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Why Daily Stats Don’t Mean Everything in SEO

Don't Worry about Daily Stats

Photo Illustration by Mike Valentine © 2022

Article by Noah Levy

When I first started working in SEO blog writing, I had a little addiction: I’d check my Google Search Console stats every single day.

While being on top of your stats isn’t a bad thing, if you worry too much about daily stats you’ll give yourself anxiety that can be avoided in the first place.

In this article, I’m going to show you why I no longer worry about daily stats with an example of my site’s own SEO.

Why Daily Stats Matter Less Than the Bigger Picture

It’s easy to conflate not caring about your daily stats versus not making a big deal of them. Of course, I care about my daily stats. Wouldn’t it be worrisome if, all of a sudden, my site’s impressions went down from 1,800 to 1,300 a day? Alternatively, wouldn’t it be victorious if my daily stats went up from 1,300 impressions to 1,800 a day?

Both of these things have happened to me. Within one weekend (Dec 31, 2021 – Jan 2, 2022), my site’s daily impressions rose from 1,641 to 2,227.

Less than two weeks later, however, my site’s impressions dropped from over 2,500 to less than two thousand in a matter of days.
 

Screenshot and modifications by the author, Google Search Console.

I didn’t do anything drastically different with our SEO blogging strategy at SalesPipe. We kept on blogging for keywords that mattered to us, such as outbound SDR. We didn’t remove any content from our blog, either. So why did we seemingly get punished in our daily impressions?

We can also ask ourselves the flip side of that question: why did we get so many daily impressions to begin with?

The answer to these questions is virtually not answerable. The reason why is that we don’t fully understand what Google’s algorithm is doing. Part of having a winning strategy in SEO (really, in anything) is understanding the parameters of what’s in your control versus what’s not.

When it comes to blogging for SEO, there are only three things that we can do…

  • Do loads of keyword research. This is the process of going on research platforms like Semrush and seeing what your buyers are searching for on Google, how much monthly volume there is for that keyword, and how difficult it is to rank for that keyword.
  • Blog SEO-optimized content for those keywords. Write articles that have your target keywords appear frequently, have good images and infographics, cite solid data and their external sources, etc. Make sure your articles are much better than whatever ranks number one.
  • Get backlinks for those articles. This is probably the most difficult step – you need to convince other sites to hyperlink your articles onto a webpage of theirs. The best way to do this is by giving them value: offer to write a free blog post in exchange for backlinking your articles.

Other than that, I can’t think of things that you can do to optimize your SEO blogs. You can go back to your older content and work on optimizing that if it’s not up to page-one standards. Maybe you can increase the word count by 500 more words, add two infographics that should be there but aren’t, and more.

But really, is there anything else you can do to rank for the first page on Google?

Nope.

And that’s why it doesn’t make sense to worry about daily stats.

SEO is like the stock market. There are many more factors that are out of your control than are within it.

Someone could’ve written a blog on your keywords better than yours, Google could’ve changed their algorithm to favor certain factors higher than others…the list goes on and on.

In fact, Google had more than four thousand changes to their algorithm alone for their search engine in some years.

So stop beating yourself up for things that are out of your control.

If you’re writing the best content possible while getting backlinks for that content, you’re already doing the best you can.

Finally, you must consider the bigger picture and what it looks like before worrying about your daily stats.

For our SEO at SalesPipe, we had only 3,600 impressions ever in its four-year-long existence as a domain on the web. That was the number before I started working on our SEO.

Today? We get nearly two thousand impressions a day, surpassing that 3,600 number every two days. Plus, we’ve gotten nearly half of our leads from our inbound SEO blogging strategy in 2022.

Although our stats fluctuate on daily basis, that doesn’t mean we are doing poorly. The stats of today are simply a pixel in the bigger picture of our standing. And we’re standing pretty tall.

The next time you beat yourself up for having bad daily stats, consider everything written above. It’s best to think of the long-term rather than the short.

Noah Levy is a co-founder of FoundCopy and the Head of Content Marketing at SalesPipe.

Word of Mouth Wins: Referrals for Consulting


 
I’ve been fortunate to be involved in SEO as a consultant since 1998. I’ve also been fortunate to have been consistently referred to new consulting engagements by those I’ve worked with (both corporate in-house colleagues and individual consulting clients). Referrals from corporate roles are more frequent simply because in-house exposure to separate team members is broader than the typical 2 or 3 contacts common with consulting work.

This past week while reviewing a monthly report with a client and discussing a graph showing long-term ‘upward and to the right’ performance. I was asked, “What is the start date of that graph?” I checked to find the chart began in 2017. I pointed out that the graph started immediately after a rebranding (and change of domain name). We had worked together for two years prior to that change. So a total of seven years.
 
Client Long Term Search Performance Graph
 
That long-term client came via a referral from a former corporate colleague with whom I’d worked in-house for a couple of years. That prompted me to look at other clients for longevity. I knew that even the newest on the client list has extended our relationship beyond the initially planned six month agreement. They chose to continue that business relationship because of meaningful business gains.

Of course there have been dozens of short-term clients – and it occurred to me that most short-timers had come from various types of paid leads, from marketing placement sites, and from typical sales activity. I’m not a great salesman – I focus on results. I often use those long-term ‘upward and to the right’ performance graphs to show potential new clients what they can expect when we work together.

