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Why should you use Squirrly’s Live Assistant?
To answer this question, we need to look at what this feature from Squirrly SEO actually does.
The Live Assistant checks your article in real-time to make sure it’s optimized for SEO and therefore has the best chances to rank on Google.
So, basically, it acts like an evolved on-page SEO Checklist, checking your writing, and guiding your steps towards 100% Optimization.
So, why should you use it?
Here’s a pretty good reason to start with:
“On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks.” (source)
If you want to be among those first results that get most of the clicks, you should make sure you are checking all the boxes that help you achieve that goal.
And optimizing your articles is one of those checkboxes.
We’re not the only ones stressing how important it is to optimize your content if you want to rank on Google.
Top SEO experts have their own SEO Checklists where they talk about essential things you should focus on to achieve better rankings. And content optimization is almost always at the top of their list.
Now, when they talk about content optimization, SEO experts will often break this process down into smaller actions, like adding the keyword in your titles, adding your keywords in the first part of your post, and so on.
The reason I’m telling you this is that the majority of those must-do tasks suggested by them are actually covered by Squirrly’s Live Assistant feature.
The rest of them are either covered by our Focus Pages feature or the Audit feature.
I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have a computer keep tabs of everything I need to do to rank higher on Google – than try to make sense of everything on my own.
So, without further ado, let’s see what today’s renowned SEO experts have included in their SEO Checklists when it comes to content optimization – and how all those checks are covered by Squirrly’s Live Assistant.
First, we will take a look at some statistics, as there is no better confirmation that you should be working on something than some good ol’ stats.
Here’s one that speaks volumes about the importance of keywords being present in the URL when it comes to ranking higher on Google:
A study of 1 Million Pages revealed that Webpages with their target keyword in their URL tend to rank higher in Google than pages that don’t have the keyword in the URL. (source)
“Write an SEO-friendly URL that includes the primary keyword.” – Alexa
“Before anything else, your URL has to be descriptive and meaningful (please avoid weird number and random letter combinations!). And of course the URL is a very good place for your keywords.” – SEMrush
“In all, both long and short, keyword-rich, generic URLs do well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), especially when the content is useful and easy to implement.” – Neil Patel
“Google likes URLs that contain your title and or keywords in the post, but shorter URLs are generally better.” – Kinsta
” …the URL is an opportunity to present a clean directory structure that includes keywords and context as to what the page is about.” – Search Engine Journal
” …another benefit of using descriptive URLs: They tend to include your target keyword.” – Ahrefs
“Your URL helps Google understand what your page is all about. And a keyword-rich URL can improve your organic CTR.” – Backlinko
As you can see, we are not the only ones that highlight the importance of having the keyword present in the URL.
We are now taking a look at the title. The title should be Google Friendly and should also contain the keyword. Just like before, we’ll check out some statistics first:
“It’s no secret that you should use your keyword in your title tag. But not as many people know that WHERE you put your keyword matters. Specifically, you want to put your keyword in the front of your title tag.” – Backlinko
“Be mindful of best practices for length and the keywords that are most relevant to the page topic and write and implement static tags or ensure that you have dynamic formulas in place to populate the title.” – Search Engine Journal
“It is important that you have your main “focus keyword” that you want to rank for in your blog post or page title tag.” – Kinsta
“Title tags: Title tags define the title of your web page or document. They’re mostly used to display preview snippets of your web pages. When you’re writing your title tag, it should be short, clear and descriptive but don’t duplicate content from the page content.” – Neil Patel
“Write a title that is appealing to both search engines and audiences. Serve search engines by including the primary keyword near the beginning of the headline, and serve audiences by writing a descriptive yet concise title that tells readers why the content is valuable.” – Alexa
“It is at the top of our on page SEO checklist and is critical for attracting the user’s attention and increasing the page CTR.” – SEMrush
“…it’s important to optimize for long-tail variations too.
Doing this is easy. Sprinkle them throughout your content wherever they make sense. Just don’t overdo it or shoehorn keywords where they don’t belong—the readability of your content should always take priority.” – Ahrefs
“While much of the old school focus on latent semantic indexing, keyword density, and formulas for how many times words need to appear in a page are obsolete, you can’t ignore the fact that body copy on the page often accounts for the biggest block of indexable content.” – Search Engine Journal
“And, over the years, Clark and his prolific team have produced some of the best blog posts and articles around. Through consistent and proper use of keyword phrase content marketing techniques, Brian Clark turned a blog (copyblogger.com) into a $7 million digital company.” – Neil Patel
See what renowned industry experts are saying about this.
“…don’t obsess over using a keyword 37 times. Do what’s natural and focus on the bigger picture and you’ll be in good shape.” – Search Engine Journal
“As a best practice, use the term two to three times per 100 words to create a 2-3% keyword density. Try to avoid going over this limit to avoid keyword stuffing issues.” – Alexa
Let’s hear it from praised SEO experts.
“Fail to convince readers that your page offers what they want within a few seconds and they’ll hit that back button faster than you can say “dwell time.”” – Ahrefs
“Even when you create SEO content for the purpose of ranking, always remember that your number one focus should be your readers. Create high-quality content that is valuable, useful, and well-written.” – Alexa
“But it is not just Google who decides if your content deserves a higher position – it is your readers as well. Google doesn’t read your work and grade you with an “A” for excellent wording or exclusiveness of insights; it estimates a level of interest for your article by taking into account users’ behavior and your text’s availability.” – SEMrush
“Be mindful of best practices for length and the keywords that are most relevant to the page topic and write and implement static tags or ensure that you have dynamic formulas in place to populate the title.” – Search Engine Journal
“…remember that title tags not only affect SEO but also your clickthrough rate (CTR). Some have reported seeing 20% increases in CTR simply by making small tweaks to their titles.” – Kinsta
“When you’re writing your title tag, it should be short, clear and descriptive but don’t duplicate content from the page content.” – Neil Patel
One of the first things a possible customer will see when searching for something on Google is the Title of a post.
You might be tired of hearing about keywords all the time.
But the reason we keep bringing them up is that they are extremely important to your SEO success. And we’re not the only ones who say it.
“Don’t skip out on including your focus keywords in the body copy as you need to tie into the context you’re building in the other areas up to this point.” – Search Engine Journal
“The first paragraph of your post and pages content in WordPress is very important! It is always recommended to add your focus keyword within the first paragraph if possible. The reason is that Google crawls content from top to bottom, and if it finds your keyword there it can help deem your article as more relevant to the topic.” – Kinsta
“You’ll also notice that when you start creating in-depth content, you’ll see a corresponding increase in traffic from long-tail searches, a very specific keyword phrase indicating buyer positioning and urgency.” – Neil Patel
“To provide users with the most relevant results for their particular search terms, use your target keywords within the first 100-150 words of your text and add some additional weight by placing semantically related words.” – SEMrush
Making sure that keywords are included not only in the URL and the title but also within the content can and will make the difference in terms of whether a page ranks on Google or not.
Make sure you don’t just include your keyword in the introduction but throughout the article/page as well.
Many SEO experts agree that bolding your keywords is a content optimization practice that can improve your chances of ranking.
“When you make pages easier to read, you’ll be raising the user’s level of expertise and so increasing the chance that many will be linking back to your page. This indirect technique will increase search engine rankings (SEO) and is the solely method I feel bold and italics can have an effect on your page.” – SEO Clerk
“But, that has changed (as all things do in SEO) and we are glad to report that bolding your primary keyword in article content does give a small bump. Pretty Cool huh!” – SEO Intelligence Agency
You should use your keywords in the headline as well but don’t overdo it. Don’t use your keyword in all your headlines, as it will not help you get better SEO results.
You can see what experts are saying about this as well:
“Make sure to include your keyword in H1, H2 or H3 tags.” – Backlinko
“Scannability. Having your keyword in the H1 helps to reinforce that the visitor is in the right place. It makes it clear that your content tackles the topic they likely Googled before arriving on your page.” – Ahrefs
“If you can use heading tags, do so in an organized fashion and make sure they use keywords that are relevant. Try to use just one H1 tag and have it be the first.” – Search Engine Journal
“The H1 tag is one of your most important header and should contain your focus keyword. Additional headers could also include your keyword or long-tail variations of your keyword.” – Kinsta
“H1, H2, and H3 header tags are still super important. You want to make sure that the title of your page is the H1 and so forth. But just to check on all of that would be good.” – Moz
“Tie your content back to the main keyword by using the primary keyword in at least one of your subheadings. Use it in more than one subheading if it is natural and makes sense.” – Alexa
“In technical SEO language – don’t forget to use H1…H6 tags for your subheads (and place your target keywords in the subheads, of course).” – SEMrush
Using images in your blog articles can help you get 94% more views.
However, it’s not only important that you use images in your content. You also need to make sure that you use keywords in the alt text of the image to help search engines better understand your content.
“The images you use say a lot about your content.
Unfortunately, Google is really bad at reading images.
