Google Top 10 Test: How to identify valuable moments of your website

Free traffic to your website! More traffic means more conversions! More conversions means more money! So traffic equals money! That really sounds good. The whole idea of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) revolves around getting organic traffic to your website. Yet, it is not as easy as it sounds. There is usually fierce competition on high volume search terms. Moreover, just because you create a website that contains certain keywords does not mean that you will also rank highly for these keywords.

Google Top 10 tests: The barrier to traffic

Taking that thought to a deeper level, we find that Google and other search engines carefully select which sites are worth ranking for which keywords. Next to heavy personalisation there is a general continuous change in what is shown on the first few pages. This process is called "Google Top 10 Test", and it tests which keyword-webpage combination is to enter the realm of page 1 of search results. Being on page 1 has tremendous results, as multiple studies have shown. From Position 1 to 5 a sharp decrease in clicks can be observed, while results on page 2 are basically in a black hole that barely anyone gets to see. No Top 10 result means no traffic. Thus, getting organic traffic usually boils down to two challenges:

• Being shown among the Google Top 10 results
• Having a high user centricity in your website title and description, which results in a high CTR

Obviously, those two challenges interact. High CTR websites will continuously climb through the ranks, which in turn leads to more traffic. So what it comes down to (next to technical parameters) is that you want to optimise your webpage’s title and description to provide the best intent-result fit that is possible. But when you have tens of thousands of pages - which ones should you optimise?

Identify the candidates: All the pages, every day

That line of argument leads to a task many SEO managers are facing every day: Which pages are currently on the verge to reach the Top 10 results, how to identify and improve them? Image having the responsibility for a large website with thousands of pages. What would your approach be? Let me tell you that any approach you developed will be highly inefficient. Google Top 10 Tests often take a long duration or a short one, they might jump quickly to test or only after a long time, there might be clear signals or very fuzzy ones. You would need to manually check each single keywords-webpage combination which results in millions of patterns. Every day. Well, obviously we don’t only state the problem, but also show the solution. At Ryte, we developed a fully automated way to identify Google Top 10 tests based on statistical pattern analysis to solve that problem for you.

Introducing: Ryte's Google Top 10 Test

At Ryte, we don’t only want to identify problems and provide data to analyse the problems, but rather directly solve the problem for you. Moreover, we aim to provide suggestions and recommendations to ease your life, make you more efficient and successful. Therefore, Data Science @ Ryte produced a new feature called “Google Top 10 Test”. Based on several statistical patterns, we analyse your historical Google Search Console data, identify Google Top 10 Tests and automatically notify you which combinations are currently being tested for a position on page 1. As we feed the results of our calculation through your personal notification service, we provide you with the easiest way to tackle the real issues: how can you optimise your webpages to ace the test and provide the most value to your future visitors.

The benefit to our customers and your users

One of the main ideals when developing new features needs to be the value it provides to our customers and their users. Therefore, it is important to consider this fact very carefully: What is the benefit of our Google Top 10 Test? There are two parts to answer this question. Firstly, through an automated identification of the Google Page 1 tests we can save bare money. By providing identified priority-sorted recommendations which pages are currently tested and should be quality checked, we can save hours upon hours of work by website owners. But not only does it save money, additionally the gained efficiency allows to increase revenue, as the second factor is user satisfaction. By pointing out the most important pages and alert SEO managers to improve the content, we can easily identify an upwards trend in website quality, therefore search intent-content matching, therefore website user experience. In short, it does make the webpages of our customers a better place to fulfil the needs of their customers. To sum it up, we can say that through our Google Top 10 Test solution we can save thousands of hours of work while simultaneously allowing users to have a better experience when looking for information. All of that through some user centricity combined with Data Science and creativity. Oh, and did I mention that our solution is unique in the whole market?

Addendum: So what’s the big deal?

Having a single property to do Google Top 10 Test analysis might seem doable if your site is small and you invest a lot of time by shifting manually through each keyword-page-device-country combination. But on our side, we are doing the same work for thousands of projects, spanning millions of pages with up to billions of keywords. With higher efficiency, better accuracy and several orders of magnitude quicker. The computational complexity of calculating these tests is one of the textbook definitions of "Big Data" and pushing on the borders of the current state of technology. As such, we worked closely with the newest developments in cloud computing to solve it in an efficient and reliable manner. How? That will be another full article...