#SMX#11A @semrush
SEMrush 2017 study with unreleased updates
SEMrush Ranking Factors 2.0
#SMX#11A @semrush
June 2017
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Biggest scope of data EVERtaken for such study
On-page factors
Traffic data
Referring domains
Top 100 positions for 600,000keywords (200,000 from Google US)
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Keywords are grouped by search volume as the competition levelper group is different.
Keyword grouping
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Search Volume Groups
VERY HIGH
HIGH
MEDIUM
LOW
10,001 and up
1,001 – 10,000
101 – 1,000
1 - 100
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
RANKING FACTORS THAT MATTER
AND THE ONES THAT DON’T
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Website Security (HTTPS)
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Website security (HTTPS)
65% of domains in TOP-3 for high volume keywords are already secure
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MOVE TO HTTPS. EVEN IF IT’S NOT A MASSIVE FACTOR, IT WILL HELP WITH
CONVERSIONS & BUILD TRUST.
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Content Length
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Content length
Content length within TOP-3 is 45% longer than content length for 20th position in ALL search volume groups
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Content for long-tail keywords is 20% longer than for short-head
Pages ranking for short head and long tail keywords are NOT the same ones.
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MAKE SURE YOUR CONTENT LENGTH IS SUFFICIENT. MAKE SURE IT’S RELEVANT
AND MATCHES USER INTENT.
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CHECK YOUR COMPETITION AND MAKE SURE THEY DON’T OUTPERFORM IN TERMS OF LENGTH / AMOUNT OF
WORDS – BUT KEEP IT RELEVANT.
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Keywords
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Keyword in title
35% of domains ranking for high volume keywords don’t have the keyword in title
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Keyword in anchor
Keyword existence in the anchor doesn’t have any significant importance for rankings. Even for high volume group only 8% of link anchors include the keyword.
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Website traffic
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Total website visits
Number of visits matters for high volume keywords.For lower volume keyword the impact is insignificant.
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Graph changes only when we excluded direct traffic
Search traffic has no significant impact on rankings.
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User signals
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Bounce rate increases after TOP-3
Possible reasons: content is less relevant, site loads slower, there is more trust towards the domains on first positions
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CHECK PAGES WITH HIGHER BOUNCE RATE AND KEYWORDS THESE PAGES
RANK FOR. MAKE THE CONTENT MORE RELEVANT TO REDUCE THE BOUNCE RATE.
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Pages per session
Visitors coming to the website from search visit 3 – 3.5 pages per one session.
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USER SIGNALS MIGHT BE TOO NOISY FOR GOOGLE, BUT THEY INDICATE THAT
USERS ARE NOT ENGAGING WITH YOUR SITE AS THEY SHOULD BE!
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Referring domains
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Number of referring domains
The 1st position has almost twice as much referring domains as pages on 10th position (~10K difference)
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BACKLINKS STILL MATTER FOR SEO. PROPER HIGH QUALITY LINK BUILDING
WILL HELP YOU RANK HIGHER FOR KEYWORDS WITH VOLUME OF LESS
THAN 10,000 QUERIES
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Follow backlinks
Graphs for the number of follow-backlinks, the total number of backlinks and referring domains have identical patterns.
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Research at a glance
Backlinks still matter for SEO, especially for keywords with <10K volume User behavior signals impact your rankings
Keywords in tags have become less significant
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WHAT FACTOR IS MOST IMPORTANT?
New approach
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Forget about correlation!
CORRELATION
VS.
IMPORTANCE
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Let’s get nerdy: A little bit about Random Forest
The Pairwise Approach:
Compared factors for each two URLs
Random Forest: 2/3 of data is randomly
distributed to grow millions of decision trees
Random Forest: 1/3 of data is used for voting
and estimating attribute (factors) importance
All factors are analyzed at the same time!
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Importance of 17 factors
How Google differentiates who to rank among websites that did on-page SEO right
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THANK YOU & SEE YOU AT THE NEXT #SMX
Staytunedfortheupdates!->semrush.com/ranking-factors
OLGA ANDRIENKO
HEAD OF GLOBAL MARKETING @[email protected]
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