After using the Content Assistant Tool, in less than 48 hours my post went from 14-16 place in search results straight within the featured snippet. 

Background

I have good quality content on my site – Imigração para o Canadá e Quebec. For instance, my bounce rate so far this year is 3.30%. All 2019 my bounce rate was 14%, but there’s was still room for improvement. Below you can see a print screen from my Google Analytics account with the results for my website performance.

It doesn’t matter if the content is good, if the targeted audience doesn’t come to my website.

If they don’t know about the existence of my amazing website and its content… what’s the point?

After reading some of my main competitors’ content I was asking myself: how the hell Google ranks this above my piece? Seriously! And then I realized it must have something else I was missing. And we are of course talking about SEO.

I know that SEO is very important and can help any website grow if the principles are correct. The sad part of the story is that I never paid too much attention. So knowing I was behind my foes, I started to sign up for a lot of famous SEO’s websites. (Neil Patel, SemRush, Moz, etc). 

They were helpful to give me some advice but to be honest it was too general and vague. I wanted help to move my awesome content to the very top! I have no idea how I came across cognitiveSEO. With all due respect, I’ve never heard about them.

I’ve had tested so many tools that I decided to try this one too. You know what they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before finding your prince.

The Content Optimization Process

When I found cognitiveSEO and looked on the website, I saw a bunch of useful tools, but not what I was looking for, at my first sight (real help to move my content higher in Google). But, that was a mistake which I found out afterward. 

I closed the cognitiveSEO’s website and went to look for more options. Then I got an email from the team and I saw a mention about the Keyword Tool & Content Assistant. And that’s how I started using the tool.

I already had in mind the keyword I want to rank for (Nova Scotia immigration – the Portuguese version ) and I already had some content, so my main purpose was to improve that content. And it was way easier than expected.

Firstly, I imported the URL of my existing content. A few seconds later I got a lot of recommendations and MOST IMPORTANT for me, keywords suggestions.

This was the tool that I was looking for to bring my content higher on the Google search results page.

The Content Optimizer Tool told me which keywords I have to use more, those I must include, topics suggestions and more.

I will be 100% honest: At first, I was completely skeptical. Some keywords although had some connection to the content it was very weird to use it.

But I decided to go ahead. So, I used almost all the keywords recommended by cognitiveSEO. Even some that I would never think about it. I managed to bring the Content Performance score to 97. 

Right after I finished all the changes, the tool showed me on a yellow box: “This content can rank in the top 10 Google results“. I literally said to myself: “Oh yeah! Really?”. Come on! This tool knows nothing about Brazil, immigration to Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada (trending right now among Brazilians). And it’s in English! I’m writing in Portuguese.

I knew it would help me in some way. But rank in top 10? No way… I was not prepared for what was coming …

The Results After Using cognitiveSEO’s Content Assistant

Before using the cognitiveSEO tool, my content was ranking in position 14-16 on the search engines for my targeted keyword – imigração nova scotia.

After all the changes using the Optimize Content Tool in less than 48 hours my post went from 14-16 place in search results for that keyword to the VERY FIRST ONE!

Not only that but now my website ranks in Google Answer Box, on position zero in search results. We all know how hard is to win the Answer box. Google is literally telling people: Don’t look any further, it’s here you are going to find all your answers.

You can see that I’m ranking higher than the official website of the Nova Scotia Government. You can take a look at the screenshot below with the featured snippet and find my website in Google Featured Snippet. Their Domain authority rate is 60% higher than mine. But the Content Optimizer Tool just made sure that Google knows my content is better.

I was so amazed that I did two things:

• First, I searched for that keyword in three different computers making sure to use different networks! I couldn’t believe my eyes.
• And second, I took the initiative to contact cognitiveSEO and tell them about my results!

I will never publish another post before getting the Optimize Content Tool’s help!

Thanks, cognitiveSEO team. You really provided what I was looking for in my content strategy!

I hope these kinds of examples can help you understand how to use cognitiveSEO Content Optimizer Tool, how it can help you and see third-party, no-strings-attached results. 

Disclosure

This is not a paid post and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the author. This is Rafael Alencar’s success story, written and documented by himself. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

Jibran Qazi is an SEO consultant, growth hacker, and founder of Hunter Canada, a company that helps tech firms achieve exponential traffic growth. Enjoy his story, written and documented by himself, and see how he managed to grow an app in the Fintech space, increasing its number of monthly visitors from 4000 to 420K+ in just 6 months.  All organic traffic from Google, no PPC, no paid ads.

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 
   1. Social Proof
   2. The Numbers
   3. First 30 Days
   4. First 60 days (2 months)
   5. First 120 Days (4 Months)
   6. First 180 Days (6 months)
2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site
3. The SEO Process
   1. Negative SEO Check on Main (Mysite.com) + Subdomains
   2. Build Citations
   3. Add Your Link to Reliable Directory
   4. Add Text
   5. Moving Forward
   6. Using Phrases As Anchor Text
4. The Link Building Strategy
   1. Forget About NoFollow Links
5. Conclusion

1. Success Story of 420K+ visitors increase 

The length of our contract was 6 months which started on May 29th, 2018 and ended on Nov 29, 2018.

Let’s start with some social proof, shall we:

1.1 Social Proof

If you zoom into the email, you’ll see I got them on the first page for “Invoice” and “Receipt”.  Two massive keywords. Not sure if they are still there but during that time, they sure were.

1.2 The Numbers

For obvious reasons, I can’t share the exact numbers but this should give you an idea.

Which lead to over 350K downloads of their app.

Let’s break down the month by month increase.

1.3 First 30 Days

Success to these guys was a 30% increase in the first 3-6 months. I handed this to them in the first 30 days.

In fact, I more than doubled it. Over 60%.

1.4 First 60 days (2 months)

During these months and pretty much every month after I started, the growth was (As expected) simply exponential.

370%+ increase in traffic in just 2 months.

Over 1200%+ increase in just 3 months.

1.5 First 120 Days (4 Months)

Over 3000%+ increase in traffic. In fact, this was the first time the traffic went over 140K.

1.6 First 180 Days (6 months)

This is where I took them over 8000% in organic growth and had over 420k people in total. All in 6 months.

2. How To Get Exponential Results For Your Own Site

To get such results in your own niche, you must rank for some high volume keywords. I got this Fintech company on the first page for the following massive keywords:

• Invoice;
• Receipt;

Considering they weren’t even close when I benchmarked everything in the beginning, these are pretty solid results.

I literally beat out sites like Wikipedia, Shopify, Office.com and many more established sites with massive advertising budgets.

3. The SEO Process

Since I can’t share exactly what I did for legal reasons, let me share some “general tips”. I just applied my 3 step formula again:

1. Fix what’s wrong (Site Architecture).
2. Optimize Site (On-Page SEO).
3. Build Links (Starts from day 1).

If you’re new to SEO, or not sure what ‘link juice’ is, start here.

The only difference is instead of approaching these steps in a sequence, you should perform all 3 steps at the same time in a holistic way.

Now you can use lots of tools for the first two steps (Depends on your preference really) but the main one that really helped me get this site (Plus my other clients/sites) to the next level was hands down, Cognitive SEO.

Here’s why:

• If you want the deepest backlink data, there is just no comparison.
• For the past 3 years, I’ve been using it for the initial NegSEO cleanup and then ongoing monitoring.
• When I’m considering getting a backlink from somewhere which looks a little odd, CognitiveSEO allows me to take a deeper look.

Guys, the thing is if you want great results, you have to use quality tools. CognitiveSEO is one of them. So generally speaking, here is how you should usually approach a site.

3.1 NegSEO Check on Main (Mysite.com) + Subdomains (help.mysite.com)

Always do a NegSEO check on your main domain and any subdomains first. Sometimes spammy links from your subdomains can kill your traffic over time. I love how CognitiveSEO allows me to look up subdomains for NegSEO as well. Very important.