So to help them understand your images, you want to optimize your image alt tags and filenames.” – Backlinko
“The purpose of alt tags is to offer some context to the reader should the image fail to load (or if the visitor is using a screen reader).
For that reason, you should make sure alt tags are descriptive—this will often result in the natural inclusion of your target keywords.
Alt text is also helpful for ranking in Google Images.” – Ahrefs
“One of the biggest red flags I get in results from accessibility and on-page auditing reporting tools is missing alt text. Alt text is helpful for the search engines to understand what an image is about.” – Search Engine Journal
“ALT tags are used by Google to see how relevant your image is to the content around it. […] You should always add ALT text to your images. And if you haven’t been, go back and do it now.” – Kinsta
“Make the content more interesting to readers and show search engines that the content is valuable by adding at least one image to the page.” – Ahrefs
“…add the primary keyword to the image alt tag for the graphic.” – Ahrefs
“Descriptive image file names and the use of ALT tags can help images from your page appear in Google image search results and help those that are visually impaired understand the page better.” – SEMrush
As you saw from this article, Squirrly’s Live Assistant makes it easy to follow expert-approved best practices for optimizing content – so that you can do SEO like a PRO and give your content the best chances to succeed out there.
How often do you use this feature from Squirrly?
When it comes to successful SEO, it’s not enough to do just a few things right.
There are many pieces in the SEO puzzle that need to fit together to create an image of success.
And considering that there are more than 200 ranking factors that Google takes into account to rank your pages, doing the work necessary to get every piece of the puzzle right can take up a lot of time and effort.
However, not all ranking factors are equal in Google’s eyes.
Certain factors might influence Google’s algorithm more, and some you can use to compensate for the ones you still haven’t checked off your list.
You can make up for the fact that you haven’t had time to build strength in certain “muscles” of your site by being smart with how you craft your strategy.
You can get Google’s attention even if you’re competing with bigger sites that have more authority than you.
You just need to know what to focus on.
To learn how to do this, you need to familiarize yourself with two main pillars of SEO:
By understanding these key concepts and how they influence your chances of ranking, you’ll be better equipped to come up with a ranking strategy. One that takes into consideration the level your site is at right now.In other words, you’ll know which path to take and what to focus on to achieve the best results.
Okay, so let’s get to it then and start with the first one from our list: Authority.
The best way to explain what Authority refers to in an SEO context is to use an example.
Let’s say you want to learn more about Impressionism, the famous 19th-century art movement. You could ask your next-door neighbor about it.
But unless your neighbor is a knowledgeable art teacher with years of experience, chances are that you are not going to learn much this way.
Another thing you could do is go to an art university.
You could talk to one of the professors there; someone who specializes in Impressionism and whose knowledge has been vetted by an authority in this domain (the art university which employs him).
Or you could go to the library and buy some books on this topic who have been recommended by other readers who are interested in this art movement.
Would you rather get your information from your next-door neighbor who doesn’t know much about art? Or from an authoritative source, like an art professor or an insightful book which many others have bought?
The answer is obvious – and authority plays a key role in how you’ve made your decision.
Search Engines also take Authority into account when figuring out which results to serve their users.
Remember, their top priority is to make their users happy (you can learn more about this in our Ultimate SEO Beginner’s Guide).
Therefore, search engines like Google want to provide the most authoritative (relevant) results that perfectly match their users’ search queries.
Now, the question is: how do search engines evaluate authority? We’ll answer that next.
There are several things that Search Engines look at to determine Authority, but the two main categories that take center stage are:
1. Content (which is also part of the relevance pillar)
2. Links
A search engine will read and analyze the content as well as other elements like the page language, the structure, and more to determine how well the page covers the topic – and how useful it might be to a visitor.
After the search engine understands the content of the page and indexes it, it will move to external signals to determine the level of authority of the page for its intended topic.
To do this, it will take a look at the links that pages have received from other websites.
It’s not just the number of links that counts, though.
The quality of those links matters as well.
Getting relevant, trustworthy sources to link to your content is what you want.
So, you shouldn’t just focus on link quantity to build the Authority of your site. If you are solely focusing on quantity with no regard for quality, you may be sabotaging your SEO efforts.
Why?
Google might penalize you if it looks like the links you got were obtained in an artificial way instead of an organic way.
It’s better to focus on quality and have relevant domains linking back to you.
For example:
Say you’ve published an ultimate guide on dog food, and you receive two backlinks, one from Bob’s Dog Training School website and one from Jay’s Nails and Bolts eCommerce store.
Which one of the two do you think is more valuable?
Ding!Ding!Ding!
You got it!
It’s the one from the dog training school, as it is more RELEVANT. It tells Google that your guide is pretty good, as others in this niche are recommending it by linking to it.
Remember that the relevance of the linking page and site impacts how valuable the link really is.
Now that you know more about what authority is, let’s move on to Relevance – the second pillar of SEO we’re talking about today.
There’s a whole lot of content being published every second. We’re talking millions of new pages every single day.
In fact, for every search query a user makes, Google has to choose from about 22 Million pages that it can display.
So, it needs a way to assess which websites in their index are best able to meet the user’s requirements.
It needs to figure out which of the pages it can display are actually relevant (when we talk about relevance, we talk about how appropriate a specific page is for a specific query).
The better a text or the content of a page matches a search query, the more likely it is that it will achieve a good ranking.
To sort the wheat from the chaff and provide relevant results to their users, search engines such as Google use complex algorithms that analyze the content on your page, how that content is structured, and more.
Optimizing your pages for keywords is the best tactic you can use to create search relevance. You can learn more about this here.
In the old days of SEO, it was often enough to just use the exact keyword as the search query in the body of the content numerous times to rank for that keyword.
Now, the algorithm is a lot more sophisticated.
You have to make sure you are using the right SEO keywords when optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions, as well as the content.
Then, you need to pay attention to the website architecture, inner linking, proper rendering, and indexability, among others.
As you can see, improving your website’s search relevance can take a bit of work. But if you’re using features from Squirrly such as the Live Assistant and the Focus Pages, it’s not that complicated.
Plus, the benefits are considerable.
Data from our study suggests that one can compensate for having pages with low authority by working on optimizing their content.
This is most evident for sites that are in the 40 to 49 SEO score segment in our study. (SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook).
In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing a lot of time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
That said, let’s get back to our 40 to 49 SEO segment.
To make it easier to see the relationship between Authority and SEO relevance:
If you take a look at the image above, you can see how the metric: SEO Score per article is influenced by the metric: Number of keywords Article is optimized for per 100 pages.
The metric: SEO Score per article is directly proportional to the: Number of keywords Article is optimized for per 100 pages.
What does this mean?
It means that the sites that are optimizing for more keywords are also paying closer attention to on-page SEO; making sure they are optimizing their content by incorporating keywords in strategic places across their pages.
Now, by looking at the Page Authority per article metric, we can see that the site that has optimized for the largest number of keywords has the lowest authority, but is still able to compete with the rest of the sites included in this study.
That’s because the owner of that site is focused on improving his page’s search relevance.
Of course, the pillars we talk about in this article are connected to one another. You can influence one by focusing on the other and vice versa.
By working on improving your search relevance, you also improve your chances of becoming an authoritative source of content.
Having a website full of well-researched and optimized content that is relevant to your niche will help Google see you as an expert in the industry.
This will help increase your authority and your chances of ranking among the top positions in Google.
Now you know more about two key pillars of SEO:
By optimizing using the SEO Live Assistant to create search relevance, you can compete with other domains with much bigger authority than yours. If you want to see how we managed to outrank Amazon (yes, the Amazon) using this method, you should read this.
That said, it’s also true that by being a more authoritative site, you have a better chance to rank for more keywords (without having to work as much to create search relevance as sites with lower authority).
Which of these two pillars of SEO are you focusing on right now?
It’s interesting to see common SEO mistakes they make. Even though they’re popular, they could be getting more search traffic than they currently do. And you can see how easy it would be to fix such mistakes.
Throughout this year, we analyzed 105 sites to reveal common SEO issues that impact a site’s performance in Google Search results.
The sites we chose for this analysis are popular, top-performing sites that have significant marketing budgets. They are all sites that people perceive as being successful and whose performance is well above the average.
Still, through this study, we were able to identify SEO mistakes for each one of the 105 sites and discover which are the issues that are most common among these sites.
We were curious to see just how many of the issues we uncovered for these sites are actually covered by Squirrly SEO.
More specifically, we were interested to know how many of those issues can be prevented and fixed by using Squirrly SEO features.
This article includes our key findings.
For this study, we analyzed 105 sites.
We picked sites that are popular among the people in our community (the first 25 sites that made it into our study were chosen based on who our users are following on Twitter).
The rest of the sites which we included in this analysis are a mix of popular sites in the digital marketing field and sites from Alexa lists.
Therefore, all 105 sites are popular sites that people view as being successful and trustworthy.