I’ve now confirmed that all long-term work has started with an existing business relationship! I’ve regularly been frustrated by paid sales channels (paid leads & ads). They produce short term work from businesses that aren’t committed, don’t have dedicated marketing budgets or are not clear about their competitors. Some of the short-term projects are due to business failures or pivots away from original goals.

So I’d simply like to publicly say thank-you for those word-of-mouth recommendations. I’m grateful to former corporate colleagues, which has included Product, Design, Web Producers, Software Engineers, the C-Suite and former fellow Marketing team members. Consulting clients also refer after we’ve worked together. When contacts move from one company to another, I hear from them when their new company needs consulting.

All those referrals have contributed to long-term clients that I didn’t need to pay to find. Nor did I need to work through long sales funnels to acquire fresh long-term work. I’ll continue to use paid channels when it’s warranted, but it is needed far less frequently thanks to long-term relationships.

Is High Bounce Rate Bad for SEO?

Pushing Back Bounce Button
SEO Consultants hear a couple of frequent questions about bounce rates during reporting updates with clients. Those questions are, “Why is our bounce rate so high? and “Is it true that bounce rates have an effect on SEO?”

So let’s first address the simple question, “What is a bounce?” It is defined by Google as, “a session that triggers only a single request”. In other words the visitor left the site after viewing the page without interacting. (Closed the browser window or clicked the browser “Back” button.)

There is nothing which turns that bounce into a timed, valuable visit because the visitor leaves the window open for several minutes (to read an article for example) before closing it or hitting the back button. Only when a visitor clicks a link on the page will analytics know it is not a bounce.

Time on page (aka “Session Duration”) is measured time between arrival and clicking any other link on that page. Sessions are not timed at all by analytics if the visitor doesn’t click another link or take an action that is measured on that page (video view, download a file, fill out a form). No time is measured if no action is taken before clicking the back button or closing the browser.
 
Click Link or Back Button or Close Browser
 

Now that we understand bounces, ask yourself, “What is on the page with a high bounce rate?” Is it a sentence or two under a photo – or just a graphic button labeled “Buy Now” under a photograph of a product? Can any action be taken on the page other than purchase?

If your bounce rate is high from any particular page, consider adding some rich sales copy or an explainer video if your goal is selling something. Those who aren’t immediately sold by that wonderful photo with the simple caption will, of course, immediately leave.

If the purpose of the photograph or single sentence is entertainment only, then you’ve probably accomplished your goal. You’ve made the visitor think, or made them smile or even laugh. Then they leave. (See below for ideas to keep that visitor on your site)

If your goal is to reduce your bounce rate, you must give the visitor a reason to interact with your site. There are multiple ways to accomplish that second click into your site.
 
Search Console Graph

  • If your high bounce rate page has longer content such as an article or other long-form content – try rewriting the page headline to better reflect what the page content is about.
  • If you run a content site, add a module which provides “Related Content” with links to similar articles to encourage visitors to look at more like the page that initially attracted their interest.
  • If your high bounce rate is from ecommerce product detail pages, provide reviews and ratings links to share user opinions from customers.
  • Again, from product detail pages, provide links to buying guides or links to pages answering frequently asked questions to encourage further purchase consideration.
  • From any high bounce rate page, add video links which go to explainer videos, assembly instruction or product use videos or photos.
  • Use exit intent to trigger a “Subscribe” form or a questionnaire which require actions that are measurable events.

 
Zero Goal Conversions
 
In every instance where high bounce rate has been raised by clients, I believe the visitor found exactly what they came for. Because I believe that they got what they expected – there is no reason for concern with the bounce rate. (I must clarify though, that those cases on which I’ve taken that position were informational content pages – not e-commerce pages.)

As a matter of fact, it is very common for there to be popular content pages which have high bounce rates and zero conversions, often among the most popular pages on the site. This highly popular content is usually among the top 25 landing pages from search engines. Popular pages are commonly company blog posts, infographics or well-optimized content addressing highly focused topics.

Let’s return to the second question asked at the top of this discussion: “Is it true that bounce rates have an effect on SEO?” The most authoritative source, Google, says “It depends“. On what? Your Goals for the pages with high bounce rates matter above all.
 
Analytics Laptop View
 
If the popular page is informational and not transactional consider enabling enhanced link tracking of anchor links which “jump” from one section of a page to another place on the same page. That tracking is essential on one-page sites which are made up entirely of anchor links. However, linking from different areas of the page can trigger measurement of the “session duration” and avoids recorded “bounces”.
 

Some clients are so concerned with the lack of conversions from popular pages that they propose getting rid of their most popular content! That is a bad (SEO) idea in most cases, because that strong visibility of popular pages can be leveraged to increase relevance and share page authority using internal links.

When popular content with high bounce rates and no conversion exist, link to relevant products (or content), freemium content or subscription pages. Always provide a prominent “Call to Action” for your primary product or service. Offer appropriate downloads or provide videos, which will stop the bounce and record a productive visit.
 
Bounce Rate Analytics
 
Your SEO is typically affected on a page-by-page basis, but when SEO is viewed overall for your entire site, a small percentage of pages with high bounce rates are unlikely to have any effect on your overall visibility in search. Often, those high bounce-rate pages are ranked incredibly well if they are among top landing pages from search.

Do your best to convert those visitors to customers. Enjoy the exposure of your business and be content with the bragging rights of having crowd-pleasing content. Those popular (but high bounce rate) pages can only help overall visibility – especially if leveraged as recommended above.