By now, I guess you must have heard the saying: website ranking depends a lot on the quality of content or, more briefly, Content is King . After hearing that much, do you understand what that saying really means?
I am a person who likes numbers. I agree with the story Content is King but I also want to know specifically how much important content plays in the ranking results.
And how does Google identify quality or poor quality content, through UX (user experience) metrics like bounce rate, time on page or something else?
Luckily, to shed some light on how content affects SEO, today I'm going to present you with an in-depth analysis of nearly 40,000 keywords and approximately 4 million pieces of content by CognitiveSEO. And as a result, they are extremely influential on each other.
Compared to other SEO strategies, Content marketing is clearly a topic that attracts the attention of more businesses than ever. This issue is so hot that you should have updated the information already. But there's one thing I bet you still don't know: how exactly are SEO and content related?
Do you know how your content is actually affecting your keyword rankings? Or do you know exactly what key elements of your content Google requires?
First, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that after analyzing a huge dataset, Cognitive SEO has classified them according to the following criteria:
The relationship between content and Google rankings
Parameters used to measure content effectiveness
The main factors that help promote content to the top
And many other cool things that will definitely make a huge impact on your website through applying Entity Building on your website.
The bad news is that this article is over 3500 words long, so it will take you quite a while to read and digest it. But the time you spend going through the article is completely worth the knowledge you gain.
The importance of Content in promoting website rankings
Often the first part will be the best, most impressive part of the whole article. Therefore, at the very beginning of the Cognitive SEO research article, they immediately informed you of an interesting content discovery:
If you collect enough data, it will speak for itself!
As you can see in the image below, after analyzing the top positions of results displayed on Google, with about 40,000 keywords in all industries, they found a very strong correlation between content quality ( or content score) and rankings.
The higher the content score, the higher the ranking.
The content score here means the score that evaluates the quality of that content.
It will tell you how well the SEO optimization of a page is if only in terms of content. In this article, Cognitive SEO takes a scale from 0-100 to evaluate.
Cognitive SEO said that they have been thinking about figuring out how to calculate some content when considering their correlation with ranking order. And then, the idea of rating content quality scores was born. It sounds like fun!
This is the content score of the top 20 websites ranked on Google.
You and I both know the higher the quality of the content, the higher your chances of ranking will be. At the last offline session Entity Building 2.0: Let your website talk, I also made it clear: content, backlinks and brain rank are the top 3 ranking factors in the Google algorithm.
You have also witnessed that from the beginning of 2018 until now, Google has had 3 major updates in January, March & May for the Google Panda algorithm to cut down on poor quality content.
If you are not sure what Panda is and how to deal with it, check out my 2 articles on Panda Secrets here:
What is Google Panda? The harsh truth 95% of SEOs don't know (Part 1)
Google Panda Update 2018: The harsh truth that 95% of SEOs don't know (Part 2
Then, from the chart above, what points should you pay attention to:
The first thing you need to pay attention to when observing this chart is the quality content score. You see, it's all within the mean range - almost two-thirds of the 0-100 scale. No score is too high or too low. Not only that, based on the distances represented in the figure, it can be seen that the scores are fairly evenly distributed – there are no sudden jumps or drops, everything is in a smooth straight line.
Another important point to note is that the straight line represents a very smooth (almost perfect, corner to corner) uptrend. There are only 4 points on the chart where they don't follow the rule "high content quality score equals good position in the rankings. Fortunately, these points are very small, almost insignificant.
Last but not least, there is another visual cue to be found in the chart. You see, the range from 55 down to 50, roughly evenly splits the first 10 places. This sign is also not very special, but it is consistent with other results, and at the same time proves one thing:
==> There is a strong correlation between content score and ranking position.
Commercial keywords & brand keywords: Are they relevant to rankings?
According to statistics, there are more than 1 billion websites in the world and this entire website has the ability to target all kinds of keywords.
In general, the keywords that Cognitive SEO has chosen to analyze are divided into 2 categories: brand keywords and commercial keywords (short keywords).
