Imagine you’re someone who works hard to make your website show up on Google when people search for things. It’s like a race, and you want your website to be at the front. But one day, you wake up and realize your website has fallen way behind or has vanished from the race altogether. This can be really scary and frustrating!

The process of making your website do well on Google is like planting seeds in a garden. You have to wait for those seeds to grow into healthy plants, and it takes some time, maybe a few months. But what’s even more frustrating is when it seems like all your hard work isn’t paying off.

Many things can affect how well your website does on Google, and in this article, we’ll explore why your website might be doing poorly and what you can do about it.

Don’t panic!

If you notice that your website isn’t ranking as high as it used to, you should not panic — it might just be a technical glitch. So here are some simple steps you can try first:

1. Check your rankings using a different tool or service. I like the search console to find the ranking for pages, here’s an article that explains how you can leverage scanning search rankings on GSC. Additionally, you can use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to track the position status across different countries.

2. Notice if it’s just one specific page that dropped in ranking or if your whole website is affected. If it’s just a single page with high-traffic intake, you can analyze the page rankings for its organic keywords. Again you can use GSC, Ahrefs, or Semrush.

3. Take a manual look at your rankings across countries where most traffic comes. You can use SERP watch to track live rankings.

4. Keep an eye on your competitors’ websites. If they’re experiencing a drop in traffic too, it could be due to a recent change in Google’s algorithms. Here’s what I do:

• Take the page address of any competitor page ranking on 1st page of Google.
• Go to semrush and scan the URL with the “exact URL” term.

• This will give you an idea of organic traffic for those pages in recent days.

• If traffic data is low on your competitor pages, there might be a drop in seasonal demand or the topic is heading toward needing to be updated.

In case you’re confident that the drop in your rankings isn’t because of technical issues after checks on your rank tracking tools or Google itself, it’s time to investigate why your orders have gone down. 

That takes us to some common reasons why a WordPress website might not perform well in search engine results.

Possible reasons for your Google ranking drop and fixes

1. Algorithm changes

One of the main causes of search result drops is obviously the changes in Search engine algorithms. These updates are to improve search results, and thus in the process, these updates can hurt your site with a significant decrease in rankings and is quite frustrating, to be honest.

This year (2023) Google had two major updates in March and August followed by a helpful content update in September, causing many websites across the world to lose their rankings. These updates particularly affected sites that the system thinks need to be more helpful or have unverified information.

Every website has a different impact after an algorithm update. Some sites may shoot to the top and other drops drastically. If your site did great after a core update, it does not mean it will be intact following the next in case your site falls behind other sites in fulfilling what users are looking for.

A tool you can use:

A handy tool you can use in this situation is called the Penguin tool by Barracuda. This tool connects to your Google Analytics and helps you see how your website’s traffic is affected by Google’s algorithm changes. It’s like having a map that shows you when your traffic started to change and if there were any updates from Google just before that happened. 

Even if you see some changes in traffic and ranking, it’s important not to rush into action right away. When there’s a new algorithm update, things can be a bit crazy for the first few days. Wait for a couple of days and monitor the situation as things tend to calm down and get back to normal within a couple of days.

2. Change in Seasonal Demand

If your website’s rankings have fallen, it could be because your topics are no longer as popular or the season when it’s in high demand has passed. For instance, if you’re in the business of selling snow shovels, your rankings will probably decline as spring and summer approach since people won’t be searching for snow-related products during those seasons.

Obviously, we know that Google Trends, in this case, is the best free tool available to find out seasonal changes and how trends go up and down over time. You can customize it to see the bigger picture, like focusing on specific locations or time periods.

Typically setting the time period to the past 12 months or yearly gives you the best view of seasonal demands changes across your target location or worldwide (in case your market is international)

3. Check for manual action

Another major reason your websites can see a significant drop in search results is due to Google penalties in place for websites that break the rules, and these penalties can be applied either through algorithms or manually by Google’s team.

Algorithmic penalties are updates for ranking high-quality content. If your site doesn’t align with these new algorithms and Google’s many ranking factors, it might drop in the search results.

Manual penalties are like a warning from Google that remains for an unknown duration when you don’t follow their rules for website owners.