When disavowing, always make sure you manually check the metrics of the sites you want to disavow. Sometimes you can disavow good ones as well and that could hurt you a lot.

There is a world of difference between a spammy site vs a low quality site. You need to disavow spammy site not low quality sites.

According to Cognitive SEO, 97% of Google is made of low-quality sites. Check out Google’s very own backlink profile below:

3.2 Build Citations

Citations are links from local business directories. It is surprising how so many businesses (Established or not), have not paid any attention to these.

Quality citations are a great source for backlinks and another great way of diversifying your backlink profile.

3.3 Add Your Link to JoeAnt

If there is one directory that I swear by to this day, it is JoeAnt. Love how they’ve maintained their quality throughout all these years. So always make sure you are present on JoeAnt.

It will give your site two things. A quality backlink and another diverse source that your backlinks is coming from. In this case, it would be from a directory.

3.4 Add Text

Try your best to turn your main pages (Pages you want to rank), into long copy.

These days, you need to have around 3000+ words. You don’t have to do it right away but keep adding text little by little.

3.5 Moving Forward

Most of these changes that I’ve mentioned here take the first 30-60 days. Usually 60 days as all the changes you are making need to get re-indexed as well. I used a service called One Hour Indexing for this.

Oh wait … What about backlinks?

Again, nothing special here either. Just you typical, manual, white hat link building (Blog comments, Forums, Directories, etc).

When it comes to SEO, it’s link building that takes most of my time. 2-4 hours a day at the very least. I recommend getting 15-20 links a month and see how your site reacts to it. Then you adjust your numbers accordingly. That’s really it.

3.6 Using Phrases As Anchor Text

Forget about one or two-word anchor texts. Most of the anchor texts that I use are between 5 to 7 words. Yes you read that right. It looks natural and it works.

In most cases, using the keywords isn’t necessary either.

4. The Link Building Strategy

Now, this is something I haven’t seen anyone discuss so I would like to share this. After finding quality link opportunities, where and how do you point them?

Well first, never link to the homepage. As the homepage usually already has enough links coming in. I’ve read case studies where they only link to the homepage and get great results. Like I said earlier, everyone has their own style and this is what has worked for me.

Once I reach the top, I randomize this pattern every 30 days so it all looks natural for Google as well. Think of link building as putting different coats of paint. Just make sure each coat (link building cycle) is different.

4.1 Forget About NoFollow Links

Forget about NoFollow or not. Just get links that fall in your pre-determined metric’s range (One I mentioned above).

You need both kinds of links (Heck I say get all kinds of links from all kinds of CMS’s) so you get quality links from diverse sources. That’s the key to successful link building.

Please stop ignoring ‘NoFollow’ links. If they are coming from a good authoritative place, get them. Nofollow links from Forbes or Wikipedia are still world-class links. Never check if a backlink is NoFollow or not. Haven’t done that in ages.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, if you do the following, you’ll get great results:

• Pay attention to where and how the ‘link juice’ of a site flows. Be obsessed with link juice.
• Make smart changes that work for you and Google. A healthy balance here can always be achieved.
• Write about things your competitors aren’t.
• Never stop getting backlinks.
• Use proper tools to get a deeper look at your backlinks (Current and the ones that you want to acquire).
• Run your own tests.

That’s pretty much it.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post. cognitiveSEO made no agreement with the author.
This is Jibran’s success story, written and documented by himself.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

About the author

  Jibran Qazi is an SEO consultant, growth hacker, and founder of Hunter Canada, a company that helps tech firms achieve exponential growth. 

Jim Miller is an e-commerce consultant, and founder of Salesbloom, who collaborates with world-renowned marketing gurus. Enjoy his story, written and documented by himself, and see how we hit the Google’s top SERP spots with no backlinks but with a good content optimization.

Over a six to nine month period using the content assistant optimization tool, I have seen numerous pages swiftly develop and rank to the highest pages of Google. So getting traffic without building backlinks can be achieved with the right content strategy.

This case study was composed to help share the success I had for my client.

1. Why This Ought to Work For You?
2. How We Hit the Google’s Top SERP Spots
   1. Step 1: Find Existing Content to Improve
   2. Step 2: Search for the Main Keyword with Cognitive’s Keyword Tool
   3. Step 3: Optimise with Content Assistant
   4. Step 4: Fetch URL within Google Search Console
3. Results

Why This Ought to Work For You?

Working behind the scenes with some of the fastest developing agencies in marketing, you encounter conflicting strategies both internally and externally, which promise to improve your client’s rankings.

I’m a firm believer in testing everything before foolishly trusting any information from whoever it may be, whether an influencer, agency or otherwise, so I work behind the scenes to know what actually works.

Years ago, I cracked an algorithm on eBay’s search engine with one of my first career positions, taking a small (and I do mean small) local footwear retailer from £10k online sales per month to £250k (£450,000 Christmas Peak).

All in just under six months!

Yes, it’s true – and this included outselling retail giants like ‘Barretts’, ‘Office’ and ‘Schuh’- and all without a penny of a marketing budget!

I’ve never had the luxury of limitless budgets (and I prefer not to either as the constraints bring out the best in me). Having a typically micro-budget (maybe being a tad frugal as well), I’m always hesitant to pick something like ‘Marketmuse’ and put my house on the market for a taste!

Being overworked (and a little disorganized if I’m honest at the time) necessitated a search for a timesaving tool for obtaining the broader metrics or overarching topics and keywords which help others rank more highly. It was then that I came across Cognitive’s Content Assistant tool – though at that time it took a little digging as the software was so new.

Cognitive’s content assistant tool allowed me the opportunity to see correlated topics and missing keywords that enable the content to shine through. I’m not a natural writer, I rely on others to help me edit my thoughts as many e-commerce consultants do. I might add that my thoughts are not always that easy to convey, so this tool was an immense help.

I found the experience when using the Cognitive SEO to be intuitive in the main, simple to use and then ideal to communicate to others.
	Jim Miller
	Founder of Salesbloom | @salesbloomuk

Now at Salesbloom, we constantly develop existing content using Cognitive and produce new articles within the same content writing process.

Here’s how we did it (as I’m honest enough to say I have great colleagues too!) …

How We Hit the Google’s Top SERP Spots

If you’ve never used Cognitive or unless you’re comfortable enough to drop into the Google Search console,  it’s worth tracking your existing content’s keyword positions with Rank Tracker before you start.

The first things to do are:

• Find existing content you determine needs to be improved upon.
• Search for the main keyword with the ‘Cognitive Keyword Tool’.
• Optimize your content with ‘Content Assistant’.
• Fetch URL within Google Search Console

Step 1: Find Existing Content to Improve

One of the best positions to start from is by finding pages with keywords or queries that currently rank outside the top five spots on Google.

The ‘sweet spot’ is choosing keywords that sit in position 4 up to 30.  As you can see, the blue line above did brilliantly!

Step 2: Search for the Main Keyword with Cognitive’s Keyword Tool

Pick your head term or the keyword you want to rank for and search with the keyword tool. On the example below, I chose “SEO agency” as my keyword phrase.

Feel free to pick any keyword and page you like as I’ve had success with category pages on e-commerce websites, homepages and blog articles.

Make note of the average content performance score. The goal is to beat that on your optimization round. ( I suggest you open a new Google doc and add it at the top to remind you of your target)

It’s good to pull out the relevancy scores and consider any that score higher than 3 stars. Create your new content so it reads well, and without worrying about keyphrases initially. Once you’ve done that, copy the list of keywords that Cognitive suggests and work out a structure for your article based upon the 3-5 star terms.

GO FOR GOLD.

Never strive to be average at anything.
	Jim Miller
	Founder of Salesbloom | @salesbloomuk

Take a peek at the ranking analysis tab next to see how you are performing before you continue.

It’s a good idea to see what competitor pages do on the look and feel of the page for content flow. Google ‘likes’ these sites for a reason so it’s a ‘no-brainer’. (Ultimately, it’s because the visitors do as well!)

