Ranking factors studies: What's really important

Ranking factors studies: What's really important

These are a few of my thoughts about ranking factor studies that are so insanely popular these days.

As someone who has worked on the SEO tool side for quite a long time, and who is still involved in helping various digital marketing tool companies build their marketing strategies, I have something to say on this topic. In my view, all those studies based on analysis of a massive number of SERPs and traffic flow are suffering from the same "brain fog" -- too much data with too little clarity of vision. Let me explain.

1. Everything starts with data

First of all, no one is perfect, and the same is true with data. It's never perfect, even when a tool is scraping it directly from Google. Plenty of issues can arise. For instance, a site might use a proxy and scape US SERPS by using non US IP. Or it might have a loss of data when a crawler is broken or flawed. Or if a tool takes data from a third-party provider, there's a chance that the accumulation is complicated or the source is shady, since that's out of the tool's control. Yes, digital marketing data tools do run checks, try to establish consistency, and aim to represent the accurate data. But again, it's not always perfect.

2. Who is responsible for calculations?

Finding correlations between a good number of ranking factors requires a math degree and a lot of experience in delivering such research projects. But most of us have no idea who is responsible for designing the process or applying the calculations that produce the results we're using. And we can't know whether that person (or team) is actually good at correlation analysis.

3. The explanation is as important as the results.

Even if every calculation on the previous stage were delivered correctly, there would still be plenty of opportunities to fail at the "explaining" stage. Again, you have to ask, "who is in charge?" If the person interpreting the results is a content marketer while the research is about SEO ranking factors, then the chance that the logic might be off is extremely high.

You might wonder whether it makes sense to follow these studies. My answer is a definite yes, but only from a theoretical perspective. That's quite helpful when it comes to understanding the generic landscape. But for practical application, I'm not so sure. The only way to bring forth a meaningful study with practical results is to build it based on interviewing real SEO experts rather than just crunching massive data sets. That's what Stephen Kenwright from Branded3 did. In other words, he build his research based on the experience of interviewed SEO experts. This makes the majority of their findings and their explanations very focused and straightforward, coming right to the point. And that's what gives them the all-important practical base that makes a difference in real-world use.

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