Commercial keywords in relation to rankings
Just looking at the chart below, you will clearly see that for content articles written about commercial keywords, the content score has a great influence on rankings. The range from #1 to #10 is 10 points apart.
It is difficult to get accurate information about the number of backlinks a large website has. But with content, it's different, it's in your control, you can take advantage of this.
The link between brand keywords and rankings
In fact, the close relationship between content score and ranking order can be applied to many types of keywords, even brand keywords. Specifically, the higher the content score for articles containing brand keywords, the higher the post ranking.
However, this correlation has a particularly remarkable property. As you can see in the chart above, the content in the top position has a content score that is not much different from the content in the 5th position (#1-46; #5-45). And this is also the case with other positions behind.
So, what does this situation mean? Why is that?
Content is very important when considering articles about brand keywords. But it will be less important when considering other keywords. Therefore, I believe that brand names being accelerated to the top of the rankings are due to the impact of other ranking factors.
Take for example the image below, “Brand Mentions” can be both a commercial keyword and a brand keyword.
Although the content score for the keyword in the brandmentions.com website is not as high as the score of other pages targeting the keyword, it is still in the lead because it is the brand name.
This proves that Google is quite quick in semantic search and above all it understands the user's intent (Rank Brain). Not to mention that the brand itself is more likely to have registered ownership of the brand keyword and as such, it is obviously always at the top of the rankings.
As can be seen, for brand keywords, content score is very important. So, just because you write about branded keywords doesn't mean you don't have to put in the effort to create high-quality content.
How do domain and website authority affect the ranking process?
It is a sad and happy truth that content alone is not enough to boost website rankings. In terms of search results rankings (SERP), there are also many other ranking factors, 2 of which are domain and website authority.
Cognitive SEO used the phrase “quality score” in this study because it included several other factors (domain term, number of incoming links, etc.)
The link between domains and rankings
From the screenshot below, we can easily see that there is a strong relationship between domain quality score and ranking position.
However, this relationship is not always “smooth” in a straight line. You see, the domain quality score of page 1 (46.5) is almost the same as that of page 4 (46).
Therefore, while the domain may seem important in ranking, there are other factors, such as the aforementioned content score, that may be more important than the domain as a whole.
The more reputable and powerful the website, the higher the ranking
When it comes to authority score, website power also refers to a strong relationship between a website's authority and its rankings. The higher the reputation score, the better the ranking.
If, after looking at this chart, you have thoughts like, “I have no chance of improving my rankings because the website is not yet highly authoritative”, then I advise you to think again.
How does a site have high authority? That's when that website only specializes in a certain area, an authority site in that field. Now, the more quality backlinks you will get and the more quality content you write, the higher your score will be.
And how can you become the primary source of information that users always have to come to you when they search for information about your niche? (I will detail below how you can build Semantic content applications in Entity Building).
How to make your content rank high on Google?
This is what you most want to read. I know that
The first thing you need to keep in mind when looking at any chart is the range of variation, the volatility. In Cognitive SEO's research, it seems that content must be between 1400 and 2000 words long to reach the top 20 of Google.
As can be seen, the minimum length of content that ranks 1 is about 1700 words.
Before that, I used to recommend that you write at least 1500 words long, right? Now you should write a little longer to reach 1700 words.
Fluctuations in word count of top 20 Google content articles
I also mentioned this through the article 1,000,000 page research results on factors that help to get to the top 10 in google
The next thing you should do is follow the overall uptrend of the chart. And here, things seem to be more complicated.
With the chart above, it looks simple at first, but looking closer you realize what is interesting is:
Long content is better than short content
There are 11 points on the chart that tend to decrease directly as the content length decreases, corresponding to a decrease in rankings. Although the average line between points is not straight down to 1 circuit, there are points that are skewed but clearly the rule is. And even in positions that deviate from the rule you will see in the next 2 points it will return to the moving average.
The second interesting observation is that this rule only shows from the 3rd position onwards, while the first three positions show the opposite trend – the fewer words, the higher the ranking.
The content length of the top 1 position, although less than the number of words in the second or third position, is still more than the 15 or 20 position (75%).
I'm sure you'll feel a bit confused, right?