The action to take for this example is: Write a 700-4000 word content piece that beats 69.

Step 3: Optimise with Content Assistant

Once you’ve gone into the Content Assistant,  press the top right, ‘Import link’ if it’s an existing page (and yes, it can even score raw code). Otherwise, copy and paste your content into the relevant sections and hit ‘Check Score’.

This site is new so typically it’s not going to score well yet, but if you export the list and scroll down on the right-hand side you now have keywords to export and use. You do have the option to amend the copy on the left-hand-side in real time, but each check of the score reduces your overall monthly allowance. 

I prefer to optimize outside in a Google document file so as to not squeeze keywords in when they are not needed, and to ensure your article or post still reads well. Repeat each process, and once you feel you’ve done a good job hopefully, you’ve beaten your competition’s score. If not, take a step back and see where your content can be improved.

Step 4: Fetch URL within Google Search Console

Login to Google Search Console and retrieve the revised URL.

(I’m not convinced this speeds it up, but it’s a habit I now do every time).

Results

Results can be manipulated but these graphs illustrate this type of content is not reliant upon seasonal wins or easy pickings. That alone should encourage you to test this for yourself, based on my findings.

The first piece of content below was devised for a SAAS company which has grown from zero to almost 7,000 clicks in a year.

This, with no backlinks or promotion: Pure organic traffic gain.

Some keywords can take longer to develop (as below) but site traffic appears when you produce good content via the ‘Content Assistant’.

Here’s another blog article created and developing nicely below. Perfect for a revisit within a year turnaround.

Here’s a comparison (below) for much older content.

To reiterate, I’m not going for easy choices on keywords. To my mind, there aren’t many anyway, but the example above is recently optimized and shows positive progress in a short period.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post. cognitiveSEO made no agreement with the author.
This is Salesbloom’s and Jim’s success story, written and documented by himself.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

About the author

 Jim Miller is an e-commerce consultant, and founder of Salesbloom, who collaborates with world-renowned marketing gurus such as Neil Patel and Eric Siu on internal projects.

1. Website Speed as a Ranking Factor
2. Reducing the Image File Size Using the Lossy and Lossless Compression Techniques
3. Case Study – Image Compression Tools Tested to the Limit
   1. How the Image Optimization Test Was Performed
   2. Top 6 Metrics Tested for Finding the Best Image Compression Tool

1. Website Speed as a Ranking factor

Site speed, according to Google, “reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests”  and for all intents and purposes serves both the user and the site owner. Users get an enhanced experience, site owners are more likely to get reduced operation costs and… well, more users, who stay on the website longer.

Google thinks the same, as indicated by the very fact that it provides us with tools to check up on our site speed and suggests solutions for sluggish pages. There is the PageSpeed module in the Google Developers section and a Page Speed Insights for making a speed audit for every website.

Even Yahoo has a developer module for page speed improvement, called Yslow. The slew of freely available tools is certainly meant to wear off some of the concerns that only big sites can benefit from this change. In fact, chances are smaller sites have the upper hand here in terms of flexibility and adjusting. Some questions and concerns remain though, the most important being:

What is and how exactly does Google measure “site speed?”

For instance, the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered” time when loading a page was mentioned. The former means that while not all the elements on a page are showing, you can start clicking and navigating. The latter means that everything is clearly visible on the page, even background stuff like ads and images. Even though it is difficult to pinpoint specifically and with certainty which aspect of speed directly helps your rankings, working on your site loading speed, in general, is bound, at the very least, to enhance your users’ experience. So, for instance, having a “document complete” time which is faster than the “fully rendered time” could help.

2. Reducing the Image File Size Using the Lossy and Lossless Compression Techniques

Images can play a major role in the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered site” loading times, especially for mobile sites.

One solution is to simply delay loading images. Let everything else load first and then only at the end start loading images. This ensures that your site is functional long before you get to the bandwidth-chugging portions of the page. As with everything else nowadays, there are lots of plugins that can help you. On WordPress, you can try Advanced Lazy Load or Smush. But if you need to do that, maybe the problem is simply that your images are too big and they slow down your site speed anyway. So why not compress your images to begin with?

We used two techniques for image compression for our case study:

• lossless compression, which means the image quality remains largely the same. 
• lossy compression, which means some loss of fidelity may occur, though in general, it may be imperceptible.

Brian Jackson, Director of Inbound Marketing of Kinsta, explained each compression method:

Lossy image compression refers to compression in which some of the data from the original file (JPEG) is lost. The process is irreversible, once you convert to lossy, you can’t go back. And the more you compress it, the more degradation occurs.   Lossless image compression refers to compression in which the image is reduced without any quality loss. Usually, this is done by removing unnecessary metadata from JPEG and PNG files. RAW, BMP, GIF, and PNG are all lossless image formats.
	BRIAN JACKSON
	Dir. of Inbound Marketing Kinsta

You can see below the representation of both reduced files using these two techniques. 

To be more exact on this, the correct term is perceptually lossless. A human can’t tell between a JPEG optimized version and the Original photo. JPEG is a lossy format. PNG is lossless. 

3. Case Study – Image Compression Tools Tested to the Limit

We went out and researched some of the best image compression tools out there which use the lossless and lossy techniques for image compression. After we identified them, we made a list of the most relevant tools that would be up to the job:

• JPEGMini
• Kraken Image Optimizer
• Puny PNG
• Tiny PNG
• Google’s PageSpeed Module

I hope it’s useless to mention that this analysis is unbiased and none of the mentioned tools offered to take us out for a beer or promised any goods in exchange. So we are going to test those 4+1 tools on the same artifact and see if we can notice any difference in loading speed results.

To make the analysis more encompassing we added a 5th element to the comparison (a 5th dimension, if you will), which is slightly different from the other 4: Google’s PageSpeed. Unlike the other image compression tools we have included in our research, Pagespeed isn’t really a compression tool as much as an optimization tool that works holistically through a series of custom filters which are executed when the HTTP server serves the website assets.

What gets it a spot in our test is the fact that it “dynamically optimizes images by removing unused meta-data from each file, resizing the images to specified dimensions, and re-encoding images to be served in the most efficient format available to the user.” Sounds pretty nifty, right? We’ll see if the boast stands at the end of the day.

3.1 How the Image Optimization Test Was Performed

The test had to be the same for all and give these tools a run for their money, so we decided on optimizing our blog’s entire image data (galery), which rounded up at 3,824 images. This was done on a test version of the site and it has not gone live yet. It was designed for testing purposes only. Most of the services we used to compress the images have their own API and some example scripts but for our test, we’ve built our own scripts which send a request for each image.

Some services have a “batch upload” feature, but for consistency, we’ve sent a single image per request since we cannot do a “batch upload” on all servers. We don’t want to lade you with too many technical details. Yet, a few comments on the process are in order. Where an API was not available, the images were processed with the service provided by that particular software.

The first comment is that JPEGMini was the only tool that was a downloadable software, the rest being hosted online. The second is that all of the tools have APIs, except for JPEG Mini. Last but not least, for Pagespeed we used the Nginx module.

3.2 Top 6 Metrics Tested for Finding the Best Image Compression Tool

We measured several metrics, which we could split into two categories:

• Image compression related metrics.
• Page load speed related metrics.

For the first category, we only had results for the 4 image compression tools, since Pagespeed is a bit of a different type of tool, as discussed earlier. It is worth noticing that not all tools had the same workload:

• TinyPNG only compressed both PNG and JPEG format files.
• JPEGMini only compressed the JPEG format files.
• Kraken compresses both PNG and JPEG format files.
• Puny PNG compresses both PNG, JPEG and GIF format files.

The metrics in both categories, however, were calculated relative to the actual work and not to absolute standards. And here they are:

1. Metric 1 – Conversion Time

We ran tests for each tool to see which one of them manages to convert the image faster and our winner was JPEGMini.

