SEO
12 Essential SEO Data Points For Any Website
Optimizing a website according to best practices is a starting point.
Once a site is published, out the door comes the next process of monitoring performance and improving based on the data.
The key to success is choosing the best SEO data points.
Here are a collection of 12 data points to consider that will help improve all areas of your SEO.
1. Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of metrics representing what the page loading experience is for site users. The CWV metrics are also a (minor) ranking factor.
The importance of CWV extends beyond its being a ranking factor. It helps optimize a site for speed, which is known to influence factors such as conversions and earnings.
2. Server Speed
Website server speed influences how fast pages are served and how many of them can be served at the same time.
It’s one of the few conversion- and sales-related variables that can be easily controlled.
Shared hosts can have hundreds or even thousands of websites all competing for the same limited resources.
While shared is fine to begin with, be ready to scale up to a faster host as soon as the site gains traction and begins to succeed.
In some cases, 500 error response messages are an indication that the server is running out of resources, and it’s time to upgrade.
Managed WordPress hosting can be somewhat restrictive of what plugins are allowed to be installed.
But the trade-off is that, because resource-hogging or unnecessary plugins are not an issue, there is more server power available for everyone.
There are many flavors of web hosting – from Shared and Shared Premium to VPS, Cloud, and Dedicated.
There is almost always someone who can say something nice about any given web host and someone else to say something negative.
Sometimes, it can boil down to matching what you are prepared to pay with the level of server control you are able to handle.
If you don’t know anything about server management then something with a simple control panel is the best approach.
3. Publishing Frequency
People want lots of quality content, and they want it all the time. The more content that is published on a daily schedule, the better.
It’s tempting to publish a large group of content and then say the website is done.
For many kinds of sites, especially one that publishes articles, a website is never done.
There is no “set it and forget it” in terms of content.
What that means is that the path to success is created with a constant creation of more content, always more and as often as possible.
It’s not really about generating content that’s ten times better than the competition, either.
It’s simply about generating quality content on a regular basis and doing the best that you can do to provide readers with what you believe they want.
The path to success is almost always through publishing as much quality content as possible.
4. Number Of Indexed Pages
If Google isn’t indexing your pages, that may mean there’s something wrong with your content and/or the entire website.
The Search Console Index Coverage Report provides the data on indexed pages, including discovered but not indexed pages.
If you find that your content is regularly not getting indexed, then this is an opportunity for improvement.
This isn’t a matter of bad luck, and it’s not necessarily a technical issue that’s easily fixed.
Content problems can be hard to identify because it’s difficult to see one’s own content objectively.
Examples Of Content Problems:
- Content is similar to what’s already published.
- Content is thin (Screaming Frog provides Word Count data).
- Content is poorly written.
- Content is not focused enough on the topic.
- Overall, site quality is poor.
5. Search Console Impressions
Search Console shows how often your site appeared in the search results for a variety of keyword phrases. In Google Search Console, this data point is called impressions.
It’s tempting to open up the Search Console to check out which keywords are performing best and bask in the warmth and sunshine of a job well done.
But that’s a waste of time.
Lower ranked keyword phrases are where your time is best spent. Always focus on your lower keywords because this is where the areas to improve can be found.
Some of these opportunities are quick wins, meaning that improving rankings for these phrases is relatively easy.
For other more competitive phrases, it may be that there’s nothing wrong with the content except that it needs more links.
6. Excessive Scrolling
Excessive scrolling is a user experience data point provided by Microsoft Clarity.
Clarity is a free user experience analytics program that is low impact and GDPR compliant. It comes with machine learning that can alert publishers with problems, and provides a variety of metrics that show user behavior on a site.
Content is your most important ranking factor.
The excessive scrolling metric is a flag signaling that improvements to content are needed.
Anything that improves your content is helpful for SEO.
7. Reading Behavior
Reading Behavior is another Microsoft Clarity data point.
This metric shows how many readers are engaged and how many abandon the webpage at the headline.
Pages with an abnormally high abandonment rate need improvement.
The Reading Behavior data point shows you which pages need improvement. This is valuable information.
The way Microsoft Clarity points out content that needs improvement is like employing a junior SEO to work full time creating site audits on a budget of free.