We mostly used ContentLook and Squirrly SPY to analyze the websites and acquire the data we were interested in.
For each SEO issue that we’ve identified as part of our study, we’ll provide an explanation to help you better understand what that issue refers to – and why it’s a problem.
Then, we’ll show how Squirrly SEO helps with each particular SEO error and issue included in this study.
You’ll walk away with a better understanding of common SEO issues, and you’ll know exactly how to fix or prevent them for your site.
Every site we analyzed had at least one SEO error. The majority of sites we looked at had over 8 issues each.
More specifically, out of the 105 sites analyzed:
All of the issues we identified are issues that impact a site’s performance and can influence rankings in a negative way.
All of the issues identified are issues that you can easily avoid and fix by using Squirrly SEO features.
Now, let’s go into every one of the issues that we discovered.
Let’s see what they are all about, how exactly they impact performance – and what you can do to fix or prevent such issues for your site.
URLs that have symbols like: -,!, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), [, ], ?, {, }, ;, :, “ are not SEO-friendly.
The average number of pages this error is on is 13.94.
You should only use words, numbers, and dashes in your URLs so that Google can easily read them.
You can see if you have this issue for pages that you are trying to rank on Google via the Focus Pages panel.
Google’s display titles max out (currently) at 600 pixels.
That is the equivalent of about 80 characters, depending on what characters you use.
Neil Patel recommends that you keep your title tag under 65 characters so it will be visible.
In one lesson by MOZ, we see that they recommend that you keep your title tag between 50-60 characters.
According to Orbit Media, the title length should be 55 characters.
The average number of pages that have this issue/site is 28.7.
Having very long titles won’t necessarily impact your SEO performance.
We saw that the best title length can mean different things from one site to the next.
For example, we’ve had a client for which long titles worked best.
However, as a best practice, you should try to keep your titles in the 10 to 75 characters range.
You will be advised in real-time to keep your titles under 75 characters when optimizing your articles using the Live Assistant feature.
When you have a title that is shorter than 10 characters, it will be hard for Google and other search engines to understand what your page is about.
The average number of pages that have this issue (across all sites) is 12.
That means that about 12 pages /site have a <title> tag length that is too short.
We recommend that you keep your title length within the 10 to 75 characters range.
You’ll be notified if your pages have this issue via the SEO Audit.
Plus, you will also be advised in real-time to make your titles longer than 10 characters when optimizing your articles using the Live Assistant feature.
According to impactbnd.com, the average content length of the top position Google article contains 2,416 words.
In order for Google or any other search engine to understand what is on your page/article, you need content.
If you have just a few words written on that page/article, then there is a big chance that Google will NOT understand exactly what you want to say or how your particular page can help others.
This is what we call thin content.
There is a purpose for it as well (meaning: there are times when you might choose to publish Thin Content), but NOT if you want to rank your pages and outrank your competition.
There is an eternal debate about how many words an article/page you want to get on the 1st page of Google should have.
Some say it should be around 1,500 words long, while others recommend a word count of over 2,200 words.
In 2016, Brian Dean and Eric Van Buskirk analyzed 1 million websites to find out how long an article should be to rank high on Google.
This is what the study revealed:
“We found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.”
And in 2019, Dean and BuzzSumo reviewed 912 million blog posts to discover that long-form content gets more backlinks.
“Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles. Therefore, long-form content appears to be ideal for backlink acquisition.”
Neil Patel also recommends you write more than 2,200 words in your articles.
Our own study showed that the average number of words the articles have for all sites is: 2,159.
If we are to take a look at the SEO score and the number of words per article, we can see that the sites that have an SEO score between 40 and 49 write an average of 2,998 words.
The average number of pages that have this issue per site is 14.
If you are not new to Squirrly, then you already know that we recommend you write at least 1,500 words on an article/page you want to rank on Google.
We help you keep track of this aspect for the pages you want to rank via our Focus Pages feature.
According to Google:
“Good meta descriptions are short blurbs that describe accurately the content of the page. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.”
If you don’t customize your meta description, Google will usually display the first sentence of the post/page as your meta description.
The average number of such pages is 32.6.
It’s simple, go through the pages you want to rank and customize your meta descriptions to get more clicks.
You will always be up to date with all the errors your site has with Squirrly’s SEO Audit.
You can also see if you have this issue on a page you are working on in the Focus Pages panel.
URLs that are too long may affect your chances of ranking.
How come?
Google will start to think that your page targets a specific long-tail phrase instead of a broad phrase.
According to a study made by Quicksprout:
“In regards to URL length, there’s no better place to look than Google itself.
The average URL length for Gmail is 59 characters.
The average URL length for Webmaster Tools is 90 characters.
The average URL length for the Google blog is 76 characters.”
They also analyzed the length of the URLs according to the results on each page and found some interesting results.
“URLs ranked in the top 10 results on average contained 37 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 20 results on average contained 35 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 30 results on average contained 39 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 40 results on average contained 41 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 50 results on average contained 36 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 60 results on average contained 32 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 70 results on average contained 48 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 80 results on average contained 45 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 90 results on average contained 41 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 100 results on average contained 38 characters.”
Try to keep your URLs between 37 to 76 characters.
Squirrly will let you know how to make your Links SEO-friendly for pages you are trying to rank via Focus Pages.
No need to worry about this; with Squirrly, you’ll know if your pages have this issue – and how to fix it.
Meta descriptions are short snippets meant to describe the content on the page.
Meta descriptions are featured on search engine results and influence whether a user will click on a listing or not.
Google doesn’t like it when it sees the same description on multiple pages that you own, so you shouldn’t have the same meta description on more than one page if you expect great SEO results.
Make sure that every page has a unique meta description.
Squirrly SEO makes it easy to ensure that every page has a unique meta description with its Bulk SEO feature.
Plus, Squirrly will always let you know about all the errors your site has, including duplicate descriptions, via the SEO audit.
You can also see if you have this issue on the page you are working on in the Focus Pages panel.
When you have the duplicate < title > tags error, it means that two or more pages in your site have the SAME < title > tag.
< Title > tags should be unique for each and every page on your site.
If you have the same < title >tag on more than one page, Google will only index one of them. That’s because it is difficult for the search engine to understand which is more important than the other.
Squirrly PRO helps you with this in a number of ways:
Having more than one < title > tag on a page makes it difficult for Google or any other search engine to know what the content is about, or if it’s a good match for what their users are searching for.
Make sure you only have one <title> tag per page.
You can always count on Squirrly to let you know what is wrong with your site and how to fix it via the site Audit and the Focus Pages feature.
Loading time refers to the time it takes a site to fully render in your browser.
According to a study made by Hosting Tribunal:
“1 second delay reduces page views by 11%.
1 second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.
1 second delay eats away 7% of the coveted conversion rate.
1-3 seconds in loading time see a very low bounce rate probability – only 32%.
Add 1 second more to that and the chance for users to bounce triples, reaching 90%.
On annual basis, 1 second delay can lead to $2.5 million in missed revenue if your shop generates $100,000 per day.”
And according to Neil Patel:
“47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.”
Here’s another stat from Unbounce:
“Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%”
Remove any plugin that you are not using, clean your HTML code, compress your images and caching, and consider upgrading your server if that’s the reason why your site loads slowly.
You can see if you have this error yourself via the SEO Audit.
What’s more, if pages you are trying to rank take too long to load, you will also receive a task to take care of fixing this issue within the Focus Pages panel.
Having a sitemap.xml helps Google crawl your site more easily and more accurately, as it gives the search engine crawlers a list of all your content in a machine-readable format.
According to a study made by MOZ:
“When a Sitemap was submitted the average time it took for the bot to visit the new post was 14 minutes for Google and 245 minutes for Yahoo.
When no Sitemap was submitted and the bot had to crawl to the post, it took 1375 minutes for Google and 1773 for Yahoo.
The averages were calculated on 12 different posts, 6 with Sitemaps being submitted, and 6 with the Sitemaps not being submitted.”
Build a sitemap in an XML format and make it available to Google.
To fix this issue, activate the sitemap.xml setting in the Squirrly SEO plugin.
You can always check if your site has this issue in our Focus Pages feature, as well as in our SEO Audit feature.
The < title > tag is an HTML tag that provides useful information about the context or the subject of the page, as it is the title of that page.
It’s a critical element that significantly impacts a page’s success, as the title appears in search engine results where relevant and descriptive results have more chances of being clicked on.
If you don’t have a <title> tag, then Google will think twice about ranking your page, as search engines make a priority out of offering content that is relevant to the search made by their users.
Taking all that into consideration, it’s no surprise that:
The no <title> tag issue is not as common as some of the other issues mentioned in this study, but it can still occur.
That means that each site of those 5 has about 4 pages with no <title> tag.
All you have to do is make sure that you created a <title> tag for your articles/pages.
You can easily make sure that you created a <title> tag for your articles/pages using the All Snippets feature.
Go to METAs –> Title to find this option.
