SEO Ranking Factors Part 4: Content Length

There is ample debate on today’s topic — content length. If you ask one SEO expert, he may suggest that your content must be longer than Stephen King’s book, ‘It’; ask another one and he would recommend to keep it no longer than a fortune cookie.

So, today we are going to use data to get to the bottom of this debate once and for all. As usual, we are going to break down our study in search volume sizes of XL, L, M, and S. But, let’s dive into traditional thought process before we start dissecting the data provided by SEMRush.

Traditional Logic

Essentially, longer content is assumed to be more reliable as it creates the perception of an in-depth knowledge and better-researched content by the end user. Obviously, this perception would fade away if the content is not relevant or of readable quality.

Imagine going to a search engine and researching which dishwasher to buy for your new home. You click on a page that talks about the best flavor of ice cream to eat while watching Game of Thrones and passively mentions the name of the dish washer they use to clean the ice cream bowls. This wouldn’t be very relevant to your search, would it? In this example, traditional logic is highlighted that such an irrelevant site would not show up regardless of the length of your content.

The Numbers

After reviewing 600,000 search results and their rankings, SEMRush was able to graph the results below.

While looking at the graph, you can see a distinct difference in content length of the various search volume sizes. The XL search term size has the most content, and content size reduces as the search volume size decreases.

An interesting stat to examine is the long tail vs. the short tail searches and the length of their content. You would notice that long tail searches have content that is 1.5 longer than short tail searches. But why is it that?

There isn’t a sure-shot way to explain this, but we have two theories that we are confident about. First, long tail searches are typically people who are conducting in-depth searches and are looking for more detailed information in comparison to people who use short tail searches looking for general information. Our second theory is that when searching for a long tail phrase, the searcher is typically looking a solution that is detailed and can be used immediately.

If you’re targeting S to M search volumes, then you’re in luck as the top ranking sites have the content length just north of 500 words. So, now you can easily set yourself apart from the competition by creating relevant, content rich posts without much effort.

More Numbers

If the numbers above aren’t convincing enough, let’s check-out some info from Neil Patel, a conversion and SEO wiz with amazing results.

In his article on content length, he provides an endless amount of data, but herein, I will share only a few of the cliff notes from his article.

• The first benefit he indicates is that for the majority of keywords ranking in the first ten spots of Google searches had 2,000 words or more.
• The second benefit is that pages with more content get more backlinks, which we learned means better positioning in searches.
• The third benefit is that longer content gets 68.1% more shares on twitter and 22.6% more shares on Facebook. This sends social signals to your content that Google notices.
• The last benefit that I find worth mentioning is that long content converted better by 40.54% and created an ROI of 50% when using AdWords. On the contrary, the shorter content had a negative ROI of 66%.

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...longer content gets 68.1% more shares on twitter and 22.6% more shares on Facebook. This sends social signals to your content that Google notices.

Conclusion

After looking at the numbers, we can easily end today’s debate of long vs. short content as all signs indicate that longer content generates better rankings, conversions, and meaningful leads.

But before you go off and start writing a book for your next blog post, you should consider the following elements:

Relevancy: Garbage in, garbage out is what the saying states, which means that if you create garbage content, you’re going to get crappy search engine results and hence, crappy leads.

Have the reader in mind: When you’re writing be mindful of what your reader is looking for. If you are selling a product, remember what potential objections they may have and address them in your sales copy.

Don’t treat it like a term paper: This means that like a term-paper, don’t feel compelled to put X amount of words and bloat your article to meet a specific word count. In other words, if the topic you are discussing is naturally short and can be fully covered in 300 words, then use only that much.

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Ranking Factors Series: Part 3 Backlink Profile

It’s a common belief that backlinks (number of times your website gets linked to) are king of the SEO jungle. For example, if website A has 100 links pointing to it and website B has 50 links; website A would rank higher in search engines.

In this article, we are going to explain why that’s not always true and is flawed because it doesn’t tell the full story of backlink profiles. Before we do a deep dive, we need to explain some key terms and what they mean.

Key Terms

Backlink(s): A backlink(s) is when another website puts your URL on their website which will direct (link) their visitors to your website. A site can link as many time as it wants to your site and each one is recognized by search engines.

