount of information about the algorithms used to rank websites. There are many other research papers that Google does not acknowledge whether or not the technology is in use.

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One can level up their SEO and marketing success by knowing what algorithms Google has admitted to using and what kinds of algorithms have been researched.

More Resources:


Featured image: Master1305/Shutterstock

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Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)

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Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)

You won’t read anything good about the content marketing funnel in this article. Only bad things. Like, it’s too linear and simplistic to address the complexities of customer journeys.

If you need a framework to build your content strategy on, it should probably be a no-funnel framework instead. And there are very good reasons for it.

A funnel in marketing is a multi-stage process that guides potential customers from first learning about a product to making a purchase.

Depending on the version, it has 3 – 6 stages, and it looks something like this:

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Traditionally, all content types have their designated place in each stage:

  • Top: product landing pages, ebooks, guides, most social media posts, etc.
  • Middle: webinars, case studies, lead nurturing programs, etc.
  • Bottom: success stories, white papers, sales enablement materials, etc.

Makes sense, right? Not entirely.

It oversimplifies literally everything important for a content marketer. And because of that, the model gets some things completely wrong and ignores others.

This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve applied the funnel approach at various companies. Initially, it was reassuring, providing a sense of structure and control. However, the deeper I got, the more confusing it became. It started to seem like the sense of order was purely imaginary, as there was no reliable method to verify if people were truly following the funnel.

1. Misunderstands consumer behavior

The funnel model assumes a perfectly linear path from awareness to purchase and tries to rush people through it. Or, actually, it makes you think you should rush people through it with your content.

However, consumer behavior is more complex and non-linear. People often jump between stages, revisit them, or take unique paths to purchase.

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So, the journey is not a funnel; it’s more like a maze.

Illustrative B2B Buying JourneyIllustrative B2B Buying Journey
Source

B2C customer journeys are even more peculiar. Remember that time when you saw an ad and bought that product immediately? Or conversely, how the journey from see to buy lasted for years. I know I can:

Short and long buyer journey examples.Short and long buyer journey examples.

But content marketers shouldn’t try to solve that maze, or cut a straight line through it just for their convenience. They should rather adapt to it.

2. Tries to fit round pegs in square holes

Not all content types can be, nor should be, fit into rigid stages of the funnel, as the model wants it.

Here’s an example based on one of our articles. Which stage(s) of the marketing funnel does our blog post about “How to find low competition keywords” serve?

Example of content fitting multiple stages of the funnel with explanation.Example of content fitting multiple stages of the funnel with explanation.

As you can see, the model can’t handle one of the basic forms of content marketing – a blog post. But take any type of educational content, and you’ll find the same problem. Many content types can serve multiple stages of the funnel or work across them. They can both attract and reengage a visitor or even bring them all the way from discovery to purchase.

Because of that, the content marketing funnel simply isn’t helpful for creating content that’s enjoyable for the user and effective for the business.

3. Neglects customer retention

Customer retention is how good you are at keeping your customers. It’s important because you don’t want customers to buy just once from you; you want to keep coming back so that you don’t need to attract a total stranger each time to make a sale — that’s both hard and expensive.

Here’s another way to look at it. According to the study by Bain and Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. And it makes total sense if you think about it — if someone asked you to generate an extra $1000 in sales in 24 hours, would you go to existing customers or try to find new ones?

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But if you’re practicing the old ways of the funnel, catering to your existing customers is very limited because the funnel ends at the purchase stage. There’s nothing a content marketer can do nor should do after a prospect becomes a customer.

It’s having a party where you’re so focused on inviting new guests that you forget to entertain the ones already inside.

4. Ignores customer expansion

If you only chase new customers and forget about the ones you already have, you miss the chance to make more sales to them or get them to recommend your business to others. Happy customers can really boost your business by buying more and telling their friends about you.

How can content help with that? One good way is to create product-led content. This type of content is designed to show how your product can solve the customer’s problem.

The mechanism is simple: showing product features in action turns a regular user into a power user. They start to use more features and get better value from them, which builds loyalty and gives you a good ground for upselling.

And if that content is really good, people will share it with others, amplifying your brand’s reach.

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The best thing: good content will be recommended not only by your customers. People don’t really need to be your customers or know a lot about your brand to give your content a shout-out on social media.