If you are using the Squirrly SEO plugin, then the probability of having this issue is minimal.
With the help of meta automation, you can rest assured knowing that all your pages have titles.
You can also check to see if everything is ok in the Audit section. Squirrly is always analyzing your site to help reveal possible issues and help you rank.
Furthermore, you can see if you have a <title> tag for the page you are working hard to rank using the Focus Pages feature (more specifically, the snippet tasks).
As you can see, Squirrly SEO provides tremendous oversight and guidance to help you prevent and overcome common SEO issues that impact your performance.
No need to worry about overlooking critical SEO aspects that ruin your chances of ranking.
Simply use the incredible features from Squirrly SEO and ensure your site will NEVER make it into a study on common SEO errors like this one.
It’s the easiest way to have an SEO error-free website that is healthy and ready to rank.
In an effort to better understand which factors correlate with high site performance, we analyzed 105 super-popular sites using our own analysis tools – mainly Squirrly SPY and ContentLook – and a few other tools available on the market right now.
We looked at keywords and content.
We looked at the sites’ domain score, backlinks, social media shares, and how fast they load on mobile and desktop.
We even looked at their SEO issues and errors.
Our analysis revealed some very interesting insights about the “DNA” of top-performing sites, the things they focus on, how they manage to stay ahead of their competition – and the things they could do to be even more successful.
With this article, we’re going to share with you what we found.
1. Our data suggests that on average, the sites included in this study optimize a page/article for 4 keywords, and each of those keywords is composed of 2 to 4 words. Optimizing for multiple keywords (including long-tail keywords) appears to be a part of these sites’ SEO strategy.
?By optimizing for a secondary keyword that is related to your primary keyword, you’re sending additional signals to search engines to help them understand and rank the page.
2. 102 out of the 105 popular sites analyzed have an SEO Score* of 40 or more, which indicates that they are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
?*SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook.
3. The average web page we analyzed in this study takes 4.43 seconds longer to load on mobile vs. desktop.
4. All sites included in this study have implemented the Open Graph Protocol.
? Open Graph lets you control what content is displayed when pages are shared on social media, thus influencing your page’s performance.
If you lack these tags, then you’re risking that an unrelated image or inaccurate description will be shown. On the flip side, having these tags helps you harness the power of social media and boost your social media CTR.
5. Our data shows that the majority of the successful sites we analyzed create long-form content, with the average number of Words for all sites being 1,481.
6. All sites in this study have Social “Follow me” Buttons, as well as Share buttons in their articles.
? Social signals are a confirmed ranking factor, so it’s important to make it as easy as possible for visitors to share your articles and follow you on social media.
7. We saw that there is a correlation between the length of a keyword and the position it ranked on Google. Namely, keywords that were formed of 3 words typically ranked on the 1st Page of Google.
8. The most common SEO issue we’ve identified across the sites that we analyzed was the issue related to Empty Descriptions.
? Google doesn’t want to place sites with coding problems up in the first positions. Sure, the search engine is smart enough to generate the description on its own, based on the content inside the URL, but it’s still a bad practice.
By fixing this issue, the sites included in this study could be even more successful.
9. We discovered that ALL sites included in this study have both Site Icons and Apple Icons.
? A Site Icon is an icon associated with a website to be displayed with bookmarks, in the URL bar, on tabs – and anywhere else where a website has to be identified visually.
? Apple Icons are the graphics you’ve chosen to represent your site when a user saves your page to their home screen in iOS. If you don’t have Apple Icons created for your site, iOS grabs a compressed thumbnail of your website and displays it as the icon. (the result is typically indistinguishable and not visually unappealing).
10. Twitter Cards can be found across all sites which we’ve analyzed for this study.
? Twitter Cards are a great partner to your SEO strategy, as it helps you stand out to Twitter users and thus increase engagement and CTR.
11. The average domain age is 13 years, which shows once again that success isn’t built overnight.
?Domain age indicates how long it has been since Google first indexed that domain, or saw a link to the domain, and is a factor in determining Google rankings.
12. Getting backlinks from different sites correlates with being a top-performing site. The websites included in our study are attracting a significant number of backlinks.
13. A high domain score correlates with high-performance. The average Domain Score for all sites we analyzed in this study is 81.98.
14. A high On-Page SEO Score (as measured by Ubersuggest) correlates with high site performance. The average on-page SEO score for all sites included in this study is 85.48.
15. Data from our study suggests that one can compensate for having pages with low authority by working on optimizing their content. This is most evident for sites that are in the 40-49 SEO Score segment of our analysis.
16. All sites included in this study are listed as Safe Browsing sites.
? Google Safe Browsing displays warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing also notifies webmasters when their websites are compromised by malicious actors.
No one wants to visit a site that puts their personal information at risk or tries to install malicious code on their computer. That’s why making sure your site is a Safe Browsing site is key.
Furthermore, Safe Browsing is set to become part of the page experience ranking update going live in 2021.
17. Despite being extremely popular sites with large marketing budgets, our study revealed that they are still making common SEO mistakes that prevent them from maximizing their success on Google.
Every site we analyzed had at least one SEO error. The majority of sites we looked at had over 8 issues each.
These are the top 3 most common issues we’ve identified across the 105 sites:
18. Most sites included in this study have no-follow outgoing links.
? Using the nofollow tag is a way in which publishers can tell search engines NOT to count some of their links to other pages as “votes” in favor of that content. Based on the results of this study, we can say this is a best practice among successful, top-performing websites.
19. Google considers the site’s speed a ranking factor. We saw that even the big sites are struggling with getting this perfect, though. The average speed of sites included in this study is 4.19 seconds (on desktop). On mobile, it’s 8.62 seconds.
? This is longer than what is broadly viewed as a good loading speed. Ideally, it should take your pages 3 seconds or less to fully load (both on desktop and on mobile).
20. Our analysis of 105 sites revealed that top sites have lots of Facebook and Pinterest Shares. There is also a high correlation between social signals and ranking position.
We analyzed 105 popular sites for this study.
The sites that we analyzed were chosen based on who our users are following on Twitter. We also included sites that are typically mentioned in articles published across top SEO and marketing sites.
All sites we analyzed are e popular, top-performing sites that have significant marketing budgets. They are all sites that people perceive as being successful and whose performance is well above the average.
We mainly used ContentLook, Squirrly SPY, as well as one other audit tool that is not created by us.
We looked at Overview Data for each site, namely:
We also looked at the sites’ speed (both for desktop and mobile), whether they have social media elements present on their sites, and analyzed the SEO errors for each site.
In addition to that, we analyzed the top pages for each site and the estimated amount of organic traffic those pages receive every month.
We were also interested in learning how many keywords they are ranking for (and on which positions); how many words are on their top-ranking pages – and other similar details that would allow us to learn more about which are the factors that contribute to their success.
To keep everything organized, we decided to group the data into multiple categories, namely:
After obtaining the data for each site, we did an average of all the sites.
The average number of ORGANIC Keywords for all sites is 1,168,741.45.
The average number of ORGANIC MONTHLY TRAFFIC for all sites is 551, 930,103.09.
The average number of DOMAIN SCORE for all sites is 81.98.
?What is the Domain Score?
Influenced by a variety of factors, the Domain Score is an indicator of the overall strength of a website. A score of 1 to 100 is given to all sites, and the higher the number, the more authoritative the site is (which also translates to higher Google Rankings)
The average number of BACKLINKS for all sites is 37,867,847.61
The average number of ON-PAGE SEO SCORE for all sites is 85.48
? As defined by Ubersuggest, the On-Page SEO Score is a 0-100 SEO Score, with 0 being the lowest possible score. The score represents a combination of the ratio of issues found to the number of checks performed by the audit tools in Ubersuggest. It’s an overall score for all pages scanned in the audit.
The data revealed in this portion of our study confirms that the sites we choose for our analysis are successful, powerful, popular sites that perform very well in Google Search Results.
As you can see from the data, these sites:
Google considers the site’s speed a ranking factor. We saw that even the big sites are struggling with getting this perfect, though.
The average number of site speed on Desktop for all sites is 4.19 seconds.
For mobile, it’s 8.62 seconds.
You’ll want your site speed to be lower than that, both on mobile and desktop. Why?
These stats answer it best:
The average load time of the top-ranking websites in Google is under three seconds, so that is what you should strive for.
We chose the top 20 pages according to the estimated monthly traffic they get for each site. Then we looked at each individual page to see how much traffic they are generating.
We also looked at:
We started by creating a special sheet for each site.
Then, we took the first 20 pages according to the traffic of that site.
For each of those pages, we collected the following data:
** Here’s an example of how we calculated this:
Say an article ranks for three keywords. One of those keywords is composed of one word, the other has 3 words, and the third one is composed of 4 words. In this case, the minimum number of words a keyword is composed of will be 1, and the maximum will be 4.
To be able to provide broader statistics across all 20 pages, we made an average of the number of words keywords are composed of.