8. Scroll Data
The Scroll Data Microsoft Clarity metric is very important because it reveals how far down webpage users are scrolling.
Identifying where on a webpage visitors are abandoning a page can help debug a technical issue or maybe a problem with the content itself.
9. Missing Or Duplicate Meta Data
It’s easy to drop the ball and roll out a website with unoptimized meta description or title tags.
Duplicate or missing title tags and meta descriptions are especially bad and surprisingly common on websites.
Screaming Frog provides the Missing/Duplicate Meta Description and Title Tag data point.
There’s a free version of Screaming Frog that crawls about 500 pages. So, if you’re just starting out, then give Screaming Frog a try.
10. Image Size
This is a data point related to speed. Mobile data bandwidth can be barely usable.
Even if a site is served on a fast web host, large images are going to pile up like cars on a one-lane freeway exit ramp when they reach a site visitor’s mobile browser.
Image size is one of the easiest things to control, yet one of the variables that many sites ignore when optimizing.
According to HTTP Archive data, for a one-year period between 2021 and 2022, the median average of images per page is 751 KB for the top 1 million websites.
The amount of images per page for the same period of time for WordPress sites is a whopping 1,116.0 KB – that’s over a megabyte of images per page!
How big should your image sizes be? As small as you can possibly make them.
Just remember these tips:
- Photographic images – save as JPEG.
- Illustrative images – save as PNG.
- Avoid superimposing text over photographic images.
- Avoid images with lots of details, like trees with thousands of leaves.
- Avoid illustration images that have gradients.
An easy way to shrink images is by serving images in the new WebP format.
Screaming Frog provides image size data for every image on your site. The tool is configurable to flag whatever target size you consider reasonable.
11. Backlinks
While backlinks are very much one of the most important ranking factors, in today’s search algorithms it’s not necessarily the deciding ranking factor.
Search algorithms increasingly use links as part of a ranking algorithm to produce a set of candidate pages to list in the search results.
But, another layer of relevance can be applied that re-ranks the search results for things like relevance, user intent, geolocation, and user expectations, to name a few reasons.
The use of a modification factor or a modification engine is not new – it’s been around for at least 10 years.
So, while links are a highly important ranking factor, links are not necessarily the deciding factor.
This isn’t meant to minimize the importance of links, but simply to make clear where it stands in terms of importance.
Backlink data is available in Google Search Console.
12. Earnings
Earnings might not initially seem like an SEO data point, but it is.
While earnings are the whole point of SEO, earnings are a data point that can work together with other metrics, like traffic and keyword rankings, to tell the entire story of what’s happening. This enables a publisher to make more accurate decisions.
Earnings Indicate Profitability Of Topic
Earnings are an indicator of whether your topic is lucrative.
Some topics have a massive amount of traffic.
But, some of those same topics may have slim profit margins, which can have a negative effect on affiliate commission rates and ad revenue.
Sometimes, keyword phrases with less traffic are more profitable.
Earnings Coordinates With SEO Metrics
Earnings can signal if something has changed in traffic or rankings and contribute to understanding what those changes are.
For example, it’s not uncommon for traffic to decline while earnings remain steady or improve.
That could mean that less relevant traffic is hitting the site, leaving behind the most relevant (and profitable) traffic.
Should you panic? Maybe not.
It could be that the page wasn’t actually relevant for the query, meaning that it may be useful to create a new page to target the lost keyword/s.
This can happen to pages that rank for multiple, different but related keywords, like if a page ranks for plumbing, bathroom installations, and kitchen fixtures and loses all the keyword traffic except for plumbing.
Earnings And Consumer Demand
Earnings can help to signal if consumer demand has changed.
Keyword rankings can remain the same while traffic steadily declines, which will be reflected in earnings.
What’s going on in this scenario is that consumer demand has changed.
This typically happens with the introduction of new product models and sometimes with the introduction of a disruptive new product or service.
SEO Data Points
There are many SEO data points, but the 12 mentioned here are, in my opinion, the most important.
There are many more data points that may prove more useful to your situation.
What’s important is to get thinking about what can signal areas of improvement, identify the causes, then make improvements.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Khosro/Shutterstock
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SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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