The best solution to the shortcomings of the funnel is to have no funnel at all. Here’s why:

  • Adapting to consumer behavior, not forcing it. Focus on how consumers naturally interact with content rather than trying to dictate their journey. Make your content easily accessible without imposing how it should be consumed.
  • A more efficient use of content marketing. Content can work both pre-sales and post-sales. It doesn’t have to be useful in one moment in time. It can be designed to stay useful and relevant over time.
  • A more helpful way to create content. No time wasted on deciding whether that guide you’re about to write belongs to the top or middle of the funnel. You can simply focus on delivering value and delighting your audience.

Here are three different no-funnel models that share those advantages.

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This approach is about using your content to directly boost demand for your product, whether before or after a sale.

Instead of sorting content by stages of a sales funnel, you rate it based on how closely it relates to your product.

The Business Potential Framework.The Business Potential Framework.

So for example, for a content marketing tool, topics with high business potential would include content marketing metrics, “B2B content marketing”, “content ideation”, “content optimization”, and “content distribution” (and not an interview with content marketers or “history of content marketing”, etc.).

This scoring system makes planning your content strategy really easy. You can quickly decide how much of each type of content to make. Also, you can use it with other important metrics (we use it with organic traffic potential) to further prioritize content.

Ahrefs has been using this model for years, especially for SEO content, which is most of what we publish. It’s great for understanding which search terms are most valuable.

Take these two keywords below as an example. The first one has a lot more traffic potential but is too broad to easily include our product — it would get a “1.” Conversely, the keyword with less traffic but more focused on SEO would get a “3” because it’s more relevant to our customers and our product.

Traffic potential data via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.Traffic potential data via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

The Business Potential Framework might be a good fit for you if you’re working in an established industry, where there’s already considerable demand for content directly linked to products like yours. This will make it easier to find topics with a score of 2 and 3. You can gauge that demand by looking at search volume in our free keywords generator.

Free keyword research with Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator.Free keyword research with Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator.

The Content Playground, devised by Ashley Faus, reimagines the buyer’s journey as an open, interactive space, akin to a playground, moving away from the traditional funnel’s linear path.

Content playground visualization. Content playground visualization.

It aims to cater to varied audience interests and learning styles by offering a mix of deep dives, strategic frameworks, and practical tips. To achieve this, it covers topics in three levels:

  • Conceptual: covering big ideas and their significance.
  • Strategic: outlining frameworks and processes.
  • Tactical: providing specific, actionable steps.

Staying with the content marketing tool example, topics you would create content about could look like this: “what is content marketing” (conceptual), “developing a content marketing strategy” (strategic), “how to promote content” (tactical).

To illustrate, this content hub on Agile from Atlassian is designed to be a content playground. There is a mix of all three types of content, and the user can start at any point, go as deep as they like, and jump to another topic at any time.

Example of content playground in practice.Example of content playground in practice.

Naturally, the content needs to be interlinked and ungated so consumers may access it however they want and navigate through it freely. The bonus of that is getting organic traffic from related keywords. According to Ahrefs, this one hub attracts over 591k organic visits every month, and it looks like it’s about to get more.

Organic performance graph via Ahrefs.Organic performance graph via Ahrefs.

But a playground doesn’t need to be confined to one site. As long as you tackle a topic with these three types and allow people to access them freely, you can have it scattered across a limitless number of sites and platforms: microsites, blog posts, social media, email, ebooks, etc.

I had a brief chat with Ashley, the mind behind this framework, to understand where this framework fits best. I learned that the framework was developed and tested with B2B marketers in mind, and that’s where it’s most relevant. B2C marketers simply don’t have as big of a problem with customers “coming and going” and re-engaging them on different channels.

There is a way to cover all customer intents, topics, journey stages, and key marketing channels naturally by simply focusing on what matters to your audience and where they are willing to consume content. I call it the Cluster-Channel Network (CCN).

Two core elements of the framework are:

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  • Clusters: thematic groupings of content around a central topic, supported by a network of related subtopics. They represent things people care about.
  • Channels: platforms and mediums through which your message reaches your audience. They represent meeting places that bring you and your audience together to talk about things they care about. Think advertising, email, social media, Google, etc.

CCN ensures a multi-channel presence with content that both attracts your audience and makes your brand an authority in a carefully picked selection of topics.

What’s more, this is an efficient framework because it allows you to “squeeze out” the most of any topic. That’s an important benefit because there are only so many topics a brand can comfortably cover, without creating turning into a content farm spinning irrelevant content just for the sake of traffic.

The framework consists of five steps.