Referring Domains: A referring domain is the count of the actual domains (websites) that links to yours. Now each website is only counted once independent of the number of times it links to yours.

Backlink Profile: Your backlink profile is the number of domains and backlinks that your site has. An example would be if site A links to site C 50 times, and site B links to site C 10 times then site C’s backlink profile would be two referring domains and 60 backlinks.

Taking You To School

At JPDA we like to make things more relatable through comparison because it makes it easier to understand.

Google and other search engines are a lot like a high school popularity contest. The number of times other students say you’re cool isn’t as important as the number of students who vouched for you.

If student A has three students say they’re cool 100 times and student B has 20 students say they’re cool 60 times then naturally the perception would be student B is more popular. In our example, the students represent the number of referring domains and saying they’re cool represents backlinking.

Search engines are similar in the sense that a website with a greater ratio of referring domains to backlinks is considered more relevant. Hopefully, through our awkward high school reference, we were able to show how search engine logic isn’t much different from ours.

The Numbers

The numbers below were generated by SEMRush and we are interpreting the data for you. We are also using clothing sizes again to represent search volume (XL, L, M, S).

The graph above is telling two stories, and both are very important. First, it shows just how competitive XL and L volume keywords can be and the amount of work required to start competing. The second story is there is a lot of potential upsides and a reasonable amount of competition in the M and S search volumes.

Let’s start by addressing the XL and L categories. These keywords are behemoths and make them nearly impossible to compete. For example, for the XL category, the median is 10,000 referring domains. If your site were able to get four new referring domains a month, it would take 2,500 months or ~208 years to hit the median amount of referring domains assuming the median doesn’t grow during that time.

Enough of the bad news, let’s move to a brighter spot, the M and S competition level. These words are more accessible to the common business. At a glance, you will notice that the M and S terms have a minor difference in referring domains when comparing positions 2 to 15 ranking positions. Now compare that to the XL/L groups, and you will notice a substantial decline in referring domains for the same position range. Using the same four new referring domains a month example from before, If the median of referring domains is 50, then it would take only a year to have as many referring domains.

How to use these numbers

Although the first part of the numbers section of this article can be discouraging, the second part of it should be very encouraging. Search Engine Optimization results are in reach, and you can formulate a plan around it.

First, we should mention that SEO is a lot like weight lifting, you shouldn’t expect instant SEO results just like you wouldn’t expect to look like Arnold after lifting weights once. SEO work is continuous and requires consistency to build your search engine muscle. If you’re ever approached by an “expert” who claims to be able to increase your rankings within days, be very cautious. You do not want to end up like BMW  and get penalized by Google with the potential of never being able to recover from it.

With that said, our suggestion would be to target search terms in the M & S category at the same time. This way you will see a return on investment sooner than targeting M alone because of the low competition level in the S category. While you see results from the S search terms, you will be building your authority in the M search terms which bring even more results.

This strategy works particularly well with local businesses because region specific terms tend to be less competitive depending on your city or neighborhood because they are long tailed (3-6 word search terms).

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This strategy works particularly well with local businesses because region specific terms tend to be less competitive depending on your city or neighborhood because they are long tailed (3-6 word search terms).

Conclusion

Today’s topic was very dense and could use a recap. What the key take aways from Part 3 is having a bunch of backlinks isn’t the only factor in SEO you should be concerned with and should make sure you have a variety of domains backlinking. It’s also important to take away that M and S search terms are with in reach for local businesses.

Concerned about your backlink profile? Contact us now, and we will do a report for you free of charge that will include your backlink profile.

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SEO Ranking Factors Part 2: Videos

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million words. Sounds great, but how does that translate to making you king of the castle on search engines relative to your competition?

Video has been on the rise since 2014, and there have not been any signs of it stopping. According to Insivia 74% of online traffic will be video.

Here we are going to dive into how videos on your page impact your search engine factors and how to best utilize it.

on-page videos

You’ve written a great article, and you want to take it to the top by posting a video on the page. You’re thinking “this is for sure going to help my rankings!”

In the SEMRush report, they could not correlate on-page video with ranking results. Does that mean there’s no place for video on your website?