Then, taking the data for the 20 pages/site, we did another average to obtain data for all sites included in this study.
We wanted to see if they are focusing on ranking just one keyword per page/article, or if they optimize for secondary keywords as well.
We were also interested to know if the keywords they rank for are long-tail keywords (which typically consist of three to five or even more words) or short-tail keywords (more general search queries consisting of one or two words).
The average number of Estimated Page Visits for all sites is 193,024.86
The average number of Facebook Shares for all sites is 8,039.15
The average number of Pinterest Shares for all sites is 543.12
The average Number of Words per Page for all sites is 1,481.75
The average number of keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google/article across all sites is 4.32
The average number of minimum words used in Keywords for all sites is 1.98
The average number of maximum words used in Keywords for all sites is 3.52
A key insight we were able to extract from this portion of the study is this:
The top pages (according to the Estimated Monthly Traffic they bring) from the successful sites included in this study each rank, on average, for four keywords on the 1st page of Google.
We also know that those keywords are long-tail keywords composed of 2 to 4 words (on average).
We also observed that the top sites included in this study don’t just focus on SEO but also on social media. Social signals (such as shares) are a confirmed ranking factor, and by working on this (like the sites in this study do), you can improve your performance in SERPs.
You can easily keep track of this aspect for the pages you want to rank by using the Focus Pages feature from Squirrly SEO.
Another thing we saw was that long-form content correlates with higher performance. The average word-count for the top 20 pages according to Estimated Monthly Traffic is 1,481.
When it comes to the keywords that rank on the 1st page of Google set of data, we looked at:
Just like the data for the top pages, we also gathered this info for each site in its own sheet (as you see in the screenshot above).
The numbers that we get for each site were then written in the main file we used for this study. There is where we made an average of all the 105 sites included in our analysis.
The average Number of keywords on the 1st page of Google from all sites is 209.01
The average Number of words a keyword is composed of from all sites is 3.24
The average Search Volume a keyword has from all sites is 225,111.60
?Search Volume is the number of searches that a particular keyword has during a month.
The average Position a keyword has from all sites is 3.91
? The Average Position is the position a URL ranks in Google Search for a specific keyword.
The average Estimated Monthly Visits from all sites is 9,655.25
?Estimated Monthly Visits refers to the estimated traffic web pages get from Google for the terms they rank for.
The average SEO difficulty from all sites is 23.96
?Average SEO difficulty is the estimated competition in organic search, the higher the number the more competitive.)
You should focus on long-tail keywords composed of 3 words or more (the data from this study suggest that 3-words is the sweet spot for keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google).
You should be happy and celebrate your success if your average position of all the keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google is 3.91.
The data from this study also indicates that you should target keywords that have the potential to bring about 9,655 monthly traffic combined.
That means that you can have 10 keywords that can bring 1,000 monthly visits, and you will get a Total Monthly Traffic of 10,000.
There is a more detailed article regarding this section of the study that you can check out here.
If you don’t have time to read the whole thing right now, then here’s a quick overview of the most important results that we got.
The average number for the error : low word count from all sites is 14.94
The average number for the error : no sitemap.xml to optimize interaction with bots from all sites is 0.18
The average number for the error : duplicate
You shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, because even super-popular sites with large marketing budgets are guilty of making SEO mistakes and overlooking to correct them.
However, you should try to have as few errors as possible – as a low number of SEO issues strongly correlates with high site performance.
By using the SEO protection provided by Squirrly SEO alongside the Audit and the Focus Pages feature, you could actually do better than the sites included in this study.
That’s because you will be aware of the issues that are impacting your site’s performance on Google – and get step-by-step instructions on how to fix them.
For the next segment of our study, we’ll move on to data that we retrieved using our content analysis software: ContentLook.
The average SEO Score* from all sites is 59
(*SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook).
In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
The average number of Duplicate titles from all sites is 11
The average number of Duplicate Descriptions from all sites is 13
The average number of Empty Titles from all sites is 1
The average number of Empty Descriptions from all sites is 58
The average number of words a Title-Tag is composed of is 50
The average number of words a meta description is composed of is 115
The majority of the sites included in this study DON’T have:
The majority of the sites included in this study:
The average number for Outgoing doFollow links is 1
The average number for Domain Age is 13
You should try to get a ContentLook score bigger than 40.
We saw that sites that have scores between 30 to 39 know about SEO but they don’t really focus on optimization.
The sites that have an SEO Score of over 40 are the ones that are really investing time and resources into creating SEO-optimized articles.
An SEO Score over 70 (as measured by ContentLook) indicates that the sites go above and beyond with their optimization efforts, optimizing their page content as well as other elements from their site such as the footer, headers, and their menu.
You can create a free ContentLook account here to gain valuable insights into your site’s performance and set up tasks to improve.
As this study revealed, even big sites have issues.
(Every site we analyzed had at least one SEO error. The majority of sites we looked at had over 8 issues each.)
By working on fixing these issues, they could maximize their traffic potential and further increase their success.
Our study also revealed that the average number of characters for a title tag is 50, while the average number of characters for a meta description is 115.
It’s very important to have original titles and meta descriptions. Make sure you don’t have:
This is really easy to do this with Squirrly’s Bulk SEO settings.
Here are a few other things that should be on your checklist.
Make sure that:
1. You have canonical links and a robots.txt file.
2. Your site is listed as a Safe Browsing site.
3. You have a Site Icon and Apple Icon.
4. You have Open Graph Protocol and Twitter Cards for your articles.
5. You have “Follow Me” and Share buttons for your articles.
^^ These are all best practices that the majority of the sites included in this study use as well. 4 and 5 are very important for social media and help ensure that both you and your readers can easily share your articles on social media.
And the last thing, you should be patient. (this is usually the hardest, I know).
The sites included in this study have an average domain age of 13 years.
If you’re only just starting out, try to have realistic expectations and not expect to be able to compete with a site that has been out there for 13 years right away.
Here’s what we looked at:
The 100 pages/articles were selected based on how many words they have.
That means we’ve selected the pages with the most words (per site). We chose this as a factor because we saw that the more you write on a single page and optimize, the more chances that page has to rank on Google.
When it comes to keywords, the first three columns in the image above show the keywords that the article has been optimized for. Some articles were optimized for a single keyword, others for two keywords, and there were also pages that were optimized for three keywords.
Then we added the number of keywords the 100 pages were optimized for and got a total of 290. (results: each page is optimized, on average, for 2.9 keywords).
We also looked at the average number of words the keywords were composed of. Following a similar methodology, we saw that keywords for which the 100 pages rank for were composed, on average, of 2.85 words.
The purpose of this was to see if the sites included in our study are targeting long-tail keywords or if they mainly focus on broad, general terms.
The average Title Length of the 100 pages is 62.85
The average Word Count of the 100 pages is 2,158.69
The average Number of Keywords 100 pages are optimized for is 208.24
The average Number of Keyword an article is optimized for is 2.12
The average Number of words that one Keyword is composed for the 100 pages is 2.13
The average On-Page SEO Score per article of the 100 pages is 52.44
The average number of words that the Meta Description has for the 100 pages is 19.51
The average Page Authority per article of the 100 pages is 25.56
A site optimizes for about 208 keywords (for the top word count 100 pages). This means, that every page is optimized for about 2 keywords each.
Again, this data represents an average, meaning some of the pages could be optimized for more than 2 keywords, while other pages may be optimized for less than 2 keywords.
A typical page of the 100 we analyzed across all sites has the following characteristics:
Here are some insights about it:
After retrieving all the data for all the sites, we decided to categorize the sites according to their SEO SCORE.*
(*SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook).
The SEO score is a good indicator of how much a certain website is focusing on SEO.
An SEO Score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
An SEO Score over 70 is given to sites that go above and beyond with their optimization efforts, optimizing their page content as well as other elements from their site such as the footer, headers, and their menu.
Based on the SEO score that was given to each site included in this study, we ended up with 6 categories:
Note! Since there was only 1 site in the 0-10 SEO Score Category and 1 site in the 30-39 SEO Score Category, we disregarded those categories for the next phase of our study.
A total of 11 sites are included in this SEO Score category.
Below, you can see exactly which are these sites, as well as which is their SEO score.
1. https://500.co/blog/ ( SEO Score: 43)
2. https://www.tesla.com/ ( SEO Score: 47)
3. http://www.killerstartups.com/ ( SEO Score: 47)
4. https://thecopybot.com/ ( SEO Score: 47)
5. https://www.ryrob.com/ ( SEO Score: 47)
6. https://www.canva.com/ ( SEO Score: 48)
7. https://mashable.com/?europe=true ( SEO Score: 48)
8. https://addicted2success.com/ ( SEO Score: 48)
9. https://www.success.com/ ( SEO Score: 48)
10. https://www.quicksprout.com/ ( SEO Score: 49)
11. https://tim.blog/ ( SEO Score: 49)
The average site speed on desktop for all sites is 1.64. For mobile, it’s 8.18.
