It’s a beautiful day, and we’ll get to talk about seven surprising numbers that will help you take control of your WordPress SEO and your content marketing strategy.
I’m so happy that you’re still keeping up with these lessons.
Practical Things You’ll Learn in This Lesson:
- How to check your site’s progress and performance using numbers and scores
- What are the most important Google ranking factors
- How to leverage data and metrics to rank your site higher
The Link between Numbers and WordPress SEO Success
You need to have a strong vision of what you want to achieve, sure.
However, you will never reach your goals unless you study what’s going on with your site, measure the progress and continuously work on improving performance.
And this is where numbers come into play. They are meant to guide your efforts and help you always be in the know.
That being said, the best way to check your progress and see how your WordPress SEO improves from week to week is via Squirrly’s site Audit score.
The weekly Audit that you get from Squirrly will help you access essential information with ease. That’s because it gives you relevant metrics and a performance score to let you know how your site is performing.
What’s more, the Audit is broken down into sections so that you know which areas need improving. It also tells you what every section means and gives you either insights or PRO tips to help you improve the score.
Here’s a look into Squirrly’s site audit.
Now, let’s take a look at which numbers from the site Audit contribute to the success of your WordPress site.
7 Numbers That Have a Lasting Impact on WordPress SEO
By now, you’ve probably already received this week’s site audit from Squirrly (if you’re a Squirrly user).
Go ahead and open it from this page.
Right. Numbers.
1) Site Audit Score
Based on everything we analyze about your WordPress site, we give you an overall score. If you remember, in Lesson 1, we did that group learning experiment, and we’ve shared with you what we’ve discovered.
The most important takeaway of our study was this: the sites which had a solid chance of making it big online all had a Site Audit Score of over 80.
Back then, we also had a traffic analytics solution implemented for the people who were part of the experiment. We measured their organic traffic – the traffic they got as a result of having great WordPress SEO.
Even if your site’s score is at 30 when you’re just starting out, don’t panic!
Follow the instructions from the report to start fixing issues. This way, you’ll solve most of your WordPress site structure problems, which will increase the score you get. Start making improvements. Check your Audit weekly. That score needs to grow.
You can always get professional help from Squirrly Experts, to get your WordPress SEO Site Structure fixed.
2) Posting Frequency
The next important number for great WordPress SEO is the posting frequency.
I guess you already know that the way to do SEO these days is by having a lot of great content on your site. It’s much easier to rank for pages and blog posts than it is to rank for your homepage.
Furthermore, your website needs to look fresh and updated. Google takes this very seriously. It has solid reasons for doing so.
If someone enters a website and sees that there is no new content published by that company on their blog, it’s a clear indicator that either:
a) That company went out of business.
b) Business is going dreadfully.
If you think people will assume the business is doing so well that they don’t have time to write articles anymore, know that this scenario is highly unlikely. Most people just don’t think that way.
Remember: your WordPress SEO needs to take into account both search bots AND human readers.
Another good case for publishing new blog posts is this: social media only works for you if you keep posting new content. The human readers who spend their time on social media will get bored if you publish the same old, same old.
Brian Dean (who also loves the Squirrly SEO Audit and our keyword research tool) is one of the most important SEO experts. He is the owner of Backlinko, where he posts some fantastic ideas on how to get backlinks to your website.
Brian’s ideas revolve around the fact that you should publish super long-form content, instead of publishing shorter articles more often. He is right. You can also try that.
We know that not every business will be able to publish content every three days. What we also know is that websites with a higher posting frequency have a much better chance of being ranked than the other ones. It can work both ways.
Our purpose is to show you what works in most of the cases, to give you a better chance of having amazing WordPress SEO.
3) Average Content Optimization
To provide this score, we analyze all the pages you optimized so far with Squirrly (whether they are WordPress blog posts or eCommerce product pages) and check the optimization percentage.
Using this data, we determine the average content optimization score.
Now that you have Squirrly SEO, you should focus on getting as many pages optimized as possible.
By raising this number, you will help Google figure out that your pages are valuable for other people. This will increase your rankings.