1. Using content that’s not original.

2. Sneaky redirects that hide where a link goes.

3. Keeping hidden content or links on your site.

4. Creating low-quality pages that just lead to other pages.

5. Automatically generating content without human input.

6. Using special code in the wrong way.

7. Having harmful pages on your site.

8. Stuffing your pages with too many keywords.

Your site might suffer a slight decline in ranking or vanish from Google’s search results based on how severely you have broken its rules.

Tool to use:

Utilize, Google Search Console in this case. Expand the security and manual action section > click on Manual action. You will get a warning explaining the type of issue your site has triggered and needs to be taken action on your side.

If you don’t find any manual penalties, it’s likely that the decrease in your ranking isn’t because of spam or bad practices on your site. Instead, it could be related to technical problems, SEO, changes in what people are searching for, or outdated content – which we’ll discuss later in this post.

4. Have you recently changed anything on the website

At times, drops in your Google ranking can be tied to changes you’ve made to your website. In fact, any improvements you have made to the site or design alterations can impact your site’s ranking, either in a positive or negative way.

A positive change is great, but you need to know what type of changes can lead to a ranking drop.

1. Content Updates: If you or someone managing your site changes the content or adds new keywords, it can lead to a ranking drop. Such a drop typically appears when you use a keyword too frequently or reduce important texts related to the topic on a page.
2. Moved a page: When you move a page and redirect it to the new page, it takes time for search engines to find and update it. During this period, your site may not perform as well in Google search results, and the page might seem like it’s gone.
3. Change in internal links: When you adjust the links within your site, you can change how “link juice” flows. Thus, some pages might lose their importance in the process.
4. Design Change: Significant changes in your website’s design can sometimes make it harder for people to use and slow down how quickly it loads. These factors can affect how users behave on your site, which is an important factor in your ranking.
5. User Experience: Factors like a cluttered layout or layout shift, intrusive pop-ups, or difficult navigation can negatively impact user experience. Google uses web vitals to matrices to rank the pages in terms of performance and user experience, so when your new site design miserably fails on those matrices, chances are your site may have a drop in ranking.

Tool to use: 

There isn’t a specific tool that directly shows how changes to your website affect its search rankings. That’s why, it’s important to keep an eye on the positions of your site’s pages using Google Search Console for at least up to 2 weeks after making any changes or improvements. 

If you encounter issues, you can use Google Fetch and Render to investigate if there’s any issue on the page or check for issues in structured data that might be preventing search engine bots from properly indexing your page.

If your page’s position in the search engine results page (SERP) hasn’t improved within a few days, you might consider trying to restore a previous version of the page from the Wayback Machine.

5. On-page issues

If you have recently optimized your website, you might run into certain issues that could have a negative impact on your search ranking once Google’s bots have indexed your site. It’s very important to make sure your site does not face critical issues during load so everything loads fine for the bot to be able to index it properly.

Commonly, when a Google bot finds a broken link on your page such as when you have linked to a nonexistent page, or added half of the link, or you had a link inside design elements such as a button that is broken/inaccessible due to optimization rules can negatively impact on your SERP ranking change.

For each page, it’s very important to create Title and Description meta tags and include Alt attributes for images. If these tags are missing or incorrect, search engines may reduce the page’s visibility in search results.

Furthermore, it’s important to ensure proper HTTPS configuration, prevent mixed content issues, address duplicate content concerns, manage permanent and temporary redirects properly, and avoid blocking Google bots from crawling your pages via .htaccess rules.

Google does not like paid links and link exchanges. If you have done so recently and they detect those links leading to questionable websites, your ranking in the search engine results page (SERP) may be negatively affected.

Tools you can use:

There are several tools at your disposal for optimizing your on-page SEO. The first one would be your browser console, which helps identify various issues that may occur during the loading of your web pages. You can access it, by pressing Ctrl + Shift + I on a Windows PC or Option + Command + K or (Option + Command + J) on a Mac. 

This guide should help you out on how to look for errors via the browser console.

SEMrush and Ahrefs can be used for scanning and detecting a wide range of page-related issues. These two tools are my go-to place for checking internal page issues that we don’t see with our eyes. 