  1. Identify relevant clusters: choose clusters aligned with your brand’s expertise and audience interests.
  2. Define subtopics: within each cluster, pinpoint subtopics for comprehensive coverage.
  3. Produce core content: select a primary channel and format for in-depth content, making this your centerpiece to attract traffic from other platforms.
  4. Distribute across channels: repurpose the core content into smaller, channel-specific formats.
  5. Interlink clusters and subtopics: connect related clusters and subtopics. Chances are, people interested in more than one cluster (e.g. SEO and content marketing).

If we were to visualize this framework consisting of four clusters, it would look something like this:

Visualization of the Cluster-Channel framework. Visualization of the Cluster-Channel framework.
Content playground could be visualized as a fully connected network with 3 node sizes.

So if we used content marketing as a cluster, one of the subtopics could be AI content. For that subtopic, you could create a blog post about ethics in content marketing in the AI era and distribute it as a thread on X, offer that topic to podcast hosts, etc.

This framework will work best if you have the resources to be present on multiple channels and you’re committed to long-term goals (building trust and authority takes time).

Tip

You can find clusters and subtopics very fast using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just plug a broad term related to your product (your cluster), and let AI do the brainstorming.

Using AI to aid keyword research process in Ahrefs.Using AI to aid keyword research process in Ahrefs.

From a bit over 10 keywords the AI found for me for the word “SEO”, Keywords Explorer found over 32k keywords which then organized into 3466 ready-to-target topics in a matter of seconds. All with traffic potential and keyword difficulty metrics to help with prioritization.

Clusters by Parent Topic report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Clusters by Parent Topic report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

Final thoughts

On a final note, the topics you choose to cover are as important as these frameworks. Check out our guide to content ideation to never run out of ideas.

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Got questions or comments? Find me on X or LinkedIn.



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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong:

  • Loss of rankings and traffic.
  • Loses of link equity.
  • Broken pages.
  • Sluggish page loading.
  • Bad mobile experience.
  • Broken internal links.
  • Duplicate content.

For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an almost 50% organic traffic loss (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t help it recover the traffic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to avoid these and other common issues – just six simple rules to follow.

Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures you can restore the original site if anything goes wrong.

Ask the site’s developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they will need to do then is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site, and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite any current databases, too.

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It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS.

Testing your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and mobile friendliness before it goes live is the best way to ensure that your new site will comply with Google’s page experience guidelines.

The thing is, a website redesign can seriously affect site speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some design flaws will be quite easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout not scaling properly on mobile devices, but not others, like unoptimized code.

Ask your site developer to run mobile friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.

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An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues on your site. And if you do it pre-and post-launch, you will easily spot any potential new problems caused by the redesign, especially those that really matter, such as:

  • Unwanted noindex pages.
  • Sites accessible both as http and https.
  • Broken pages.

So before the new site goes, click on New crawl in Site Audit and then again right after it goes live.

Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.

Then after the crawl, go to the All issues report and look at the Change column – new errors found between crawls will be colored red (fixed errors will be green) .

Change column in All issues report. Change column in All issues report.

You might want to give some issues higher priority than others. See our take on the most impactful technical SEO issues.

Tip

You can access the history of site audits by clicking on the project’s name in Site Audit.

How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).
How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).

By URL structure, I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:

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  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
  • ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
  • ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool

Altering that structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:

  • Broken redirects: redirects leading to non-existing or inaccessible pages.
  • Broken backlinks: external links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
  • Broken internal links: internal site links that don’t work, hindering site navigation and content discoverability.
  • Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and search engines to find.

Naturally, you should keep the old URL structure unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will need to put some redirects in place. On top of that, make sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site faster.

Tip

Google also advises submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages in one go. You may want to do that if that’s the case in your redesign project.

Redesigns often include some kind of content pruning or simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial that you keep the pages that are already ranking high.

Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got some backlinks you risk losing.

To make sure you’re not cutting out the good stuff, use two reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.

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Top pages report is a list of all the pages on your site ranking in the top 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. So, just one click on your left-hand side, and you’ll see a list of your best “traffic generators”.

Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

The Best by links report follows the same logic, but the focus is on links (both external and internal) and it shows all crawled pages on your site (not only the ones ranking in top 100).

Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

You can also plug in any page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see whether it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.

Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer. Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer.

Recommendation

If part of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you don’t offer anymore if you create an “archive” page and link to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do that regularly.

Example of an archive page. Example of an archive page.

This way, you can still rank for related terms, and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.

Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design imposes significant changes to your top-ranking pages, take extra caution when altering these elements:

Final thoughts

While an overall site redesign might sound like a good moment to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and backlink equity the site has already earned. If you change too much in one go, you won’t know what worked and why, and maybe more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.

Truth is, SEO is always about experimentation. You can have a well-educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.

Want to share your SEO story here? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.

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There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume

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There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume

I often post my favorite new Ahrefs features on X. And last time I announced our newest addition to Keywords Explorer, someone replied with this:

Which was not the first time I saw us being criticized for the accuracy of our search volume metric.

But here’s the kicker…

There’s NO SUCH THING as an accurate search volume:

  • The volumes in Google Keyword Planner aren’t accurate.
  • The “Impressions” in GSC aren’t accurate either.
  • And the metric itself is just an average of the past data.

I already published a pretty detailed article about the search volume metric back in 2021. But I don’t think too many people have read it.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

André Gide

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So let me address this topic from a whole new angle.

First of all, what do SEOs even mean when they ask for search volumes to be “accurate?”

Well, the less experienced folks just want the metrics in third-party tools to match what they see in Google Keyword Planner (GKP).

But the more experienced ones already know all Google Keyword Planner’s Dirty Secrets:

  • The numbers are rounded annual averages.
  • Those averages are then assigned to “volume buckets.”
  • Keywords with similar meaning are often grouped together and their search volume summed up.

In other words, the search volume numbers that you see in GKP are very imprecise. And once SEOs learn that, they no longer use GKP as their baseline of accuracy.

They use GSC.

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Ok. So the numbers in GKP are rounded and bucketed and clustered together and all that. But Google Search Console (GSC) shows you the actual impressions for a given keyword, right?

Well, did you know that a simple rank-tracking tool can easily pollute your GSC impressions?

Think of how many different “robots” might be scraping the search results for a given keyword, and therefore giving you a fairly inaccurate impression of its real (human-driven) search volume.

And besides, in order to see the actual monthly search volume your page has to be ranking at the top 10 for thirty days straight. And it should rank nationwide, just in case the search results might differ based on the location.

On top of that, I’m sure GSC is no different from any other analytics tool in the sense that it might have certain discrepancies in “counting” those impressions. I mean, go compare the “Clicks” you see reported by GSC with your server log files. I bet the numbers won’t match.

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How much time do you think would pass between you selecting a certain keyword to rank for and actually having your page rank at the top of Google for it?

According to our old research, it could be anywhere from two months to a year for a newly published page to get to the top. Don’t you think the monthly search volume of a given keyword will change by then?

That’s actually the exact reason why we’ve added search volume forecasting to our Keywords Explorer tool. It uses past data to project what would likely happen to search volume in the next 12 months:

Is it accurate? No.

But does it help to streamline your keyword research and make better decisions? Absolutely.

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Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that there was an SEO tool which would give you a highly precise search volume for any keyword. What would you use it for? Would you be able to accurately predict your search traffic from that keyword?

No!

You can’t know for sure at which position your page will end up ranking. Today it’s #3, tomorrow it’s #5, the day after is #1. Rankings are volatile and you rarely retain a given position for a long enough period of time.

And even if you did: you can’t get precise data on the click-through rate (CTR) of each position in Google. Each SERP is unique, and Google keeps rolling out more and more SERP features that steal clicks away. So even if you knew precisely the search volume of a keyword and the exact position where your page would sit… you still would not be able to calculate the accurate amount of search traffic that you’ll get.

And finally…

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Pages don’t rank for a single keyword! Seven years ago we published a study showing that a typical page that ranks at the top of Google for some keyword would actually rank for about a thousand more related keywords.

So what’s the point of trying to gauge your clicks from a single keyword, when you’ll end up ranking for a thousand of them all at the same time?

And the takeaway from all this is…

Here at Ahrefs we spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources to make sure our keyword database is in good shape, both in terms of its coverage of existing search queries, and the SEO metrics we give you for each of these keywords.

None of our SEO metrics are “accurate” though. Not search volume, nor keyword difficulty, nor traffic potential, you name it.

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But none of them can be.

They’re designed to be “directionally accurate.” They give you an overall idea of the search demand of a given keyword and if it’s a lot higher (or lower) compared to some other keywords which you are considering.

You can’t use those metrics for doing any precise calculations.

But hundreds of thousands of SEO professionals around the world are using these exact metrics to guide their SEO strategies and they get precisely the results that they expect to get.



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