Not at all, and we think there is SEO value there but not in the way you would traditionally think. Let’s talk about how video can be of use to you in your SEO strategy.

Video SEO

Some may not know this, but there is such a thing as video SEO. Have you ever searched Google and noticed that a video came up?

At JPDA, we love sneakers so on July 12th, 2017 we searched “shoe cleaner review“and interesting enough, two videos were in the top five organic results (see pic below).

How did this happen? There are two main reasons, the first one being simple and straight forward.

Have you ever met a proud parent that thinks their child is the smartest, best looking, and best-behaved child? Well, Google is not much different from that parent because YouTube is part of their ecosystem of web platforms. Naturally, Google will favor its platform over other sites.

Being on one of Google’s platforms isn’t enough alone. We are going to use the first video in the results to show what they are doing right.

First, we will look at the data and see what it tells us. The stats show that this video only has 5,060 views, after nine days, four shares, and 80 comments. To put these stats into perspective, Amazon, the number one spot, has 1.6 billion links, but this video can rank just below it and ranks above a website with 3.5k website links.

Video can be the great equalizer in terms of competing against giants because his website (notice the SSL certificate) would not show up in search engines because it only has 24 backlinks. The video stats are dwarfed by Amazon and number three spot, but yet he is still ranking.

The second part of his strategy that was done correctly but can be improved; he is linking to his website which can turn YouTube views into website visits. You will notice though he links to many other areas that don’t relate to the video or website which can confuse his visitors on where to go or will cause them to not click any of the links. We would advise they don’t place so many links in the description and guide his viewers to where his profits are made.

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Video can be the great equalizer in terms of competing against giants because his website would not show up in search engines because it only has 24 backlinks.

Conclusion

Video will not help your site or blog article ranking in search engines, but it does have value. As an on-page method of ranking video should not be part of your strategy but if you checked the video stats I linked to, then you will realize video is powerful in other ways like conversions.

The way to make video work for you in the SEO world is to utilize YouTube and then have others share, embed, like, and view your video. Ensure that you have you have a clear call to action and link to your desired page so that viewers visit the page you want them to visit.

Case Study

Today we will pick on the plumbing industry and on how this can be used. The picture above you will see the search term “how to stop drain leak, ” and the first result is a YouTube video.

When you view the video, you will find the uploader executed this perfectly. They have lots of comments, shares, and views. Also in the in the description, they have a clear call to action of where they want the viewer to go. They likely receive a fee for every person who buys the Amazon product they sell.

If you would like for us to provide you with an SEO website audit, don’t hesitate to reach out and we can provide one free of charge with no obligation. Fill out the contact form below, and we will get it for you within 48 hours.

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SEO Ranking Factors Part 1: Security

In our parent’s age, the only threats they had to worry about were local burglars, high cholesterol, and the occasional door to door salesman.

Today we live in the WWW (world wide web) which means our threats are also worldwide… rats. JPDA would never advise against adding a security certificate to your site, but we are going to cover how it relates to search engine rankings. We are not experts on internet security, and we won’t claim to be.

Google and Security Certificate

If you have been keeping up with Google’s webmaster blog (we have), you would have seen an announcement a few years back. You would have read about how Google has given a ranking boost to sites that have an SSL certificate.

It’s not often when Google tells you exactly what they use to rank your site, but when they do, you should listen. Don’t just take our word for it, let’s dive into why below.

The Numbers

First, let’s dive into the data and then we will interpret it for you. We are going to use data from SEMRush’s (link) report where they took 600k search queries then calculated the percentage of domains which use security certificates in the top 100 search engine ranking position. The data is broken down between search volume and will categorize like we would clothes: XL, L, M, S.

SEMRush took it even further and broke the data down between short head and long-tail keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with the terms, short head searches that are broad two-word searches and long tail searches are oddly specific that are three to five words. An example of how to two differ would be “delicious coffee” vs. “Fairtrade delicious coffee Detroit.”

Let’s look at the search volume angle of this report. As you will see in the graph below in the XL search volume, the top five positions all have SSL certificates. At levels of XL, L, and M 50% or greater web sites ranked at number one have SSL certificates. The S search level is sub 50%, and I’ll explain why I made it a point to point this out.