Apart from that, you can utilize Page Speed Insight’s page accessibility and SEO section to identify issues with your page. This is something that can be done via the browser lighthouse report tool.

If you come across any issues on your page, make an effort to search for online resources and resolve them. The fewer issues your page has, the more optimized it becomes, making it more appealing to Google.

6. Your competitor has improved their pages

Everybody wants to rank their pages on top of SERP. Similar to you, your competitors are continually trying to enhance their websites. It’s a constant race for the top positions in search engines.

If you were previously ranked higher than a competitor, they’ve been actively investing in optimizing their site, focusing on content, backlinks, and more, while you’ve dedicated less time to SEO or focused on other content. In such a scenario, your ranking could slip, and your competitor might surpass you. Such events are more aggressive during algorithm updates because algorithms are intelligent enough to find those great-quality contents and will try to test them on top of SERP.

So ensuring your content is up to date and contains enough quality information for the readers should help your site sustain such SERP changes.

Tool to use:

You can use Pagescreen to monitor your competitor changes and get notified when a visual change arrives. You can configure monitoring for specific pages and on the dashboard you will see the changes and screenshots taken for each page you are monitoring.

This way you can keep a close eye on your competitor pages and know who has gained the most out of your ranking drops and what they have been working on.

If you find a lot of movements & updates on competitors’ websites, you can analyze those changes and optimize your content so you don’t lose your positions. In addition, use this free content optimizer to analyze your target keywords and competitors’ pages. 

7. Off Page SEO Negative Impact

SEO can benefit or harm your site based on how you are doing it. Not only that, your websites can suffer from the actions of other web admins too. Here’s how:

1. Your competitors may try to play dirty by inserting artificial links to your site. This can lead to penalties under Google’s Penguin filter, hurting your site’s visibility and reputation.

2. Sometimes, other websites might plagiarize your content. If they publish your content before it gets indexed by Googlebot, it could be seen as duplicate content, potentially causing your page’s ranking to drop.

3. Engaging in prohibited backlink practices can have a detrimental impact on your page’s SEO. This can result in a lower ranking compared to previous weeks, making it harder for users to find your site.

4. Beware of fake user spam, whether it’s coming from unknown sources or, in some unfortunate cases, even from yourself. This is a red flag and can seriously affect your search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

What step you can take: use Originality.ai, a highly efficient plagiarism detection tool with AI content detection ability. Originality AI will let you know if your content is also being published somewhere else. In addition, you can utilize it as a traditional content plagiarism check for your writer’s content.

Furthermore, you will benefit from the readability score it comes up with, and it is really helpful to re-scale your content as it comes up with real-time suggestions with different color codes.

Regarding, link spam by unknown sources you can use SEMrush’s backlink analyzer and then block the spammy domains with the help of Google’s disavow tool. Blocking the domain would prevent the whole links from the domain and make your task a lot easier.

If you’re dealing with copied content, you can reach out to the DMCA by submitting a copyright infringement notice. For spam traffic detection, Google Analytics should help you out and then block those IPs with the help of your web host.

8. Your site might have lost some critical backlinks

Link building is an ongoing effort that requires constant attention. Your page may lose its ranking when some key backlinks are having issues or are removed by a 3rd party for some reason. These are some of the frequently triggered causes for the loss of links.

1. Link Removal: Sometimes, links that were initially placed on other websites may be taken down. This can happen if the agreement is temporary/ a disagreement in the terms/ or if the site admin asks for payment to renew the link. Losing backlinks can erode your site’s credibility thus hampering your SERP rank.

2. Obsolete Links: Backlinks can become outdated if they lead to pages that are no longer relevant or have been removed from your site. This can affect both user experience and SEO, so you would want to make sure the links that you have made are from relevant pages and explain what readers are about to read on your site, this is a really effective practice in link building.

3. Loss of Domain Trust: The trust flow is bidirectional. If the site linking to you loses its trust or credibility, it can have a negative impact on your own site’s reputation. Backlinks from untrustworthy sources can be considered toxic and harm your site’s credibility thus your pages may drop some SERP positions.

Tools that can help you:

You can find multiple tools to monitor and manage backlinks. I prefer Ahrefs because you get the backlink tracking utility with complete link management and SEO suit for a 7-day trial and $99 per user after that.

