What the average Joe thinks about search engine ranking factors
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009Recently we decided to piggyback on SEOMoz’s biannual search engine ranking factors and see what the average, non-SEO thinks about how Google’s magic organizes the world’s web pages and puts them in order for our consumption. We generated a survey and shot it out to a broad web of professionals of all stripes, and 34 of them promptly responded to us (thanks everyone!)
Ideally, we wanted to compare them apples to apples with the questions asked of SEOMoz’s panel of experts, but we found that the jargon would likely be too technical (and we were proved right by some of the email responses to our survey…sorry!)
So we tried our best to be comprehensive in regards to factors, and allowed our respondents to rank factors on a scale from 10 (extremely important) to 0 (not important). For the sake of making things pretty, we turned the average scores into percentages. The spread of scores isn’t that drastic in our respondents surveys, and the feedback of a few gives a hint to that. A few respondents came right out and stated that they added 5s where they were unsure of the factor itself or what their own perceived significance was. So, obviously, this isn’t statistically significant, nor is it a valid random sampling. What it is, however, is an interesting glimpse at how the average person may think Google is organizing the data they present. Our factors, in order:
Our results show a slant towards on page factors
The implications here, particularly when placed next to the opinions of professionals (which to stoke our egos we will simply assume are valid) is there are some pretty significant gaps in the Average Joe’s understanding of how search engines work. In particular, five of the top six factors for the Joes related to on page factors, and they ranked anchor text as the eighth most important factor!
If you live in an insular world as an SEO, you might have some significant work to do to clarify potential clients’ understanding of precisely what you’ll be doing. You’ll notice anchor text (which if you’re still looking is referred to as “Keyword(s) used in external links pointing into a page”) barely beats out “Keyword(s) in meta keywords tag”. This clearly shows a significant knowledge gap in how search engine ranking factors are perceived.
If you’re interested in comparing the full list of results from SEOMoz, check them out here.
I don’t know if anyone else has tried this survey before, but for our team here at Netvantage, it was a valuable exercise in helping to understand how to engage, communicate and set expectations for clients and prospects.
(For clarity, if you compare the SEOMoz results to ours, be aware that SEOMoz’s survey only referred to Google - but most agree the other engines work fairly similarly).
