semrush ranking factors 2.0: semrush 2017 study with unreleased updates by olga andrienko

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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 @OLGANDRIENKOO.ANDRIENKO@SEMRUSH.COM