Let’s start with the conversion time, measured in minutes. Since the number of conversions wasn’t the same for all tools (in fact, it was slightly different in each case), it makes more sense to look at the number of conversions per minute. The detached leader is JPEGMini, with roughly 113 conversions per minute, or close to 2 conversions per second. The other 3 tools trail significantly behind, with little difference between them, by comparison. TinyPNG and Kraken are at 30, respectively 21 conversions per minute, while PunyPNG is utterly unimpressive at merely 11 compressions per minute.

2. Metric 2 – Compression Power

Next, let’s look at compression power. This, again, is a metric resulting from the relation between two different measurements: the compressed size of the output relative to the original size of the input. The winner, by a margin, is TinyPNG, with a 2.78 compression ratio, with the other three being at less than half the rate (1.19 for Kraken and 1.3 for JPEGMini), or at best, just slightly better than half the rate (1.53 for PunyPNG). So far the format specific tools seem to fare much better than the format general ones.

3. Metric 3 – Pages with Mainly PNG Images

And now for the real test: does any of this impact the time to load the page? For PNG related pages, the time after compression is best improved with TinyPNG (5.29 seconds) or Pagespeed (5.44 seconds). The difference between the two is by and large negligible. Kraken and PunyPNG, however, are significantly lower (with basically no difference at all between them, however: 7.47 and 7.45 seconds respectively).

The latter loading times are more than double than if the web pages used no images and closer to the load speed if there were no compression at all (8.56 seconds). The sizes of images loaded on the web pages are, as expected, in line with the loading times. The average size is 8 MB for Pagespeed and 8.2 MB for TinyPNG, practically half the size of images obtained from Kraken (15.9 MB) or PunyPNG (15.7 MB). For comparison, the average size of the PNG images on a loaded page is 19.5 MB, not much bigger than for the compressed results for Kraken or PunyPNG.

4. Metric 4 – Pages with Mainly JPEG Images

What about JPEG image format? It’s another win for Pagespeed and the format-specific tool. This time, however, the result variation is nowhere near as dramatic as in the case of the PNG files. In fact, the times to load the page are really close:

• 3.24 seconds for Pagespeed
• 3.45 seconds for JPEGMini
• 3.53 seconds for Kraken
• 3.55 seconds for PunyPNG.
• 3.77 seconds for the Original Images
• 3.03 seconds with No Images

Hardly noticeable, isn’t it? Add to that the fact that all of these values are still not that much different from the page load time when there are no images on the page (3.03 seconds) or even when all the images on the page are at their original size (3.77 seconds). As you would expect, the difference in the average size of images loaded on page is similarly unremarkable.

Pagespeed gets the best compression, at 3.4 MB, with JPEGMini following closely at 3.9 MB. Kraken and PunyPNG are both above the 4 MB mark, with 4.3 MB and 4.4 MB respectively. While the first two values are significantly different than the average size of the page with uncompressed JPEG images on it (4.9 MB), they are nowhere near the size of the page with no JPEGs on it (1.2 MB).

Let’s do a quick recap on the JPEG and PNG compression.

Best JPEG Compression (Best is First)

1. PageSpeed
2. JPEGMini
3. Kraken
4. PunyPNG

Best PNG compression (Best is First)

1. PageSpeed
2. TinyPNG
3. PunyPNG
4. Kraken

The best JPEG compression is done by PageSpeed, then JPEGMini , followed by Kraken and PunyPNG. When it comes to PNG files, Pagespeed leads the way, tied with Tiny PNG, followed by PunyPNG and Kraken. Barring Pagespeed, the better tools seemed to be the ones that are geared for specific image formats (JPEGMini and TinyPNG), with the all-around tools doing poorer in terms of results.

5. Metric 5 – Bulk Conversion Speed 

Total Conversion Times by Tool

• JPEGmini – 20 minutes / 2275 images converted
• TinyPNG – 60 minutes / 1460 images converted
• Kraken – 197 minutes / 3824 images converted
• PunyPNG – 328 minutes / 3722 images converted
• Pagespeed – On the Fly Conversion / no initial conversion time

Images Converted per Minute by Tool

• JPEGmini – 113 images/minute
• TinyPNG – 24 images/minute
• Kraken – 19 images/minute
• PunnyPNG 11 images/minute
• Pagespeed – On the Fly Conversion

In terms of bulk conversion speed there are some aspects that need to be mentioned. First of all, PageSpeed executes the conversion instantly, on the fly, and JPEGMini is a downloadable software. So, there are some technical differences between these two tools and the others, which might make the comparison between them a bit harder. At the same time, JPEGMini and PageSpeed’s way of functioning regarding this matter is their competitive advantage so we need to give the credits to Pagespeed and JPEGMini for being the fastest.

PageSpeed seems to be the best as it makes the conversion instantaneously and JPEGMini is the next best thing, but it is limited to JPEG files. TinyPNG and Kraken are tied up in terms of speed (both not very impressive), with the former only being useful for PNG files. PunyPNG, while good for all image file formats, has the least impressive bulk compression speed of all five tools.

The conversion speed indicator is important to take into account when deciding on the tool if you want to use it on web pages that rely extensively on images. If your website’s total count of images is comparable or higher than ours, it might be worth going for PageSpeed or JPEGMini as they have the best results in terms of total conversion times and images converted per minutes.

6. Metric 6 – Conversion Process Easiness

Figures and numbers are highly important but we all know that is not all about them. A software must provide great results but must also be easy to use, intuitive and simple to understand. After all, a software’s success is given by the end user. For instance, PageSpeed is a great product and can be the detached leader in many chapters but is definitely not the most user-friendly product.

If you are not a computer literate and you don’t know how to install and configure the requested Apache or Nginx modules, then no matter how good the results are, PageSpeed might not be for you. In addition, you will need to have the rights to alter web server configurations in order to install the PageSpeed module (it won’t work for shared hosting). Unless you want to turn to a tech expert, the use of this tool will make you feel inadequate and will, paradoxically, make things look harder.

JPEGMini, Punny PNG, Kraken or TinyPNG, on the other hand, have an easy to use interface and don’t require high technical skills. From the easiness of conversion point of view, these tools are made simple, helpful and really meet the user’s needs.

Deciding on the Winner 

Deciding on a winner is hard, yet necessary in order to conclude our in-depth query. Before doing so, let’s take a look at the tools’ overall presentation and take a sneak peek at what they have to offer.

The distinction of the best all-around image compression tool when taking into account all the results goes to PageSpeed: it’s either tied for the lead, or the leading tool in terms of both file size and time it takes to load the page for both JPEG and PNG image file formats and none of the other four tools manage to do so consistently (it shares the distinction with two separate tools: TinyPNG for PNG files and JPEGMini for JPEG files).

So how much does PageSpeed actually help you? Well, the best way to measure this is by looking at the time you save by compression per load on tested page. For PNG, you get from 8.56 seconds (with the uncompressed files) to 5.44 seconds for a page to load. This means the page loads at a 36.45% faster rate. For JPEG files, we got from a loading time of 3.77 seconds (for uncompressed images) to a 3.24 seconds loading time, meaning pages load at a 14.06% faster rate. Less impressive than for PNGs, but still noteworthy.

Think of it this way: every time a user lands on one of your pages, their experience is up to 36.45% faster and better. After all, the life of the web surfer is improved with every second one is looking at relevant information rather than at a blinking hourglass. The one thing to keep in mind with Pagespeed is that there is some loss of image quality with its compression, but it is so small that it shouldn’t be a serious drawback for most websites (i.e., unless high image quality is what you’re actually going for, in which case maybe image compression is not really the best way to optimize speed on your website).

This is the fully complete metrics table data compared.

And the Winner is …

Looking back at all the graphs and figures it is not hard to say that PageSpeed stands out from the rest of the tools. In a world where the user doesn’t have the patience to wait more than 10 seconds before a page loads, Page Speed can be seen as one of the webmaster’s best friends. PageSpeed Modules are open-source server modules that optimize your site automatically. It is definitely not the average webmaster’s tool as it requires high technical skills in order to use it.