9. You Have Not Worked on Your Web Vitals

In August 2021, Google rolled out the Page Experience algorithm, which brought along a set of Core Web Vitals ranking factors. This update signifies that Google is now placing more emphasis on the loading speed of pages and user-friendliness.

Optimizing for Web Vitals does not always mean getting the greatest score on speed testing tools like Page Speed Insight, GTmatrix, and Webvitals.dev but more about finding the right balance between speed and accessibility of your site so from a performance point of view it can satisfy the following matrics as well as your site is accessible by users and bots.

Let’s take a look at web vital metrics and what they stand for in simple terms:

LCP: Largest Contentful Paint. This measures how long it takes for the largest element on a page to appear on the user’s browser.

FID: First Input Delay. This indicates the average time your pages take for the browser to react to the initial user interaction.

NIP: Currently there are limitations on FID to measure the responsiveness of a web page hence Google is planning to replace FID with NIP in the coming March of 2024. This is why focusing on optimizing your site for NIP is a forward-thinking decision right now.

CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift. This tracks the overall amount of layout movement that happens while a page is loading.

How do these Core Web Vitals matter even more in a competitive SERP landscape? Well, they can give you an extra edge. In a crowded field, having faster loading and more user-friendly pages can help you stand out from the SERP competition, attracting more visitors and boosting your rankings in search results. 

So, paying attention to these web vitals isn’t just about keeping Google happy; it’s about making your site more appealing and competitive in the online world.

What tools to use?

The first step would be to use a speed testing tool and analyze the site performance record. Then Go to Google Search Console > Page Experience > Web Vitals. Check if you can see any poor URLs or URLs that need improvement. 

In case there are any, you should focus on improving your performance and page experience.

The performance test tools combined with WordPress caching plugins can help you fix these performance-related issues and prepare for a better web vital status. 

You can also rely on a hands-off approach and have a discussion (including pre-order analysis) with our web vital optimization team at Speedy Site. This service has been helping a lot of site owners fix their page speed issues and pass web vitals so I bet they can offer an optimal solution for your site as well.

10. Look for Geolocation fluctuations

A website’s ranking isn’t set in stone; it can vary significantly depending on the location. In different countries, regions, and cities, a page’s position in search results can differ. For instance, your site may rank very well in your country but drop its position in another region.

Google tailors search results to individual users which means that two different people searching for the same thing may see different results. Additionally, whether you’re signed in or not to your Google account can also influence the results you receive. So, keep in mind that search rankings can be quite dynamic and personalized.

The best tool to get an overview of your pages and target keywords (topics) is Google Search Console. I have explained how you can leverage GSC’s search performance data to analyze the average position of your page for many different countries.

To improve your page’s ranking across various geographic locations, you need to focus on offering top-notch original content and configuring multi-language support on your site.

11. Avoid low-quality contents

It’s really not worth your time to put out low-quality content that doesn’t genuinely benefit your readers. Instead of churning out a massive quantity of articles that essentially say the same thing as others, it’s much more effective to focus on a smaller number of high-quality pieces.

The key to valuable content is to offer solutions that might be similar to what’s out there but are presented in a way that’s more user-friendly, easy to follow, enhances the overall reader experience, and top of all provides a real solution. 

Even better if you can inject your own unique approach that sets your content apart and earns the admiration of your audience.

Furthermore, you should update your content; if:

1. Your content is plagiarized. Even copying a portion of someone else’s work can lead to Google penalties.
2. Make your content engaging for users without resorting to clickbait tactics. Using numbers and questions in headlines can still be effective.
3. Include information about the content creator, such as their name and links to their social media accounts, to establish expertise.
4. Always use verified data and provide links to reliable sources, especially when dealing with content that impacts health, happiness, safety, or financial stability (YMYL). Misleading content can lead to severe consequences.
5. Optimize the user experience by breaking up large blocks of unformatted text. Google assessors value a readable format, as it can impact bounce rates and ultimately your ranking.

Recovering page ranking in SERP

When your WordPress site takes a hit in the Google rankings, it can be a bit of a head-scratcher. 