The sites have a good speed for desktop but still have to work on improving the speed with which they load on mobile.
If they would increase their speed, the sites could reduce the bounce rate and increase their conversion rate.
As a best practice, you should strive to make sure your pages load fast both on mobile and on desktop (under three seconds).
The average number of Estimated Page Visits for all sites is 106,417.66
The average number of Facebook Shares for all sites is 3,395.92
The average number of Pinterest Shares for all sites is 2,758.60
The average Number of Words per Page for all sites is 1,972.97
The average number of On–Page SEO Optimization for all sites is 42.33
The average number of keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google/article across all sites is 5.44
The average number of minimum words used in Keywords for all sites is 1.74
The average number of maximum words used in Keywords for all sites is 3.11
A typical page that is part of the 20 top pages (based on estimated monthly traffic) from sites in this category:
The page is also shared on social media.
The average Number of keywords on the first page of Google for all sites is 231.36
The average Number of words a keyword is composed of for all sites is 3.14
The average Search Volume a keyword has for all sites is 302,408.14
?Search Volume is the number of searches a particular keyword has during a month.
The average Position a keyword has for all sites is 3.79
?The position shows how high up a keyword ranks on Google. To be on the 1st Page of Google, you need to rank among the top 10 positions in Google.
The average Estimated Monthly Visits for all sites is 11,971.93
?This indicates the estimated traffic a web page gets from Google for a particular search term.
The average SEO difficulty for all sites is 28.24
?SEO difficulty = estimated competition in organic search. The higher the number, the higher the competition.
A site in this category ranks for about 231 keywords on the 1st Page of Google.
Those keywords are long-tail keywords composed of about 3 words.
The average position those keywords rank for is 3, 4.
They bring about 11,971 monthly visits to the site.
The average number for the error : low word count from all sites is 5.09
The average number for the error : no sitemap.xml to optimize interaction with bots from all sites is 0.27
The average number for the error : duplicate <title> tags from all sites is 2.27
The average number for the error : duplicate meta descriptions from all sites is 1.00
The average number for the error : duplicate meta description tags from all sites is 3.09
The average number for the error : no meta description from all sites is 19.73
The average number for the error : no <title> tag from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : more than one <title> tag from all sites is 8.09
The average number for the error : without a H1 heading from all sites is 7.55
The average number for the error : returned 4XX status code from all sites is 1.27
The average number for the error : long loading time from all sites is 0.09
The average number for the error : URLs that are too long from all sites is 3.18
The average number for the error : poorly formatted URL for SEO from all sites is 8.36
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too long from all sites is 20.91
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too short from all sites is 7.82
The average number for the error : SSL certificate that is about to expire from all sites is 1.00
The average number for the error : don’t have doctype declared from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : gzip or deflate compression disabled from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : have temporary redirects from all sites is 0.00
The sites in this category have quite some errors they have to fix.
Squirrly SEO will help you prevent or fix the no sitemap, duplicate content, empty title or description tags, long loading time as well the poorly formatted URL for SEO errors.
Read: 70 Technical SEO Aspects Handled by Squirrly SEO >>
As you can see, just by using Squirrly SEO and fixing what the plugin is telling you to fix, you will be able to stay on top of common SEO issues that affect performance in a negative way.
The average SEO Score* based on data gathered from all sites in this category is 47.36
*SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook. In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
The average Duplicate titles errors from all sites is 16.64
The average Duplicate Descriptions error from all sites is 12.73
The average Empty Titles error from all sites is 0.73
The average Empty Descriptions error from all sites is 54.18
The average number of words a Title Tag is composed of is 35.45
The average number of words a meta description is composed of is 111.73
Most sites from this category have Duplicate Meta Tags.
Most sites from this category DON’T have:
Most sites from this category:
The average number for Outgoing doFollow links is 4.64
The average number for Domain Age is 9.45
The average ContentLook SEO score for those sites is 47. This indicates that sites in this category are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
Their title tag is composed, on average, of 35 characters and the meta description is composed of 112 characters. They have:
The sites in this category have an average domain age of 9.45 years, which is an aspect that helps them be more competitive.
Domain age indicates how long it has been since Google first indexed that domain, or saw a link to the domain, and is a factor in determining Google rankings.
This data has been generated as a result of analyzing 100 pages from each site included in this category.
Here are the main results:
The average Title Length of the 100 pages is 60.50
The average Word Count of the 100 pages is 2,998.12
The average Number of Keywords 100 pages are optimized for is 205.40
The average Number of Keyword an article is optimized for is 2.11
The average Number of words for one Keyword of the 100 pages is 2.05
The average On-Page SEO Score per article of the 100 pages is 52.92
The average number of words that Meta Description has of the 100 pages is 20.53
The average Page Authority per article of the 100 pages is 25.11
A site in this category optimizes for about 205 keywords for 100 pages.
A typical page for a site in this category looks like this:
Here are some insights about it:
If we sort the list from A-Z according to the number of keywords a site optimized for 100 pages we can see that it’s in a relationship with the SEO optimization score.
Only two sites are breaking the pattern but they have an authority of 30. You can compensate for your low authority by optimizing for more keywords.
*all numbers are average. That means some pages can have better or worse stats.
A total of 48 sites are included in this category:
1. https://neilpatel.com/ ( SEO Score: 50)
2. https://www.saleshacker.com/ ( SEO Score: 50)
3. https://jamesaltucher.com/ ( SEO Score: 50)
4. https://www.searchengine watch.com/ ( SEO Score: 51)
5. https://www.marketing profs.com/ ( SEO Score: 51)
6. https://growth.wingify.com/ ( SEO Score: 51)
7. https://www.agorapulse.com/ ( SEO Score: 52)
8. https://yaro.blog/ ( SEO Score: 52)
9. https://appsumo.com/ ( SEO Score: 53)
10. https://www.bplans.com/ ( SEO Score: 53)
11. https://www.eofire.com/ ( SEO Score: 53)
12. https://convertkit.com/ ( SEO Score: 53)
13. https://www.sethgodin.com/ ( SEO Score: 54)
14. https://searchengineland.com/ ( SEO Score: 54)
15. https://smallbiztrends.com/ ( SEO Score: 54)
16. https://www.garyvaynerchuk .com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
17. https://guykawasaki.com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
18. https://www.feedough.com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
19. https://www.techworld.com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
20. https://www.techuniverses .com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
21. https://naomisimson.com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
22. https://www.sidehustlenation .com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
23. https://blog.hubstaff.com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
24. https://www.digitalmarketer .com/ ( SEO Score: 55)
25. https://businesstown.com/ ( SEO Score: 56)
26. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/ ( SEO Score: 56)
27. https://sproutsocial.com/ ( SEO Score: 56)
28. https://salesgravy.com/ ( SEO Score: 56)
29. https://copyhackers.com/ ( SEO Score: 56)
30. https://menwithpens.ca/ ( SEO Score: 56)
31. https://moz.com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
32. https://alltopstartups.com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
33. https://www.salesforlife.com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
34. https://www.theselfemployed .com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
35. https://www.zendesk.com/ blog/ ( SEO Score: 57)
36. https://www.marieforleo.com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
37. https://jamesclear.com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
38. https://venturebeat.com/ ( SEO Score: 57)
39. https://buffer.com/ ( SEO Score: 58)
40. https://contentmarketing institute.com/ ( SEO Score: 58)
41. https://blog.playvox.com/ ( SEO Score: 58)
42. https://fonolo.com/ ( SEO Score: 58)
43. https://www.hubspot.com/ ( SEO Score: 59)
44. https://www.addthis.com/ ( SEO Score: 59)
45. https://socialtriggers.com/ ( SEO Score: 59)
46. https://theworkathomewife .com/ ( SEO Score: 59)
47. https://www.corpnet.com/ ( SEO Score: 59)
48. https://socialnomics.net/ ( SEO Score: 59)
The average number of site speed on desktop for all sites is 5.21 seconds and for mobile is 9.15 seconds.
The sites in this category are not doing very well in the speed department.
For desktop, they have a 5-seconds load time. For mobile, they have a 9-seconds load time. That’s more than what is generally viewed as good speed, namely three seconds or less.
The average number of Estimated Page Visits for all sites is 20,535.70
The average number of Facebook Shares for all sites is 3,184.77
The average number of Pinterest Shares for all sites is 153.59
The average Number of Words per Page for all sites is 1,593.21
The average number of On-Page SEO Optimization for all sites is 51.78
The average number of Keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google/article across all sites is 4.52
The average number of minimum words used in Keywords for all sites is 1.95
The average number of maximum words used in Keywords for all sites is 3.66
An average page of a site that is part of this category looks like this:
The average Number of keywords on the first page of Google for all sites is 214.56
The average Number of words a keyword is composed of for all sites is 3.41
The average Search Volume a keyword has for all sites is 25,535.54
?Search volume is the number of searches that a particular keyword has during a month.