All in all, from our research it results that PageSpeed gives the best-added value to a website optimization process overall being, maybe, the best option in what concerns a page’s loading time.

Conclusion

A site’s speed clearly plays an important role in user experience and in the Google Algorithm. People from the SEO industry are making a big investment in content and that is great. Yet, what’s the point of all the struggle if it takes too long to load? Knowing the tools that can help you optimize your site’s speed and make your life as a webmaster a bit better might really come at hand. To summarize the result of our research, we can say that PageSpeed seems like a very helpful tool. Also, you can get inspired from this WordPress image size guide. 

PageSpeed is a free to use tool that can be used on Apache and Nginx Servers and allows you do to all of your changes on the fly. It also has a cache so it won’t put too much burden on the server. If you do not have access to a server configuration, we would recommend using the JPEGMini for JPEG compression and TinyPng for PNGs. You could simply decide on only one format to use and go with the one you choose, since that would make things simpler for you and allow you to use the most efficient tool.

And don’t forget the Lazy Loading technique ;). All these together will make your site “lighter” and “faster”!

Note: This blog post is an improved version of an older one we had.

We optimized 6 articles from one section of a blog and increased the organic traffic by 78%.

Background

One of the issues we are facing at Advert Point is the constant challenge of increasing our clients’ traffic organically. The SEO landscape is ever changing and the focus on quality content is more important than ever.

Fortunately, cognitiveSEO came up with a complete solution for this, combining the old school SEO metrics with digital marketers’ current needs. If you’re a content marketer, this tool can really lower your efforts of creating the best content on the internet and bring traffic to your site. 

Content Optimization Process

We first made some keyword research with the Keyword Tool and used the Content Assistant for content optimization for one of our clients, following the article selection sent by them.

We’ve optimized 6 articles from one section of the client’s blog with the purpose of increasing the web traffic. The strategy was to first introduce the long tail keywords and then focus on the main phrases. There were 3 steps in our strategy:

• We first added some of the suggested keywords. We looked in particular for keywords with a high number of organic searches.
• Waited for a few days then we added some more keywords reflecting the main query. As a tip, I suggest you look in the Ranking Analysis to see how the landing pages for the related query look like. It can help you get insights for future optimizations. At this stage, adding a few internal links to the optimized article can bring more benefits and make your content stronger. It will increase your chances to hook the users and guiding them to stay more on the site.
• Then we rewrote the description to provide important information on SERPs. 

The rankings were almost immediately improved. And we efficiently increased the visibility in SERPs and traffic.
	Gabriel Curcudel (Krumel)
	Founder & CEO at Advert Point / @krumel

It’s quite easy to understand and use the tool. It offers useful information for content writing and some good hints regarding the potential keywords to use when you create optimized content.

It was effortless for me to take actions and plan things when I had access to an all in one place tool. The recommendations made by the tool are pretty accurate, and this is important when you use tools. Not to mention that it’s a real help in discovering opportunities and improve quality of content. Forward to that, it will help you grow your business.

I would definitely recommend it to my clients. Now it’s easy to play. It’s a must tool.
	Gabriel Curcudel (Krumel)
	Founder & CEO at Advert Point / @krumel

Results After Using the Content Assistant Tool

We reoptimized the page using the Content Assistant. There were 3 phases in our strategy. We first added some of the suggested keywords, waited for a few days then we added some more keywords reflecting the main query. Then we rewrote the description to provide important information on the search engines. It is an important aspect if you also want to lower the bounce rate. Say in the description exactly what the user will find on the landing page.

You can see in the next screenshot how beautiful the article grew after using the tool.  

The re-optimized page had an increase of organic traffic YOY with 78% compared with last year, same period.

After ranking on Google’s second or third page for a while, we’ve jumped to #1 page in Google really fast. We succeeded in increasing website traffic, conversion rates and gaining much more unique visitors. All because we’ve followed a natural and effective way to improve the rankings. The Keyword Tool and the Content Assistant was a help, a guidance telling us what keywords to use. The search volume for specific keywords was also an important trigger.

I also experienced with other pages. We tested by optimizing two new pages.

We had to optimize the content for many queries; the topics can generate traffic from more than 2-3 important keywords. The strategy was to first introduce the long tail phrases and then focus on the main keywords.

We played safe, just wanted to raise the pages close to important positions and then naturally let them rank in time. Yet, the results were amazing. 

For another client, we optimized 6 articles from one section of a blog and increased the organic traffic. We wanted to raise the organic traffic for one important section of a blog. We picked 6 articles with different topics, then made research with cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool and used the Content Assistant to reoptimize the pieces of content given by the client. This was a method for driving traffic and increasing the ranks for the relevant content. 

We easily increased the visibility in SERPs and traffic for those articles using the tool.

This content marketing strategy was very good because, as you can see, the rise was constant and natural, no weird spikes and drops. It was a smart way to increase traffic, nice and steady. 

The method we used can work very well for some and should be adapted by others and included in the content strategies each business has. The marketing tips I gave along the way can help them achieve similar results. An online business can benefit a lot from this guideline. Getting more traffic to your website has never been more effective than this.

Disclosure

This is not a paid post and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the author. This is Krumel’s success story, written and documented by himself. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5,  for one of the term we were optimizing for, to #2 in the search engines.

Background

As an agency, we are always dealing with clients that face all kinds of issues, insignificant search rankings, low quality content, few social shares on social media, poor internal link optimization, low conversion rates, slow loading time for a website, defective link building techniques used and so on. Yet, regardless of the problem they are facing, rankings have always been a focus point.

The biggest advantage I’ve experienced using the tool is the permission to build better blog posts and content pieces with insights from the SERPs we’re aiming to target. And content has a high importance among other Google ranking factors.

For as long as I remember, quality content has always had higher value and can assure a great number of organic traffic.

It’s a good resource for onpage SEO to have on hand for a sanity check to ensure you’re covering all relevant topics in our content marketing plan.

The tool was very simple and easy to use. It did not take long to understand how it worked.
	Bill Sebald
	Founder at Greenlane / @billsebald

It takes a different angle by letting you see multiple SERP results and their contents, which is something that not many other tools have. You can easily use it to optimize your site and boost the ranking of your website.

The USP for this tool is the insights you get en masse about the SERPs you’re optimizing for (topics being covered, intent, etc.).

 Content Optimization Process

We started using cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool & Content Assistant for old blog posts optimizing purposes. We chose the article posts that performed well for us and tried to optimize them using the tool.

So basically our new approach on the content creation for the improved version was a quick process. We got a baseline score of the content and then worked on improving it by including some of the topics found in the SERPs that we hadn’t previously included in the write-up.

We went through about 4-6 iterations of our copy until we hit a good content performance.

The step-by-step guide for improving your search ranking and content performance at once is simple:

• find the underperforming pieces of content;
• perform a short keyword research to choose the keywords you want to rank for;
• optimize the new blog post using those keywords;
• use the “Fetch as Google” to re-index the search engine optimized web page;
• continue with link building to gather more value and have a strong content strategy to improve your SEO rankings.

Results after Using the Content Assistant Tool

After we used the keyword phrases recommendations, we saw a beautiful growth and noticeable improvement for the targeted keywords.  

We hit a content performance score improvement from 51 of 74 and a readability score improvement of almost 67.

We had been ranking no. 5 in the search results previously and within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing to #2. So the improvement is good to see.

This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. This optimization seems to have worked great!

For the time period 6/8-6/25 vs. 5/21 – 6/7 (we launched the changes on 6/8) and for the term we were targeting, we went from 4 clicks in 5/21 to 6/7 to 9 clicks in 6/8 to 6/25. We also improved in clicks for a few other relevant terms.

Total clicks for the 5/21 – 6/7 time period reached 123 and for the 6/8-6/25 time period, 165. Impressions went from 3,709 to 4,755. Average position decreased though which was interesting: 19.7 vs. 21.7. No real traffic lift overall was seen.