When looking at short head and long tail keywords, you see a 10% drop from positions one through eight in websites that utilize security certificates. To put this in perspective, Moz estimates that first-page results account for 71% of traffic and 67% in the top five rankings. According to advancedwebranking.com, 27% of web traffic goes to rank one, and 2% goes to rank eight.

What The Numbers Mean for You

“Great to know Joe, but what am I suppose to do with this information?” I’m glad you asked.

When you look at the data above you can guess that if your search terms fit in the XL or L range of search volume then having a security certificate is a must! Your competition is already doing it and going to continue to outrank you until you get with the program.

If your search terms are sitting in M to S search volume range, then having a version of your website with a security certificate will give you an advantage over half of your competition. Since the adoption rate of security certificates is low, you’re going to distinguish yourself from your competition with minimal effort.

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Since the adoption rate of security certificates is low, you're going to distinguish yourself from your competition with minimal effort.

Real World Example

For this article, we are going to pick on dentists. On June 30th, 2017, we Googled “cosmetic dentistry Birmingham, Mi” and Dr. Robert Di Pilla was the 2nd organic result behind Yelp.

When we scroll through the rest of the results, you’ll notice that other than Yelp, he is the only website using SSL certificate. Obviously, this isn’t the only factor, but it is an interesting point to spotlight because they are ranking high despite not being very aggressive with their SEO efforts.

Regardless of keyword search volume size, it’s length or competitive level we highly suggest using a security certificate. Not only will help your search engine rankings but it’s also good for your visitors and ensure their information is safe should they contact you.

Hope you found this useful and look forward to talking about backlinks and referring domains. If you want to have your website audited by experts, reach out, and we will do it for free with zero obligation.

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SEO Ranking Factors Series

There’s a lot of buzz around SEO and with buzz comes myths or I like to call SEO folk tails. If you have the right data and techniques, SEO goes from superstitious techniques that resemble having your original Nintendo work to creating a repeatable plan that’s proven to work.

My goal here is to take “commonly known” ranking factors and interpret their actual effectiveness using big data. No, we didn’t pull these numbers ourselves, but we do use data from reliable sources like SEMrush for example.

In this series, we are going to interpret the factors, give suggestions on how to leverage them, and how to apply it to certain industries. You’ll be surprised by how low some of the hanging fruit is in some niches that can help you blow the competition out of the water in on searches.

What topics are we going to cover?

Obviously, there’s going to be loads of value in this seven-part series, but you probably want to know what’s going what we are covering.

Security – We are going to dive into how security certificates impact rankings and when you should use them relating to ranking.

Referring Domains – we explain backlinking profiles. This topic covers backlinks, referring domains, and how the impact your site’s rankings.

Video -Does video improve your search engine rankings? What value do videos bring to the table?

Content Length – How long do your blog post need to be to rank and create value in search engine eyes.

On-Page SEO Elements – Here we are going to talk about header tags, meta tags, and so on.

Website Visits – Here we will talk about unique visits, return visits, and the number of visits that impact your search engine ranking.

User Behavior – Are your users staying on the page? Do they go to other pages on your website? Does any of this matter? You bet yourself, why else would we talk about it as the last topic?

We are going to give in-depth explanations of each of these areas of SEO and how they impact your web presence on search engines.

Of course, if you’re impatient and don’t want to wait for the series, you can contact us to do a professional SEO analysis on your website for free. We show you what can be improved and generate a plan of action with no obligations.

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Digital Marketing Changing As We Know It.

In the waning weeks of 2015, Mike Barrett, president of San Francisco agency Heat, and his partners, John Elder and Steve Stone, faced the biggest decision of their careers as they mulled acquisition options for the shop, which, true to its name, had grown to rank among the hottest independents in the business.

Should they join one of the global agency holding companies showing interest?

Ultimately, however, Barrett’s team chose to go in a different direction.

Along with the usual holding-company suspects, a different breed of suitor was knocking on Heat’s door. The agency was generating interest from big professional services and IT consulting firms, which, in recent years, had begun buying shops to build out their marketing-focused operations and gain a larger slice of the client pie.

Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers rank among the most aggressive players, and Heat believed that a union with such a firm offered clear advantages. . .

Read full article here.

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