The average Position a keyword has for all sites is 3.72
? The Average Position is the position a URL ranks in Google search for a specific keyword.
The average Estimated Monthly Visits for all sites is 1,049.20
?Estimated Monthly Visits refers to the estimated traffic a web page gets from Google for a particular term.
The average SEO difficulty for all sites is 20.93
?Average SEO difficulty is the estimated competition in organic search, the higher the number the more competitive.)
A site that is part of this category ranks on the 1st page of Google with about 214 keywords.
The keywords are long-tail keywords composed of about 3 words.
The average position they rank for is 4.
The average number for the error : low word count from all sites is 11.04
The average number for the error : no sitemap.xml to optimize interaction with bots from all sites is 0.21
The average number for the error : duplicate <title> tags from all sites is 3.04
The average number for the error : duplicate meta descriptions from all sites is 4.04
The average number for the error : duplicate meta description tags from all sites is 0.21
The average number for the error : no meta description from all sites is 32.38
The average number for the error : no <title> tag from all sites is 0.48
The average number for the error : more than one <title> tag from all sites is 5.88
The average number for the error : without a H1 heading from all sites is 10.88
The average number for the error : returned 4XX status code from all sites is 0.15
The average number for the error : long loading time from all sites is 2.06
The average number for the error : URLs that are too long from all sites is 4.21
The average number for the error : poorly formatted URL for SEO from all sites is 15.35
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too long from all sites is 28.10
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too short from all sites is 11.58
The average number for the error : SSL certificate that is about to expire from all sites is 0.98
The average number for the error : don’t have doctype declared from all sites is 0.17
The average number for the error : gzip or deflate compression disabled from all sites is 2.75
The average number for the error : have temporary redirects from all sites is 0.06
Those sites still have errors that can be easily acknowledged, tracked, and corrected with Squirrly SEO.
The average SEO Score* number from all sites is 55.29
(*SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook).
In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
The average Duplicate titles errors from all sites is 13.77
The average Duplicate Descriptions error from all sites is 14.30
The average Empty Titles error from all sites is 0.48
The average Empty Descriptions error from all sites is 52.83
The average number of words a title Tag is composed of is 49
The average number of words a meta description is composed of is 120.06
Most sites in this category DON’T have:
Most sites in this category:
The average number for Outgoing doFollow links is 0.46
The average number for Domain Age is 12.54
The average ContentLook SEO score is 55. (SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook). In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.)
The sites in this category don’t have duplicate meta tags. They have all the elements for a good social media sharing experience.
A title on these sites is composed, on average, of 49 characters and the meta description is composed of 120 characters.
The sites are loading fast and are, on average, about 13 years old.
This data has been generated as a result of analyzing 100 pages from each site included in this category.
The average Title Length of the 100 pages is 59.84
The average Word Count of the 100 pages is 2,335.38
The average Number of Keyword 100 pages are optimized for is 208.21
The average Number of Keyword an article is optimized for is 2.15
The average Number of words one Keyword is composed of for the 100 pages is 2.14
The average On-Page SEO Score per article of the 100 pages is 53.24
The average number of words that Meta Description has of the 100 pages is 19.03
The average Page Authority per article of the 100 pages is 25.05
A site from this category is optimized for about 208 keywords for 100 pages.
A typical page from a site in this category looks something like this:
Here are some insights about it:
*all numbers are average
A total of 30 sites are included in this category:
1. https://magazine.startus.cc/ ( SEO Score: 60)
2. http://thestartupmag.com/ ( SEO Score: 60)
3. https://hootsuite.com/ ( SEO Score: 61)
4. https://thisweekinstartups.com/ ( SEO Score: 61)
5. https://www.nomorecoldcalling .com/ ( SEO Score: 61)
6. https://hyken.com/blog/ ( SEO Score: 61)
7. https://bothsidesofthetable .com/ ( SEO Score: 62)
8. https://www.ikea.com/ ( SEO Score: 62)
9. https://startupnation.com/ ( SEO Score: 62)
10. https://www.smartpassive income.com/ ( SEO Score: 63)
11. https://www.fastcompany .com/ ( SEO Score: 64)
12. https://www.thebalancesmb .com/ ( SEO Score: 64)
13. https://www.forbes.com/ ( SEO Score: 65)
14. https://startupbeat.com/ ( SEO Score: 65)
15. https://wistia.com/ ( SEO Score: 65)
16. https://www.searchengine journal.com/ ( SEO Score: 66)
17. https://www.postplanner.com/ ( SEO Score: 66)
18. https://chrisbrogan.com/ ( SEO Score: 66)
19. https://www.shopify.com/blog ( SEO Score: 66)
20. https://www.nytimes.com/ ( SEO Score: 66)
21. https://www.socialmedia today.com/ ( SEO Score: 67)
22. https://femaleentrepreneur association.com/ ( SEO Score:67)
23. https://backlinko.com/ ( SEO Score: 68)
24. https://www.socialmedia examiner.com/ ( SEO Score: 68)
25. https://futurestartup.com/ ( SEO Score: 68)
26. https://ducttapemarketing.com/ ( SEO Score: 68)
27. https://articles.bplans.com/ ( SEO Score: 68)
28. https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson ( SEO Score: 68)
29. https://women2.com/ ( SEO Score: 68)
30. https://www.blackenterprise .com/ ( SEO Score: 69)
The average speed of sites in this category is 4.70 seconds (on desktop).
On mobile, it’s 8.63 seconds.
Site speed is an aspect that could greatly be improved.
The sites in this category don’t have the best load speed as their pages load in almost 5 seconds on desktop. For mobile, that number is even higher: close to 9 seconds.
The average number of Estimated Page Visits for all sites is 452,127.95
The average number of Facebook Shares for all sites is 203,43.48
The average number of Pinterest Shares for all sites is 558.54
The average Number of Words per Page for all sites is 1,164.62
The average number of On–Page SEO Optimization for all sites is 42.11
The average number of keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google/article across all sites is 3.48
The average number of minimum words used in Keywords for all sites is 1.99
The average number of maximum words used in Keywords for all sites is 3.33
When it comes to the top 20 pages (based on estimated traffic), a page for a site in this category looks like this:
The average Number of keywords on the first page of Google for all sites is 188.00
The average Number of words a keyword is composed of for all sites is 3.08
The average Search Volume a keyword has for all sites is 476,895.63
?Search Volume is the number of searches a particular keyword has during a month.)
The average Position a keyword has for all sites is 4.14
?The position shows how high up a keyword ranks on Google. To be on the 1st Page of Google, you need to rank among the top 10 positions in Google.
The average Estimated Monthly Visits for all sites is 21,771.02
?This indicates the estimated traffic a web page gets from Google for a particular search term.
The average SEO difficulty for all sites is 25.99
?SEO difficulty = estimated competition in organic search. The higher the number, the higher the competition.
A site in this category ranks on the first page of Google for approximately 188 keywords.
They are long-tail keywords composed on average of 3 words.
The average position on which those keywords rank is 4 and the SEO difficulty is 26.
The average number for the error : low word count from all sites is 21.57
The average number for the error : no sitemap.xml to optimize interaction with bots from all sites is 0.10
The average number for the error : duplicate <title> tags from all sites is 5.93
The average number for the error : duplicate meta descriptions from all sites is 8.40
The average number for the error : duplicate meta description tags from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : no meta description from all sites is 36.43
The average number for the error : no <title> tag from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : more than one <title> tag from all sites is 6.20
The average number for the error : without a H1 heading from all sites is 7.60
The average number for the error : returned 4XX status code from all sites is 1.83
The average number for the error : long loading time from all sites is 0.67
The average number for the error : URLs that are too long from all sites is 4.47
The average number for the error : poorly formatted URL for SEO from all sites is 13.83
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too long from all sites is 37.53
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too short from all sites is 16.67
The average number for the error : SSL certificate that is about to expire from all sites is 0.97
The average number for the error : don’t have doctype declared from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : gzip or deflate compression disabled from all sites is 4.80
The average number for the error : have temporary redirects from all sites is 0.03
Those sites have some errors as well, with the most common error for sites in this category being the one related to no meta description.
The average Score number from all sites is 64.83
SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook. In ContentLook, an SEO score of over 40 indicates that the sites which received it are investing time and resources into optimizing their content for SEO.
The average Duplicate titles errors from all sites is 5.97
The average Duplicate Descriptions error from all sites is 5.37
The average Empty Titles error from all sites is 2.43
The average Empty Descriptions error from all sites is 75.37
The average number of words a title Tag is composed of is 53.60
The average number of words a meta description is composed of is 112.33
Most sites in this category DON’T have:
Most sites in this category:
The average number for Outgoing doFollow links is 1.17
The average number for Domain Age is 14.17
The average ContentLook SEO score for this category is 65. That’s a really good SEO score.
The sites have the elements for a good social media sharing experience and have been around for about 14 years.