To tackle it head-on you can try the tools I have mentioned above and then work on updating your content with a compelling and valuable intent that should keep your audience engaged and eventually help your site align with what Google thinks is more user-friendly content.

ChatGPT can be an invaluable tool for keyword research. Its machine learning and language models give it the power to uncover great keywords that can be used to optimize SEO. We’ve seen some creative and innovative examples of how Twitter users have been able to use ChatGPT for this purpose. 

Today we’ll dive deeper into how ChatGPT can help you with keyword research and showcase the potential of the AI-powered platform.

Different Types of Keyword Research and Analysis

There are several ways to identify which keywords best suit your website. You can use keyword research and analysis to help you determine the right terms to target. 

Keyword Discovery: This technique involves figuring out the most popular and relevant terms your target audience uses. 

Competitor Analysis: Analyzing the keywords used by your competitors can help you determine which terms they are targeting. 

Search Volume Analysis: This method estimates the number of searches for a particular keyword or phrase. Keyword Difficulty Analysis: This process helps you determine the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword or phrase. 

Long-Tail Keyword Research: Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific, less competitive search terms. Identifying these terms can help you create more targeted content. 

Keyword Clustering: Keyword Clustering involves grouping related keywords together to create more targeted content.

Can Chat GPT Fulfill Your Keyword Research Needs?

Typical keyword tools like Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Semrush are powered by huge databases that can be used to help you find the best keywords for any given topic. With these tools, you can explore related keywords or even longer-tailed keywords that contain your initial keyword search.

These tools likely use a combination of algorithms that can comprehend your search query and its related concepts, as well as data that reveals what people are searching for. Combining these two elements, these tools can provide you with the most relevant results with data.

ChatGPT, unlike traditional keyword research tools, utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the meaning behind your query and suggest related keywords. This means it can provide you with a different type of suggestion, but it also means that it’s limited in the sense that it doesn’t have access to data from actual searches. 

Despite the fact that AI is limited when it comes to providing you with Data, it still can help you with keyword research and analysis by skipping the work you need to put in to find those keywords and phrases relevant to your target search term. In addition, it’s handy to find and filter your keywords as you want just by sending a custom prompt to the AI and having your data set ready within seconds. 

Let’s take a look into how Chat GPT fits into different types of keyword analysis and research needs:

1. Discover New Keywords

ChatGPT is an incredibly versatile tool for keyword discovery. All you have to do is ask it for relevant keywords. You can then narrow your keyword search with audience specifications or add filters to your query. 

For example, you want to find out long tail keyword keywords related to copywriting. You can prompt it like “Make a list of keywords related to ‘copywriting‘ that one might search on Google.”

Now that you have some major keywords, you can find some long-tail keywords targeting beginner copywriters. The prompt goes, “adjust this list of keywords related to ‘copywriting’ with beginners in mind.”

Again, suppose you want to follow the programmatic content approach by duplicating the keyword style and changing the variables according to your need. In that case, Chat GPT makes this entire process looks effortless. 

For instance, you can ask the AI to {Make a list of keywords by changing the state name for all states in United States ‘Best Copywriting Agency in California’}, and it will give you the exact list you want without you having to look for all the state names as the variables.

When brainstorming new keywords, Chat GPT is among the top tools even though it misses out on one key component, volume, which SEOs use to determine the keyword’s worth. 

It’s faster than most of the mainstream keyword research tools in finding out keywords and is highly flexible, and has great room for your creativity.

2. Competitor’s Content Analysis

Unfortunately, ChatGPT does not let you just input a competitor’s URL into a tool like Ahrefs to get a list of keywords they are ranking for. The only way to do a competitor analysis is to feed the text from their page into ChatGPT and ask it to identify the keywords.

This sounds like time-consuming work, and the output would still not be accurate. In addition, you will miss out on metrics like keyword competition, volume, and current trends. 

Regardless, you can still use ChatGPT to extract a list of long tail keywords from a selected text like this example; you can ask the AI to make a list of 20 long tail keywords from the following text: “{copied article}.” I know it sounds like a lot of work, and some tools can do it much better than Chat GPT, but Chat GPT is not a dedicated keyword research tool either.