We also went from ranking for 29 keywords for the post to 74 overall. Checking in Google Search Console, we saw a lift from 129 queries (13 with clicks) to 222 queries (20 with clicks).

On top of that, we had an overall improvement of the CTR (clickthrough rate) after we optimized the existing content as you can see from the next screenshot.

Huge gains? Maybe not, but we weren’t testing with a webpage that had a big potential audience. This is still very promising, and we’re going to start using it with clients who have keywords that need to move.

Disclaimer

This is not a paid post and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the author. This is Bill Sebald’s success story, written and documented by himself. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us.

From position #12 to position #5 in under 30 days. It’s definitely a huge thing, especially for consultants and site owners who are looking to get even more productive in the technical maintenance aspect of their websites.

Let me tell you my experience using the Keyword Tool and Content Assistant to improve the rankings and organic traffic to my website.

Background

As an SEO pro, I am always searching for new means to improve ranks, website traffic, and all the SEO related metrics. 

Content is king; it is a a highly important SEO ranking factor every inbound marketer should take advantage of. Especially because it can help you increase organic traffic and search rankings. 

On a daily basis, I used another tool feature (TF-IDF from OnPage.org) for making the content re-optimization process a whole lot easier. But after I started using the Content Assistant tool and saw how easy it is I was really impressed. And the result spoke for themselves. 

You can easily spot the volume and recommendation for your targeted keywords. But in the end, you have to create some quality backlinks to take advantage of the new pieces of content.  

It only took me around 5-10 mins to re-optimize a single page. A type of service any SEO consultant can actually offer on its own.
	Jason Acidre
	Co-founder & CEO at Xight Interactive / @jasonacidre

The tool is like a low-hanging fruit for any content marketer, an easy alternative to Google Keyword Planner; it allowed me to save a lot of time and effort while my website started to increase search traffic and improve rankings in the search engines, offering good user experience all at once.

You’ll be able to create quality content by offering valuable organic search results to the user. 

It can also be used as a solution for those who were hit by Google Penalties in the past for thin content or other Panda related mistakes. Or on another side, it can be used as a guide to content curation. 

The Content Optimization Process

I started using the tool on 2nd of June. I optimized 2-5 pages using the Content Assistant to test it and find out if we get something out of it. As soon as I started to optimize the original content, republish it, I easily increased traffic and saw immediate improved results. Just like this one:

You can see the webpage had a beautiful growth and that was due to the quality content optimization procedure.

Then I continued with other pages; summing up a total of 15 low quality web pages optimized on a 30 days-period. What I did mainly was to re-optimize the pages as follows:

1. By using the Content Assistant feature of Cognitive SEO, I’ve included the majority of the suggested keywords by the tool on the content assets we’re aiming to increase in organic visibility.  I’ve also restructured the underperforming content and added new sections – to make the inclusion of the suggested key phrases more logical, natural and create relevant content.
2. I’ve built new internal (contextual) links pointing to the optimized versions of the pages from other topically related content to pass more link equity and ensure we’ll be sending more new signals to crawlers. Use the fresh content as an internal link for other recent posts to strengthen your sales funnel.
3. Lastly, we requested for these quality content pages to be re-indexed via Google Search Console’s Fetch as Google feature. This is a very important step because you have updated content that needs to be re-indexed in Google as it appears to offer good user experience.

I think that any content marketer could follow these 3 steps in their content creation process to bring a positive impact to site traffic, organic search, conversion rate and other valuable metrics and decrease the bounce rate.

A great value have the relevant keywords chosen to optimize a piece of content on your site.

The Keyword Tool shows relevant keyword recommendations that can help you do search engine optimization on a higher level.

You can choose other keywords, more valuable for your content relaunch by looking at the keyword rankings for search volume, relevancy and keyword difficulty. Aim for the long tail keywords to impact rankings. Following this marketing strategy, you get a chance at increasing your organic traffic. 

Results After Using the Content Assistant Tool

Just like the example above I saw major improvements to other blog posts I used for the testing. See the screenshot below, extracted from Google Analytics.

The article had a steady growth in the number of sessions, users, and other behavioral metrics. The blue line shows the visits trend for June and the orange one for May. There is a clear difference between those two. There isn’t room for doubts.

I optimized a page for “SEO Philippines”. After only 48 hours the URL jumped from #17 to #12.

After a couple of days more, it jumped on Google’s first page. 

In 30 days, my article succeeded to rank from #17 to #5 for the term “seo philippines”. – Jason
	JASON ACIDRE
	Co-founder & CEO at Xight Interactive / @jasonacidre

This means a growth from page 2 on page one, and 12 positions.

Nonetheless, this is a link-heavy SERP results, so building a couple of high-quality links to this page should really help the page make it to the top page.

The tool is a fortune cookie. It can offer almost immediate results. It is very simple to use and it is highly effective.

Another example used in my testing was a page optimized for the keyword “SEO strategies resources”.

After 48 hrs, the page actually got features in the answer box, ranking number 0, but only lasted for a day. The URL was ranking around #6 – #8 for the past few weeks, and now is steady on #4 – #5 for “SEO strategies resources”.

I saw massive improvements in traffic and search rankings for most of the test pages I optimized on 2 weeks after the changes have been made.
	Jason Acidre
	Co-founder & CEO at Xight Interactive / @jasonacidre

Being able to re-optimize 10-15 blog posts per week can tremendously impact a site’s overall search visibility. It’s definitely a huge thing, especially for consultants and site owners who are looking to get even more productive in the technical maintenance aspect of their websites.

It is easy to increase organic search traffic on the existing website and a great way to create evergreen content that can break any other content strategies and SEO tactics recommended by rookies. Of course, link building, keyword research, social media and other factors may influence rankings. But this is a damn good starting point. 

Disclosure

This is not a paid post and cognitiveSEO didn’t make any kind of agreement with the author. This is Jason Acidre’s success story, written and documented by himself. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this story with us. 

To shed some light once and for all if and how content influences rankings, we’ve performed an in-depth analysis on almost 40,000 keywords and around 4 million pieces of content. And the results are GOLD.

Content marketing, among other SEO strategies, is really a hot topic these days for any industry. But I bet you already knew that. What we think you might not know is 1. the exact correlation between SEO and content, as well as 2. how to measure how well optimized your content is. We got them both sorted out: 

1. We figured out how strong the correlation between content and SEO rankings is. 

2. We created Content Performance – the performance measurement metric that tells you how well optimized a piece of content is from an SEO point of view.   

Do you know how the content of your website actually impacts your search engines’ rankings? Or do you know the exact key elements your content needs to have in order to rank in Google’s top results?

After having analyzed a whopping set of data we’ve got it all sorted out: content assets, content’s correlation to Google rankings, measuring content performance, the key elements that boost content + many other data that we’re sure is going to impact your website big time.

The study is quite large and to get the best out of it you will need to thoroughly read this article. And yes, it’s quite long but, for the sake of your business,  totally worth it.  

1. Defining a New Metric: Content Performance
2. A High Content Performance Will (Almost) Guarantee You a Top Google Position
3. Commercial vs. Brand Keywords: How Do They Correlate With Rankings
4. How Do Domain and Page Performance Influence Rankings
5. How Long Should Your Content Be to Get High Rankings
6. How Can You Improve Your Content Performance Score 
7. How We Did the Research

1. Defining a New Metric: Content Performance

We needed to correlate content with Google positions (and further on, with conversion rates). But we cannot correlate “content” or content piece as a whole. We needed a metric to track, something that would make content measurable. After long-term researches, marketing analytics and measuring the performance of huge amounts of pieces of content, we ended up with the Content Performance metric.

What Is Content Performance?

The content performance shows you how well a page is optimized from a content point of view, on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better optimized the content is. And not only this: the same metric that is measuring your content performance also gives you info on the reasons why a piece of content is performing well or not.

The Content Performance score reflects how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus.