In general, in addition to the first 3 positions that do not follow the rule, the remaining points are still consistent with the relationship between content length and ranking order.
When we put the above together, we get two things:
If the number of words is small, in a certain period of time it can cause your rankings to drop.
Word counts between 1600-2000 words are more likely to be in the top 10 of Google.
Content Quality Score
I have used the phrase content score many times in the past. Now let's give you a clear definition of it because the content quality score is the core of this whole study.
What we need is to know specifically the link between content and Google position. But we cannot consider content in general, so there must be a tool to measure the impact of content.
And from there we will know what the Content score is .
What is Content Score?
Basically, the Content Quality Score is recommended by Cognitive SEO to reflect the importance of words to a piece of data in an entire document. This is an index proposed through studying the influence of content on rankings on google (this research article is also a study by Cognitive SEO). Specifically, Cognitive SEO drew the following conclusions:
Simply put, the content score index tells you how optimized a website is for SEO in terms of content, with a scale of 0 to 100.
A high score indicates that the content is well optimized. Not only that, but these metrics also tell you if the content is doing okay? and why?
How does Content Score work?
Cognitive SEO starts from analyzing the top ranking results from Google, especially focusing on evaluating the content of those websites.
Then, they combined with some algorithms to evaluate semantics, topic (topic) and keywords used in those pages. Note that here I am not considering the effect of HTML tags (h1, h2…). It only focuses on the quality and relevance of the content. From there, try to pinpoint the factors that have contributed to driving the content to the top of the rankings.
Based on in-depth analysis, they will score content for each ranked content post; mark the main keys contained in those articles.
Building a Topic Cluster helps Google understand the topics of the articles, thereby increasing the content score. Learn more in the article " What is a topic cluster? 7 steps to deploy Topic cluster for website 2019
How does Cognitive SEO conduct research?
What Cognitive SEO actually did was look at the content, domain, site authority, and more data that came from about 3.7 million pages ranking for over 40,000 keywords. They took the first 100 results displayed for each keyword. They also have to conduct a thorough analysis, interweaving them as much as possible. In the end, they also came to some great conclusions.
How to improve my content score?
Once you've read this far, I'm guessing you're now anxious to see how you can make the most of this research to improve your content score?
If your content score contributes to your website rankings, you need to improve it
And the great thing is that now in the world there is an SEO tool that helps you calculate the content score called The Keyword Tool and Content Assistant. The unfortunate thing here is that this tool is made by Cognitive SEO itself, its paid version is only available in the current English market
This tool tells you the content score on any content that needs monitoring to improve it. Unfortunately, it currently only parses English. But Vietnamese sites can still learn a lot from this tool. To learn more about this tool, you can refer to the article How Content Influences Rankings – What We Found Out After Analyzing 3.7 Million Pages
But don't worry, I will guide you to a completely free tool so you can create the content that google loves, removing the words that google wants the content you should mention to understand your topic. more, see you as an expert in the field more. And that is the construction of Semantic Content through the Text Razor tool that I mentioned in great detail the concept & how to do it in the article What is Entity? Why Entity Building is GTV's research direction in 2018?
EPILOGUE
Through this research article, Cognitive SEO has clearly shown us the importance of content in promoting website rankings. Besides, they also teach you how to improve your content score effectively, remember that long content always creates a higher authority with Google, at least helps you stay in the top 20 on the rankings.
In addition, they provide The Keyword Tool and Content Assistant to help you check the progress of your content quickly. However, this tool only accepts English text analysis. Because of that, I suggest you a more convenient tool than TextRazor. Through Text-Razor, you successfully build Semantic Content that is content that Google loves and contains the keywords Google expects to see you as an expert in a certain field.
Hopefully after this article, you can create high-quality content yourself by optimizing keywords, exploring the power of your domain, and improving your website's reputation in the eyes of Google. Of course, there are many other factors that contribute to the ranking process, such as: backlinks or social media usage. However, content is still a factor that is both easy to control and has a significant impact, isn't it still the most profitable to take advantage of content exploitation?
#gtvseo #gtv_seo #content_anh_huong_toi_seo
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