We copied a full article about a streaming application called Kodi from a random webpage, and chat GPT gave us a keyword list that was not really impressive on what we wanted to find out: 

So we asked if Chat GPT could recheck this. The revised list is actually pretty impressive and closely related to what we gathered from Ahrefs and Semrush on this topic.

It would not be worth your time to use Chat GPT for competitor analysis. Instead, you should stick to the traditional keyword research tools because they offer more valuable information. In addition, this process is quite time-consuming, and keep in mind that there is a limit to the amount of text you can copy and paste at once before ChatGPT gives you an error message.

3. Search Volume Analysis

ChatGPT (March 14 version) can provide you with keyword volume estimation from Google Keyword Planner. Although Chat GPT is not designed to provide this kind of information, you can ask the AI to provide you with a set of keywords with their respective volumes and competition data. 

It looks like Chat GPT can access or read data from Google keyword Planner; although, when I asked the AI about geotargeting it indicated that the data represents Global search volume, which is what we will cross-check shortly.

If you ask, “Can you provide me keyword volume and competition data for 10 long tail keywords related to this term {Copywriting}” – here’s what Chat GPT gave us:

When I attempted to verify the keyword volume and competition using the keyword planner, I found that the data didn’t exactly match what ChatGPT provided. 

We’re not entirely sure how ChatGPT is obtaining these keyword volumes, but it’s possible that different tools and algorithms may yield different results. Similarly, the competition data didn’t match my findings on the keyword planner, but the competition information corresponded for certain countries.

4. Long Tail Keyword Research

You may have noticed that I requested the tool to generate a list of “long tail” keywords, and it delivered exactly that. However, it’s important to note that the accuracy of these keywords in terms of matching real-world search queries from people cannot be guaranteed. 

Nevertheless, the tool provides a lot of relevant output that you can actually use to guide your content creation process. You can instruct the tool to help you write and piece together information during the content creation time based on the keywords it suggests.

In that case, Chat GPT is a faster and easier solution than other keyword research tools just to find some potential long-tail keywords and blend them into the content so your output is more relevant if we consider content creation with AI support. 

To find long tail keywords about any topic, you have to pass the prompt as “make a list of {count} long tail keywords for this term {your term} where minimum word count per keyword is 5”, setting up word count as a filter here to avoid shorter keywords.

And here’s what we got:

5. Keyword Clustering

When grouping similar keywords or phrases into clusters based on their semantic relevance or topical similarity, Keyword clustering is the technique to go for. You can create more focused and relevant content around specific themes or topics by grouping related keywords together. 

This helps you to create organized content and a well-structured website that benefits the visitors to find what they’re looking for in the site website. In addition, focused keyword clustering can increase click-through rates across the content because of their relevancy. 

By grouping related keywords together, it becomes easier to identify gaps in your site’s content, making it easier to target new keywords.

Keyword clustering is easy with tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush, but with Chat GPT, it’s faster and has more freedom to tweak it the way you want. For example, you want to create a cluster of informative and commercial keywords and their volume for your main term, ‘Copywriting.’

We asked Chat GPT: “Make a list of long tail keywords for Copywriting and cluster them based on keyword search intent as well as include search volume.”

After we provided the AI with a list of long-tail keywords related to copywriting, we requested it to present the data in a table format. The table can be very useful in planning your website’s content without manually extracting keywords from various keyword research tools. 

However, it is important to note that the accuracy of these keywords may not be entirely reliable, so it is important to exercise caution when using them as the basis for your content planning.

And YES, you can easily copy and paste the table created by Chat GPT to your preferred text editor or software. This means you can quickly generate any table you need by simply providing the relevant data as a prompt and asking the AI to create the table. It’s that easy!

6. Chat GPT Prompts for Title Creation

Titles are important in case you want to guide your content production team to have a list of Titles per keyword with AI assistance; you have to ask Chat GPT to include Titles that are optimized for SEO and convey the catchiness and content intent.

We asked Chat GPT to add a catchy article title for all these keywords in the same table that matches the keyword in the title.

There are so many fantastic opportunities to explore with Chat GPT! You can use it to research, plan, create and verify your content production, which is incredible. Of course, if you’re looking to create content using AI, it’s essential to be careful and avoid any issues with duplication or plagiarism. 