Putting it simply, the content performance metric shows you how well a page is optimized from a content point of view, on a scale from 0 to 100.

The Content Performance metric is an indicator entirely developed by us, everything from soup to nuts. A lot of Google reverse engineering was involved in this, combining algorithms and concepts such as semantic search, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), TF*IDF or topical authority, just to mention a few.

Case Study

How Greenlane agency went from #5 to #2 in Google in 24 hours.

Bill Sebald – founder at Greenlane, with 15 years of eCommerce & SEO, tried a new approach on content creation and content optimization, using the Content Optimizer tool.

They got a baseline content performance score and then worked on improving it .They went through about 4-6 iterations of their copy until they hit a good content performance score. They improved their score from 51 to 74.

They had been ranking #5 in Google previously and within 24 hours, after improving their content performance score, they saw their ranks improve from #5 to #2.

You can read their full story here.

How Does Content Performance Work?

As I know you are curious what’s happening under the hood, I am going to share with you a bit from our internal “kitchen”:

• We start by analyzing the top rankings results from Google, having related content as a focus point.
• After that, we apply some really advanced algorithms in order to identify the semantics, topics and keywords used on those pages. We do not take in consideration HTML tags influence (h1/h2, etc.). We only look at how well written and relevant the content is, trying to identify the exact factors that boosted those pieces of content on the top of the rankings.
• Based on an in-depth analysis, we measure the performance of the content, giving score for each piece of ranking content, highlighting the focus keywords used by that piece of content.

How Did We Come Up with the Idea of Content Performance Metric?

It all started from a cliche. Everybody says that content is king, you need to have good content to rank and I bet you can continue this row of self-evident truths.

But lately, it’s been getting harder and harder to rank on Google’s top rankings, no need to insist on that. Analyzing the search and online marketing context we figured out that the solution of getting high ranks relies on content. Even John Mueller from Google said that without well-optimized content, even if you clean up your website, and you fix all of the issues, it still won’t rank high.

But our question was:

How can we actually measure the impact of content on rankings? We also believe that content impacts rankings but how exactly?  We needed some clear evidence.

Call me the doubting Thomas but I believe that almost everything that exists can be measured at some point. So, can we “measure” content and performance data? A difficult, but not impossible task.

Inspired by semantic search and the term frequency – inverse document frequency (I know it sounds like a Wheel of Fortune word but you can find more info on it here) we came up with a metric that can measure the impact any piece of content has on rankings: the Content Performance metric.

2. A High Content Performance Will (Almost) Guarantee You a Top Google Position

Do you know that saying: Save the best for last? This time we decided not to take it into account.

If you torture data long enough, it will confess.
Admittedly, we are too excited about the findings so we couldn’t help but share the big news with you:

Content does influence rankings but we also figured it out why and how.  

As you can see in the screenshot below, after compiling and analyzing all the ranking content for the top positions in Google, for around 40,000 keywords, we realized that there is a very strong correlation between content performance and rankings (and therefore organic traffic we might say).

The higher the content performance score, the better the rankings.  

The correlation above was made in 2017. Two years later, after the Google March Update, we decided to run the same analysis again. Content still correlates with rankings but much more after the Google update, as you can see in the chart below. 

At an informal level, we always knew that content strategies have a lot to do with rankings and quality content creation improves your rankings. Google itself admitted it and they even created an update dedicated to this issue and the importance of relevant content. 

When you actually see real numbers that show to what extent content performance influences rankings, it’s totally different. 

So let’s do a rundown of these interesting observations.

The first thing to notice when looking at this chart is that good content performance is within average values – almost within the middle two-thirds of a 0 to 100 scale. There are no extremely high or extremely low content performance scores. Not only that but along the represented interval, points are quite evenly distributed – there are no quick jumps or sudden falls, everything follows the same, smooth line.

This is another important observation: the trend line is a lot smoother (almost perfect, from corner to corner). There are only 4 instances in this chart where points don’t follow the “high content performance equals high position” rule and those are very subtle, almost unnoticeable. If the vertical axis went from 0 to 100 instead of zooming in at the current interval, we’d probably not notice those points at all.

Last but not least, there is another visual cue to be found in the graph: a sort of a “cut-off” point at a score of 50 for the content performance, which almost evenly splits the first 10 positions from the following 10. While not specifically significant in itself, it is consistent with the other observations and strongly points that:

There is a very strong correlation between a high content performance scores and ranking on a high position.

3. Commercial vs. Brand Keywords:  How Do They Correlate With Rankings

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing and over 1 billion websites in the world. And all these billion websites are interested in targeting all sort of keywords.

At a holistic level, we realized that while measuring the performance of the content, the keywords analyzed by us within this research, fall into one of the two categories: commercial keywords and brand keywords.

• Brand keywords refer to the keywords strongly related to the name of the brand. For instance, “cognitiveSEO” is a brand keyword we are interested to rank for.
• Commercial keywords are the ones that have a direct profit – making intent. For instance, in our case “best SEO blog” would be a commercial keyword.

The question now remains: does the content targeted for commercial keywords correlate differently with rankings than the content targeted for brand keywords?

Is the content quality different for the two instances? And how about the conversion rates?

Commercial Keywords – Ranking Correlation

Just by taking a look at the chart below it’s crystal clear that when it comes to the content targeted by commercial keywords, the correlation between the content performance and top rankings is extremely strong.

This means that when it comes to commercial keywords, content has a very high impact on rankings.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with the link amount a big brand is getting. Yet, content performance is something that is in your full control and you can take advantage of it.

Brand Keywords – Ranking Correlation

We realized that the same strong correlation that applies to the overall content performance and rankings, applies as well when it comes to brand keywords in particular.

It seems that the better the content performance score for the brand keywords’ content, the better the rankings.

Yet, we couldn’t help noticing a particularity of this correlation. Yes, it’s a strong one (we ran several regression tests on it to make sure of that) but it’s slightly different. As you can notice in the chart above, the first position has almost the same content performance score as the 5th one (#1 scores 46, # 5 scores 45). And this situation replicates to some extent to other situations as well.

And, as we are prayed upon the idea: if it works, why? If it doesn’t why?, we took a closer look at this situation.

Content matters a lot when it comes to brand keywords, yet, not as much as it matters when it comes to other types of keywords. And this is because we believe there are other external factors that boost a brand name to the top of the rankings.

Let’s take, for instance, “Brand Mentions”. It could be a commercial keyword, yet, is also a brand name: brandmentions.com.

Even if the content performance score for brandmentions.com score isn’t as big as for other pages targeting the same keyword, the brand itself will be the winner and it will rank first.

And this is because Google is really good at semantical search and understands the intent of the user, firstly. Not to mention that the brand itself is most likely the topical authority for the brand keyword and it will be automatically ranked among first.

Yet, content performance seems to matter a lot in the case of brand keywords as well. So just because you are targeting your own brand name doesn’t mean that you don’t have to put efforts in creating a high performing content.

4. How Do Domain and Page Performance Influence Rankings

The bitter-sweet truth is that content alone does not boost rankings. There are other ranking factors that interfere when it comes to SERP position. And among those factors there is the domain and the page’s performance.

We can refer to domain/page performance or authority. We used the term “performance” for this research as it piles up several factors (domain/page’s age, number of incoming links, etc.)

Domain Performance vs. Rankings

As we can deduct from the screenshot below, overall there is a strong correlation between a domain’s performance and its ranking position.

Yet, this relation is not always smooth and linear. We can see that the domain performance for the pages ranking number one is almost the same with the ones ranking number 4.

Therefore, even if domain performance seems to matter a lot when it comes to rankings, there are cases when other factors, such as content performance, might matter more than the domain’s overall performance.

As you can see in the chart below, after the Google March Update from 2019, the domain performance seems to matter slightly less when it comes to rankings. 

Page Performance vs. Rankings

When it comes to Page performance, there is clearly a strong relation between the authority of a page and its rankings. The higher the page performance, the better the rankings.  

