Keyword Evaluation

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Factors that impact ranking

When it comes to keyword evaluation, you want to get a sense of whether a keyword is within your site’s reach in the short term, or whether it will be too hard to rank for.

To help with this, let’s circle back to the three core categories that make up SEO.

Technical SEO

The first is technical SEO. If your technical SEO is very bad, that is, for example, if your site doesn’t function well, has broken pages, is slow to load or doesn’t work on mobile, it can mean it’s unlikely that certain pages will rank at all. However, to rank above your competitors, in most cases its influence on keyword ranking is relatively small – it amounts to maybe about 10% of all ranking factors. 

On-page optimization

What is more important is on-page optimization. It’s about three times as important as technical SEO for a keyword ranking. But it’s still not as important as you might think. Why? 

If you’re in a competitive industry and have perfect technical SEO and perfect on-page optimization, but very few backlinks, you’re unlikely to rank for popular keywords. 

Off-page optimization

The factor that plays the biggest role in keyword rankings is off-page optimization. This is the quality and number of links from other websites to your website, which are known as backlinks. Think of them as votes of confidence in your favor from other websites. Google uses these “votes” to help validate the reputation of your website. Many believe it is twice as important as on-page optimization, and possibly more so. That’s because backlinks act as social proof that your content and domain are reputable. In competitive industries, it’s almost impossible to rank for the top keywords without external factors like backlinks.

Landing page reputation

Suppose you have a landing page that you want to rank and do well on a search engine. To build up your off-page SEO, then you need to build up the authority of that landing page. 

Page authority (PA)

One of Moz’s metrics is called page authority. Page authority is a score that predicts how well a specific page will rank on SERPs. Its scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. You can improve page authority by either increasing the number of internal links to that page, within reason, or by generating external links or backlinks to the page. 

Domain authority (DA)

Another of Moz’s metrics is domain authority. It predicts how likely a website is to rank in SERPs. Domain authority scores again range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking. 

A webpage needs both reputation – page authority and domain authority – and relevancy to rank highly. To improve domain authority, you need to encourage backlinks to any page on the site. And to improve page authority, you can improve domain authority, or increase the number of backlinks and/or internal links to the page.

Moz’s metrics are less complex compared to Google’s metrics. Moz, like any external company, doesn’t have inside knowledge of how Google’s algorithm works. For that reason, it’s possible for Moz metrics to go down, while your Google ranking stays the same or even improves.

Alternative metrics

To Google, the number of people searching for your brand affects your reputation. So, to measure reputation, you should also consider brand strength and branded search volumes. 
You can also use alternative metrics from Ahrefs to measure reputation. Ahrefs URL Rating is an equivalent metric to Moz’s Page Authority, as is Ahrefs Domain Rating to Moz’s Domain Authority. These metrics are now widely used in the SEO industry. 
However, Moz’s metrics are more accessible because they’re free. Ubersuggest also has a free version, as well as a Chrome plugin that adds a toolbar effect to specific pages. 

Keyword difficulty

If you want a page to rank well, it’s important to know how competitive the keyword is that you’re targeting. Some keywords will be too difficult to rank in the short to medium term.
Several different tools provide keyword difficulty metrics. Unfortunately, most of these metrics are from paid plans. These include:

• SEMrush
• Moz
• KWFinder
• Ahrefs, and
• Ubersuggest

Let’s focus on the Moz metric. Using its keyword difficulty feature, you simply type in a keyword to see the difficulty level. As a rough estimate, anything over 50% is a high score.

But think of keyword difficulty on a relative scale to how your site ranks. If your site only ranks for keywords with a difficulty between 20–40%, it’s less likely it will rank for a keyword difficulty of 60%.

A free alternative to using a keyword difficulty metric is to review the search results for a keyword, to see what the page authority and domain authority metrics are for the ranked pages in the results. 

You can do this for free using a Chrome extension called Mozbar.

It’s important to note that a website with a lower page authority can outrank a website with a higher page authority. That’s because these are just Moz’s estimates of how reputable a page and the domain is. Google uses its own, more sophisticated metrics. In general, if you want to rank in the top few results of Google, you’ll likely need a similar, and sometimes better, domain and page authority. If your results are very different, you might be considering keywords that are too difficult for your website’s current reputation. 

Access Moz metrics

To access the Moz metrics:

• Sign up for the MozBar chrome extension. 
• Create a free Moz account and login. 
• Type a keyword or URL into Google, and see the PA/DA metrics listed below each search result. And
• Toggle the “M” extension icon on the top-right on or off as needed

When keywords are too competitive or generic

When you’re evaluating a keyword, going too competitive or too generic can lead to several problems:

You can have a real lack of SEO momentum, and that will decrease motivation. That’s the number one reason that people give up. 

• If you’re targeting keywords that are too competitive, you’re probably not going to get as many sales or leads. 
• It can set unrealistic expectations. Maybe you’re doing work for your boss, and he’s following 10 keywords that you’re targeting, but they’re out of your reach in the short to medium term. Think about keywords that you can rank for maybe the next three to six months.