That’s where Originality.AI comes in – it’s the perfect tool to protect your content from being detected as AI-generated and prevent accidental plagiarism with other content on the web.

We’re working on putting together a list of prompts you can use on Chat GPT to take your content production to the next level with AI support. So stay tuned to Websiteincome.com to get access to this excellent resource! And while you’re there, check out other articles and information on online business development. It has many ideas and insights to help you build your next idea.

The keyword tools for youtube, also known as a keyword research tool, are the foundation tools used to discover new keyword opportunity for YouTube videos.

Content writing is one of the steps that has to happen within content marketing. Content marketing consists of a series of steps, including business strategy, keyword research, content writing, publishing, and marketing the created content. Too often, the process of content writing gets mistaken for a business doing content marketing.

What is the “holy grail” for Content Marketing? The answer is:  The ability to predictably say that if you target a keyword with a specific criteria, and produce an article that meets certain specifications, you will be “guaranteed” to rank in the top 10 of Google.  

Today we look at how CognitiveSEO can help in this quest!

The “Holy Grail” of Content Marketing might be a long shot, but we are always using our unique position of publishing A LOT of quality articles on great sites with Content Refined to try and come closer to understanding the variables that will rank your content with certainty on search engines. With the sheer number of articles published, along with access to data science talent, we were able to perform a multivariable regression analysis that we think it is worth pursuing.

In this article, we are going to talk about the results from one specific tool that can provide more metrics about both the keyword and content quality compared to almost any other tool on the market. 

CognitiveSEO provides an amazing array of metrics for data driven content marketers to dig into and analyze against the performance of their content. Where you would need data from several different tools such a SEMRush, MarketMuse and Ahrefs etc., CognitiveSEO consolidates a lot of that functionality into one super awesome tool. A great solution for those who have too many ongoing SAAS subscriptions already (I’ve been so guilty of this). 

So by using just CognitiveSEO, what are the metrics that would “guarantee” a ranking in the top 10? Come on a stats adventure with us.

Stats Disclaimer – Before we get dig too deeply into these numbers, it’s important that we share what some of the statistical performance was for these. 

The Keyword Monthly Volume, Content Performance, Article Word Count and URL Character length are the most valuable variables to analyze. Analyzing  50+ regression scenarios,12.42% r square is the best regression result available using a majority of only CognitiveSEO’s Variables. The best single regression variable, content performance, achieved an r squared value of 4.4%. In most successful multi regression analysis, a variable ” anchor” is needed to drive line of best fit. This seems to be missing as the most successful single regression variable only has 4.4% correlation to google rankings, making it hard to fit the rest of the data to variable with little fit. Actionable insights are still achieved and are explained below. 

Actionable Insights: 

If you are trying to create content that will predictably rank on google, according to CognitiveSEO, you want to follow these guidelines. 

Metrics: 

Minimum Conditions:

• Keyword difficulty should be at least 17
• Content performance score should be at least  51
• The readability score should be at least 47
• Minimum article length should be 250 words

Ideal Conditions: 

• Keyword difficulty should be at least 17
• Content performance score should be at least 85
• The readability score should be at least 65
• Minimum article length should be 1400 words

I checked to see if one of my best ranking pages met this criteria, and check out my findings below! 

My article “How to Build a PBN” is a great example of this. This article does really well–it has 10 keywords ranking in the top 3 spots on Google and it has been picked up for Google’s featured snippet for this article. 

In this case all of the “Ideal” Criteria were met!

• Keyword difficulty should be at least 17
  • For my Keyword it was 37
• Content performance score should be at least 85
  • Our content performance score was 97
• The readability score should be at least 65
  • Ours was 75
• Minimum article length should be 1400 words
  • We went big with this one and it was 14,743 words long! 

Conclusion: 

So what does this mean? Have we “cracked the code” of content marketing? According to this data analysis (which has pulled on hundreds of articles written by Content Refined) we are able to predict that if the ideal conditions of an article are met, you should be able to rank in the top 10 of Google. We’ve given you the Holy Grail–so give CognitiveSEO a try for yourself and really step up your game in the world of content marketing.