The sites in this category do have some duplicate errors and empty titles and descriptions.
All of those errors can be prevented or fixed with the help of Squirrly SEO. So, if you have a site and want to make sure such errors won’t affect your site’s performance, you can count on Squirrly SEO.
** This data has been generated as a result of analyzing 100 pages from each site included in this category.
Here are the main results:
The average Title Length of the 100 pages is 68.20
The average Word Count of the 100 pages is 1,828.20
The average Number of Keyword 100 pages are optimized for is 215.70
The average Number of Keyword an article is optimized for 2.16
The average Number of words for one Keyword of the 100 pages is 2.21
The average On-Page SEO Score per article of the 100 pages is 51.85
The average number of words that Meta Description has of the 100 pages is 19.98
The average Page Authority per article of the 100 pages is 26.52
A typical page for a site in this category has the following characteristics:
Here are some insights about it:
A total of 13 sites are included in this category:
1. https://www.entrepreneur.com/ ( SEO Score: 70)
2. https://www.allbusiness.com/ ( SEO Score: 70)
3. https://thesalesblog.com/ ( SEO Score: 70)
4. https://www.wpbeginner.com/ ( SEO Score: 70)
5. https://copyblogger.com/ ( SEO Score: 72)
6. https://www.heinzmarketing .com/ ( SEO Score: 72)
7. https://www.inc.com/ ( SEO Score: 74)
8. https://www.smallbizdaily.com/ ( SEO Score: 74)
9. https://www.businessknow how.com/ ( SEO Score: 74)
10. https://jimsmarketingblog.com/ ( SEO Score: 74)
11. https://www.helpscout.com/ ( SEO Score: 75)
12. https://contently.com/ ( SEO Score: 76)
13. https://www.noobpreneur.com/ ( SEO Score: 78)
The average speed with which sites load on desktop is 2.15 seconds.
The average speed with which sites load on mobile is 7.92 seconds.
The sites in this category are quite good at making sure that their pages load fast on desktop (2 seconds).
However, their performance is not very good if we’re referring to how fast these sites load on mobile devices (almost 8 seconds).
The average number of Estimated Page Visits for all sites is 212,052.05
The average number of Facebook Shares for all sites is 2,624.40
The average number of Pinterest Shares for all sites is 164.22
The average Number of Words per Page for all sites is 1,360.12
The average number of On–Page SEO Optimization for all sites is 47.42
The average number of keywords that rank on the 1st Page of Google/article across all sites is 4.07
The average number of minimum words used in Keywords for all sites is 2.10
The average number of maximum words used in Keywords for all sites is 3.50
When it comes to the top 20 pages (based on estimated traffic they bring), a typical page looks like this:
The average Number of keywords on the first page of Google for all sites is 211.15
The average Number of words a keyword is composed of for all sites is 3.19
The average Search Volume a keyword has for all sites is 137,776.91
?Search Volume shows the number of searches that a particular keyword gets during a month.
The average Position a keyword has for all sites is 3.63
?Positions – refers to the position on which a given URL ranks in Google search for a specific keyword.
The average Estimated Monthly Visits for all sites is 6,382.15
? Estimated Monthly Visits indicates the estimated traffic a web page gets from Google for a particular term.
The average SEO difficulty for all sites is 24.31
?Average SEO difficulty is the estimated competition in organic search, the higher the number the more competitive.
A site in this category ranks on the first page of Google for about 211 keywords.
They are long-tail keywords formed of 3 words.
The positions on which they rank on Google are 3.6 and the SEO difficulty is 24.
The average number for the error : low word count from all sites is 25.85
The average number for the error : no sitemap.xml to optimize interaction with bots from all sites is 0.08
The average number for the error : duplicate <title> tags from all sites is 2.69
The average number for the error : duplicate meta descriptions from all sites is 11.31
The average number for the error : duplicate meta description tags from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : no meta description from all sites is 43.00
The average number for the error : no <title> tag from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : more than one <title> tag from all sites is 0.92
The average number for the error : without a H1 heading from all sites is 17.54
The average number for the error : returned 4XX status code from all sites is 0.15
The average number for the error : long loading time from all sites is 6.92
The average number for the error : URLs that are too long from all sites is 4.46
The average number for the error : poorly formatted URL for SEO from all sites is 16.92
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too long from all sites is 24.46
The average number for the error : <title> tag that is too short from all sites is 12.38
The average number for the error : SSL certificate that is about to expire from all sites is 1.00
The average number for the error : don’t have doctype declared from all sites is 0.00
The average number for the error : gzip or deflate compression disabled from all sites is 10.85
The average number for the error : have temporary redirects from all sites is 0.08
The sites in this category still have some SEO errors.
If you are a Squirrly SEO user, you won’t have to worry about your site having errors as well, as you can easily prevent or fix most of those SEO issues.
The average SEO Score* from all sites is 73
*SEO score is a metric calculated by our content analysis tool: ContentLook.
An SEO Score over 70 is given to sites that go above and beyond with their optimization efforts, optimizing their page content as well as other elements from their site such as the footer, headers, and their menu.
The average Duplicate titles errors from all sites is 6.23
The average Duplicate Descriptions error from all sites is 27.75
The average Empty Titles error from all sites is 0
The average Empty Descriptions error from all sites is 48
The average number a title Tag is composed of is 56.15
The average number a meta description is composed of is 111.62
Most of the sites DON’T have
Most of the sites included in this study:
The average number for Outgoing doFollow links is 0.08
The average number for Domain Age is 16.08
The average ContentLook SEO score for this category is 73.
An SEO Score over 70 is given to sites that go above and beyond with their optimization efforts, optimizing their page content as well as other elements from their site such as the footer, headers, and their menu.
However, the sites in this category still have some issues with duplicate content and empty titles. Fixing those issues could help them be even more successful.
The sites have all the social media elements necessary for a good sharing experience. The title tag is composed of is 56 and the meta description is composed of 112 characters.
Taking into account their average domain age (16 years) we can say that the sites in this category have had a lot of time to build their Authority,
** This data has been generated as a result of analyzing 100 pages from each site included in this category.
Here are the main results:
The average Title Length of the 100 pages is 62.51
The average Word Count of the 100 pages is 1,709.85
The average Number of Keyword 100 pages are optimized for is 191.23
The average Number of Keyword an article is optimized for is 1.91
The average Number of words for one Keyword of the 100 pages is 1.97
The average On-Page SEO Score per article of the 100 pages is 51.59
The average number of words that Meta Description has of the 100 pages is 18.38
The average Page Authority per article of the 100 pages is 26.45
A site in this category optimized for about 191 keywords for 100 pages.
Here’s what a typical page/article from a site in this category looks like:
Here are some insights about it:
For the final segment of this analysis, we’ve compared the average numbers that every category has to see what makes them different.
Here’s what we found:
1. As you can see in the image above, the sites that have an SEO Score bigger than 60 have the least amount of duplicate titles.
? The title can make a user want to click on your listing or not, and having unique titles can increase your chances of getting more traffic to your site.
2. When it comes to empty titles and descriptions, we can see that the sites that have an SEO score over 40 are trying their best to ensure they don’t have any empty titles.
However, not the same can be said when referring to descriptions.
? With Bulk SEO Settings from Squirrly SEO, you can easily make sure that you have both these things covered. You won’t have to worry about having articles and pages on your site that don’t have titles and descriptions.
3. The sites that have an SEO Score over 50 have longer titles compared to sites in other categories included in this study.
One possible explanation could be that they are focusing on long-tail keywords. The descriptions are pretty similar, length-wise.
4. Sites that have an SEO score over 50 make sure they DO NOT have any duplicate tags.
?This is an aspect you’ll want to get right as well, as Google penalizes sites that have Duplicate Content.
5. All sites have canonical links, as well as a robots.txt file.
6. All sites are listed as Safe Browsing sites.
7. All sites have social media elements.
8. As you can see from the image above, the older a site is, the higher its SEO Score.
This is most likely because of all the hard work they did over the years. Also, they had time to build their authority and acquire backlinks.
9. All sites have both site and Apple icons.
?This indicates that it is possible to compete with sites that have been around online for longer than you have and have a higher authority than you by creating long-form, optimized content.
?One possible explanation might be that these sites know that when you are a site that has a lot of clout with search engines, you have a better chance of being ranked for more keywords – even if you didn’t optimize for them using ALL available optimization techniques.
The keywords are long-form keywords, with more than 2 words.
And the last piece of data is related to Page Authority. As you can observe in the image below, there are no notable differences between categories in this regard.
Do you ever feel like SEO is too difficult – too difficult to even be worth the effort?
Let me tell you… you’re not the only one.
Look, the world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing.
HOWEVER, the basics of SEO are not that complicated. You can easily understand them, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference.
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Did Your Rankings Go Down?
Here’s why: Positions on Google fluctuate every single day. Today you might go up, tomorrow you might go down.
This is the way that search engines work and it’s not something that you should be afraid of.
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