Talking about making them valuable for people: remember to get that human-friendly optimization check right in the Live assistant. It’s a sure way to improve your overall WordPress SEO.
4) Average Shares per Latest Posts
Many people publish great content on their WordPress sites and then forget to do anything about them. That’s the best way to fail.
The best way to win, however, comes from actually doing stuff with your articles post-publishing. One of the simplest things you can do after publishing is to start sharing your new content on social media platforms.
You will get social signals back to your site, which represents an important Google ranking factor. This shows Google that human readers love the topics you write about, so it starts considering your WordPress site as being more valuable.
In other words, promoting your content is key, as it will help gain some social signals which will also impact rankings.
So, you need to make sure that all your latest posts get shared.
5) Backlinks per Latest Posts
This is a number that you will need to improve your site’s authority and thus increase its rankings.
The good news is that you can increase this number by finding relevant content that you’ve already published on your WordPress site and sending links from those blog posts to your new blog posts.
Inner linking is paramount. One of the best things about Wikipedia is that it has so many internal links that help you discover more and more content. Google loves this kind of stuff.
To be informative, you need to provide ways for people to access more great content. Don’t limit their experience. Enhance it.
6) Outgoing doFollow Links
External Links are hyperlinks that point at any domain other than the domain the link was posted on. It’s important not to have too many external links on your site.
7) Majestic Unique Domains
It’s a number that will show you the total number of domains that have linked back to your WordPress site. Past tense.
So, the number doesn’t take into account the number of domains that currently link to your site.
A big difference.
Some SEO experts dislike Majestic because of this. Instead of showing just the currently existing backlinks, this tool will show you numbers that always keep growing, even though in reality you might be losing some of your backlinks.
The Majestic Unique Domains number, however, is actually necessary, regardless of the rest of the data. Maybe even BECAUSE of it.
If the number is high, it means that your website has always been important. If that number keeps getting bigger and bigger, it means that your site is gaining a much wider reach worldwide.
This number shows how many sites in the world have linked to your website. If more and more websites link to yours, it means that your visibility and importance on the web just keep getting better.
Empower Your WordPress SEO with These 7 Numbers and Rank Higher on Google
Now you know more about the most important numbers you can use to check your site’s SEO performance, what they represent, and what you can do to increase them.
Your Goals for This Lesson:
- Check your site Audit and find 2 issues that you can start working on right away
- Set an SEO goal for the next couple of weeks, such as to improve your posting frequency
- Start using the tips presented in this lesson to improve your site score and authority over the next month
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Write a Comment
Even if I understand the importance of checking the stats of your site, I have to admit I sometimes forget to do it. And when I remember, I get overwhelmed by everything and just give up. I did hear on the new release video that there is a new cat in town and that’s the SEO daily goals. I did not try this yet, but I’m curious whether it will solve my issue.
Yes, Alice, Daily SEO Goals should help you with that. If you need help getting started with using the Daily SEO Goals section, you can check out this video: https://youtu.be/drRVRBFYUKA
The audit feature is a bit too advanced for me. And frustrating, especially when my score is dropping and I have no idea why. I will try to apply what I learned today and see if my audit improves. Wish me luck!
Thank you for your feedback, Denise! We’re working on making the Audit even more actionable for you, which will hopefully improve your experience. Try following the instructions provided within the Audit to improve your score. Let me know how it goes! Good luck ?
Those daily goals are useful, but some of them are pretty hard to complete right away. Luckily with the instructions on each SEO daily goal, I understand better why it is important and why it should be done. These SEO daily goals are really handy, especially when you don’t know what to do anymore for your blog to increase in rankings.
You’re right, Javari! Some of the goals require a bit more time to complete, but they are worth it! The tasks you receive within the Daily SEO Goals section are the ones that will make the biggest impact on your rankings. Think about that when you need a motivation boost.
When I started using Squirrly, my audit score was 30% and I was kind of freaking out. But I chose to do what Squirrly recommended to correct all the problems, and now my audit score is 63%. I will continue listening to Squirrly and try to fix all the SEO problems that may arise.
That is great to hear, Erica! Keep following the guidance within the Audit, complete the tasks from the Next SEO Goals section and you’re likely to see that score go up soon.