SEO Audit. Part 3. Interpretations of the Content Metrics

📖 Content metrics answer the question: what exactly will search engine robots see on the page?

As discussed in SEO Audit Template, SEO reporting uses two main groups of metrics: SEO performance metrics and Website Analytics metrics. 

Website analysis metrics can be divided into 2 broad categories: 

• Accessibility metrics and 

• Content metrics. 

Below is a more in-depth discussion of Content metrics.

Content metrics answer the question: what exactly will search engine robots see on the page? These include the following sections:

1. Quality

2. Similarities / Duplicates

3. Canonicals

4. HTML tags

5. Structured data 

Content metrics provides insights into what search engine robots might think about your website and how well they might understand it - assuming they have full visibility.

Content Quality 

Different ways to assess content quality include:

1. Page text content (user-focused): page content size and similarity to content on other pages.

2. Page code content (bot-focused): canonical tags, HTML tags and structured data.

3. Text anchors on links to pages: anchor texts diversity. 

The reason to analyse text anchors is because they provide semantic information about the page the link points to. It’s like a tag from a distance, so in a way it’s related to HTML tags, and shown here.

How content quality is evaluated?

What we are looking at here is:

• Text content

• Content meant for users

• Displayed on-screen

• Includes ALTs and Title tags.

  
  

The first thing we need to do is separate the template from the actual content of the page, that is what the page is about and what the user will recognize as such. If we don’t get rid of the template before evaluating the content size and content overlaps, then our analysis will be completely skewed by the template part.  

A page might seem to have significant content while perceived by a user as empty because it’s actually all template. Or we might consider that pages have similar content when actually, all they have in common are heavy template elements. 

Similarities / Duplicates

In Similarities / Duplicates we analyse overlap between pages. Pure duplicates (100% overlap) are generally easy to spot: 

• they are likely to have the same title and headers, etc. or are 

• likely to be generated by the URL parameters that have no effect on the page content 

But pages can have significant overlap while stopping short of full duplication. These can be harder to assess. Similarity Score metrics answers the question, how much content does this page have in common with the most similar page on the site?

Content overlaps are also analysed more globally with a notion of Content Uniqueness. Whereas the Similarity Score is evaluated between two pages, Content Uniqueness considers granular information on a page, and compares it to all information available across the entire website. The portion of unique content corresponds to the information that’s found on this page only (and nowhere else on the site). 

One question a search engine might consider when deciding to crawl a page is how likely a page is to tell it something new? Content uniqueness gives a sense of this particular incentive for a search engine to keep going into a particular area of your site, based on what it has seen so far.

More generally, low perceived quality, either to a thin content or some level of duplication, does not only threaten SEO performance for the pages that are being dismissed by a search engine as being low value. It threatens the whole section or your site (or a whole pattern of URLs), because after too many disappointments, search engines can deprioritize or even ignore all pages with the same template.