Key Figures for Your Website's Success: the OPI in Practical Use

In this article, we want to take a closer look at these KPIs, and show you how you can use them in a targeted fashion to optimize your website. Let's start with the Organic Performance Index (OPI).

As a website operator, you will be asking yourself many questions about the optimization of your website on a daily basis, for example:

• Is my website optimized well?
• Am I using the potential of my keyword set sufficiently, or am I already ideally situated?
• Is there an urgent need for action in any areas of my website?
• What effects will my optimizations have?

You can find the answers to these questions on the Ryte dashboard - you can measure the developments in website performance in depth, and create detailed reports. You can use the modules Website Success and Search Success to research critical errors and optimization potentials in more detail.

Figure 1: The Ryte dashboard

The OnPage Score and Organic Performance Index are figures designed to make your website analysis easier and more efficient. The OPS is composed of different, domain-specific OnPage factors and shows you the technical level of optimization, and the OPI shows you how much organic traffic your website has potential for based on its current keyword set.

In this article, we focus on the OPI, and you how can interpret it in the right way to increase your organic traffic.

The Organic Performance Index (OPI)

The OPI is based on a self-learning algorithm that draws appropriate empirical values and correlations from the aggregate data. Its core function lies in showing whether the potential of a domain in the search engine is exhausted or not. In the following section, we will show you what the OPI means exactly, and how you can use it derive specific online marketing measures.

Figure 2: Real Google Visibility

What does visiblity mean?

Google's Search Console provides you with a lot of information to help you determine the visibility of your website, for example how many impressions your website gets in the SERPs, and how often it is clicked on. You can therefore analyze how many of the people who saw your website in the SERPs actually clicked on it - the click through rate. If the number of clicks corresponds to the number of impressions, this suggests that your goal of website optimization has been achieved.

However, it is nearly impossible to achieve a one hundred-percent click through rate. Particularly high click rates can be achieved with brand keywords; but it is difficult to achieve high click rates with non-brand keywords. If you are ranking for brand keywords for another website or brand, it will also be difficult to achieve high click rates even with top positions, as the people searching for the brand keyword are most likely to click on the brand website.

With the OPI, we differentiate between these cases, and enrich them with empirical values and correlations which we determine anonymously in advance using the GSC data. This leads to an algorithm always being able to calculate the probability of potential traffic precisely through the constant, current data feed.

As can be seen in Figure 2, the OPI in the Ryte dashboard is presented as a grey dashed line, and shows us how many clicks would be possible if a website has perfect rankings and a perfect click rate.

How can you derive measures from the OPI?

Different conclusions can be drawn, and different measures derived depending on the value of the OPI. The following three examples demonstrate possible scenarios:

1. OPI is higher than the impressions

When we first saw OPI values above the impressions (green), we thought there had to be an error, because how can it be that a website's potential exceeds the number of impressions?

This is why: if your website is mostly ranked on the second page in the SERPs and doesn't get many impressions, if your website achieved perfect rankings and click rate, the number of impressions will also increase.

In this case, you should work on improving your rankings. Look at the top keywords in the dashboard - here, you can see for which terms your website has received the most amount of impressions, including their average ranking position. You can recognize which rankings should be improved, and you can optimize the content with our TF*IDF feature in our Content Success module.

2. OPI is almost identical with clicks

If the deviation between OPI and the current number of clicks is small, this means you are currently utilizing the potential of your website on the basis of the current keyword set almost perfectly. You have almost already reached your Organic Performance Index, and there isn't a great amount of potential for gaining for organic visitors.

In this case, to gain more visitors, you should broaden the content on your domain - consider including additional topics which can offer your users added value.

3. Difference between OPI and clicks is very large

If there is a big difference between the OPI and your current traffic data, this means that there is a lot of potential in your current keyword set. Your website already has relatively good rankings, but is clicked on rarely.

Here, you should consider optimizing your snippets - you can easily increase the click rate with an optimized meta description and title. Find out tips for optimizing your meta descriptions here, and how the Ryte software can assist you.

Conclusion

To summarize, the OPI is a powerful measuring tool that shows you the current level of optimization of your website, and shows you what is possible on the basis of your current keyword set. The difference between OPI, clicks and impressions can then be used to derive conclusions and appropriate measures. You should check the development of your domain's visibility and the effectiveness of your implemented strategies on a weekly basis.