If, after looking at this chart you say something like: I have zero chances of ranking without a high page performance, think again.

We repeated the research on the impact a page performance has on rankings two years later, and we concluded that while page performance is an important ranking factor, it seems to matter a bit less nowadays that it used to a couple of years ago. 

When you get to think about it, how does a page become highly authoritative? Among others, when it’s a topical authority on a subject. And how can you become a go-to resource on a subject, the topical authority on that matter? By having relevant and optimized content on that particular subject. Therefore, without planning to make everything about content, we cannot help by noticing how connected the pieces from the ranking puzzle are.

5. How Long Should Your Content Be to Get High Rankings

As we crawled so much data, we couldn’t help taking a peak at the number of words top 20 Google ranking webpages use.

The very first thing you should notice about any chart is the variation range. In this case, it looks like having anywhere between 1400 and 2000 words is associated with being in the top 20 rankings.

It seems that the optimal number of words one page should use in order to rank high is somewhere around 1700 words. Yet, here is a longer subject to debate which we’ve luckily covered in a previous study: Long versus short content, which one ranks better?

The next thing you should do is look for trends and correlations. And here is where things usually get complicated. Even this chart, while seemingly straightforward, points to a few interesting observations. The first is that, in general, it is better to have more rather than fewer words .

There are 11 points on the graph that go in direct decreasing order of both number of words and position. They are not consecutive, so that makes the trend a bit less obvious, but it is there. Even where there are consecutive points that don’t follow this “rule,” the rule is reinstated within maximum 2 points.

The second equally interesting observation is that this rule is visible only from the 3rd position onwards, while the first three positions actually display the opposite trend – the fewer the number of words, the higher the rank. But here comparison between points is again useful.

The number of words associated with the first position, while lower than the number of words associated with the second or third position, is still higher than 15 of the other 20 positions (75%).

I know; it sounds a bit complicated. But this actually means that while there is not a perfectly linear correlation, the placement of points is still consistent with the idea of a correlation.

What do we get when put all of this together? Two conclusions:

Having fewer words, rather than more, within a certain interval, is likely to land you on a lower ranking.

Having between 1600 and 2000 words (all other factors being equal) has the highest chance of placing you in the top 10 Google positions.

Yet, remember: it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

6. How Can You Improve Your Content Performance Score 

If you’ve made it so far, allow me to reward you with a short joke:

Statistics play an important role in genetics. For instance, statistics prove that numbers of offsprings is an inherited trait. If your parent didn’t have any kids, odds are you won’t either.

Also, since you’re here I’m guessing that you’ve browsed through all the charts and figures exposed above and you are now interested in our sense of humor only. But you want to see how can you make the most out of this research.

If the content performance boosts rankings, then, the content performance score is what you need to work on. 

Seeing the high correlation between the content performance score and the rankings, wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that helped you out to calculate and improve your content performance score?

Well, good news: we’ve invented that tool: The Keyword Tool & Content Optimizer. 

As we’ve made this great breakthrough with the content performance score, we knew we needed to do something about it. So we’ve begun to dig deeper and decided to create a tool that will offer something that no other automated tool can: the exact recommendation that any piece of content should follow in order to improve its content performance score and therefore its rankings.

It wasn’t an easy ride, I can tell you. Lots of hard work, advanced algorithms and months of continuous work and research. Yet, the results are tremendous as we’ve managed to create the tool that we and any SEO pro, webmaster or content marketing needs. 

But I’d better show you how it works.

Let’s say that I own a food blog and I am interested in tackling the “vegan recipes” niche. I already used the Keyword Tool to get an idea of what people are searching for in Google when it comes to this subject. And now I am interested in “beating” my competition’s content performance score.

Just by taking a look at the Ranking Analysis section I can get a full idea of who my competitors are, where they rankings are and how  they got there. 

Having the content performance score for each of my competitors makes it easy for me to understand where my content performance score should be. More than that, I also get the exact list of focus words those webpages used. The focus keywords are the exact keywords that boost the content performance score. 

I am all covered when it comes to the competition. I know who ranks where and why. But what about my content score?

The Content Optimizer is a feature also created by us.

A personal assistant that will tell you the exact pieces you need to use to improve your content performance score.

It’s a learning machine, based on real search results, that helps you to optimize your content and your overall online marketing strategy.  

It’s like trying to solve a really complicated puzzle but someone would come and would give you the exact instructions and steps you need to follow. Things get way much easier, right? Just take a look at the screenshot below.

I’ve entered my own piece of text on which it seems I need to do some content improvements. It seems that my content performance score is only 19 and my goal is to beat #1 score, which is 52. So how do I get that score? By following the recommendations, just like in the screenshot above.

Super easy and straightforward.

There are some important keywords that I never thought of using. And not only my content performance score will be increased if I use them, but also the overall quality of my article, as it will tackle some subjects that are of high interest. And also my Google ranks. 

It’s a 100% beneficial situation:

• my blog articles will get great content optimization tips (due to which my target audience will have a better user experience)
• and my SEO rankings will improve. 

We know that this research is not a beginners guide; but this why we created the right tool for you, to make you re-think your content marketing programs, your marketing automation processes  and the way you tackle search engines rankings.

Of course, there are a lot of factors that can influence rankings: social media (we even did a research on how social signals influence rankings), backlinks, a site’s architecture, brand awareness, local SEO efforts, etc.

As long as content performance has such a high impact on rankings, why not make the most of it?

At the end of the day, you should look at the performance of your content holistically. Beside reaching top rankings, what top performing content manages to do is helping the sales teams, increase the contract sales, obtain qualified leads. The customer stories, the engagement metrics, the SEO and content marketing strategy you’ve put in place, your overall online marketing efforts should be all translated, directly or not, into sales conversions.

7. How We Did the Research

The short answer for the “how we did the research” question would be: with tons of patience and a truck of coffee.

The longer answer would be: 3,784,369 pieces of content.

What we actually did was to look at the content, domain, page performance and many other data coming from approximately 3,7 million of pages ranking on 40k keywords. We took the first 100 SERPs for each keyword. We’ve analyzed them thoroughly, squeezed them as much as we could and we draw some great conclusions.

Even if we had the data for the first 10 Google pages, we decided to present you the conclusion on the top 20 positions in Google because, bottom line, we know that these are the “most hunted” positions and are of great interest for you, guys.  The data collection took place in April 2017 and March 2019. 

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it the right way, did not become still more complicated.
	Poul Anderson
	American science fiction author

Inspired by Google Semantic Search, Latent Semantic Index, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI & LSA) and applying lots of advanced algorithms and Pearson Correlations, we squeezed everything we could for the set of data we had in order to make sure we have the most accurate and reliable results possible.

We also ran some regression analysis to make sure the correlation was right and the results more than confirmed our theory. It turned out there was a 97% positive relationship between variables and that the regression model accounts for 94% of the variation in ranking. With p falling way below 0.01, it is clear that this finding is significant and not the result of random chance.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t other factors that contribute to ranking variation, just that the variation in content performance correlates, to a very large degree, with the variation in rankings, and that it is consistent with all the other factors.

Leaving modesty aside, we do believe that the findings from this current study have a great has a huge impact on your digital marketing strategy overall and on a more granular scale on your content audit, on user engagement, the digital experience you are offering, how you track content performance and how you set up goals for your future content strategies.  You now have key metrics not only to measure but also to improve content. You can channel your content efforts better and more efficiently so you can finally get to see those big numbers in your analytics tools, be it Google Analytics or Google Search Console (and we’re talking about big numbers in traffic not in bounce rates).

We hope we haven’t lost you somewhere among the geeky data. Yet, we believe that a solid research cannot be made without a proper methodological approach.  

And yes, we do know that correlation does not imply causality.  But, as the creator of the XKCD web comic states:

Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’ 

And, if we were to draw a conclusion to all the data, what you need to keep in mind is that a high Content Performance score is correlated with top rankings in Google.