SEO METRICS USED TO MEASURE YOUR BLOG

Have you ever been approached by a PR or digital company regarding working with one of their clients, but before confirming whether you are eligible or not they will  ask you for some information such as readership statistics, social following or page views? Well, sometimes your site has been reviewed and then selected or rejected without you even knowing it or ever receiving an email proposal in your inbox.

Right now you might be thinking:

How are they measuring the eligibility of my website without contacting me?

The answer to this question is that they are using a number of SEO Tools or Metrics to determine the SEO ‘quality’ of your site and this is what I am going to be talking you through today.

When looking to collaborate with fashion, beauty or lifestyle bloggers, some companies will not only be looking to receive exposure to your readership, they will also be looking to gain SEO benefit as well, or alternatively not to damage their SEO via link building on websites and blogs with low search metrics.

I know that as I write this some of you may be wondering what the hell I am talking about, should you not have been introduced to the world of Search Engine Optimisation before. If so, you can read my 5 On-Page SEO Tips for Bloggers here and my 5 Link Building Tips for Bloggers here.

Below are four metrics that a PR or digital company may look at before deciding whether your blog would be appropriate for their campaign.

1. Page Rank (PR)

Every site on the internet is given a Page Rank between 0-10 and this is a metric that Google uses to state how ‘important’ a website is. For example, the BBC’s homepage has PageRank 9, whereas my little old blog has a PageRank of 2.

You can check the PageRank of your site with this tool here.

Although no-one really knows how often Google update the PageRank of indexed sites, some say that PR updates happen 3-4 times a year, although without knowing I would say that they most likely happen at least one time a year, if not a few, although there is no stable update history to point out how often this is.

When I first started my blog I had a PageRank of 0 as it was a new domain and over time I have managed to build this up to PR2. As a rule of thumb (from working in the digital industry) I have seen some client’s request a minimum PR of 2 when working on campaigns, although PageRank is slowly not being seen as important as it is that a site is relevant to your niche.

2. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (or DA for short) is a MOZ metric that is used to determine how authoritative your domain is on a scale from 0-100: it’s all in the name right?! There are three factors used to calculate this number and they are popularity, age and the size of the site. For example, as you can imagine, sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all have a DA of 100.

The DA of your site will also affect where you are shown in the Google Search Results, as the higher the Domain Authority of a site, the more likely it is to be shown higher up in relevant search queries.

If you want to check your Domain Authority you can do so here.

As a rule of thumb, some PR agencies will look to the Domain Authority of a website to decide whether or not they should gift our samples. This number will range from agency but some brands will sent out samples to bloggers with a DA over 30, be on the fence as to whether to send to those with a DA of around 20 and will definitely send product to those with a Domain Authority of 40 and above. Of course, this is all relative and varies from brand to brand.

3. Trust Flow

Trust Flow is a Majestic metric that measures how ‘trust worthy’ a said site it: it is all in the name really. Referring to linking out to relevant sources as voting for that site or endorsing that content as being trusted, Trust Flow is determined from trustworthy sites linking to trustworthy sources or so called ‘trustworthy neighbour’ sites.

So, to increase your Trust Flow you want to be receiving links to your blog from ‘trusted’ sites, which means avoiding spammy directory links or anything that is now deemed as ‘black hat’ or ‘negative SEO’, which I can cover in another post if this is of interest to you all?

4. Citation Flow

Citation Flow is another Majestic Metric that goes hand in hand with Trust Flow and refers to the volume of links that a said website has. This metric predicts how influential a website may be due to the number of other sites that point to it as a ‘trustworthy’ source.

You can check your Trust Flow and Citation Flow here. Personally I would advise to try and have a Citation and Trust flow of a similar score, which would indicate that the number of links pointing to your site may be deemed as ‘trustworthy’ by Google. If you say had a Citation Flow or 40 but a Trust Flow of 15 I would definitely recommend looking at your back link profile and checking that you do not have any links that may be toxic or affecting your natural search performance, as to me this would indicate that there is a large number of untrusted links pointing to your website or blog.

So, that is a little bit of an insight that I have gained from working in the SEO arena for the past few years on the metrics that PR companies or digital brands may be using to evaluate your website before reaching out or working with you. Hopefully some of you have found this post useful.

YouTube SEO Video Questions / Request ??

Also, I have been thinking that it would be a good idea to maybe do a YouTube Q&A Video on SEO questions you may have or be unsure of from my previous SEO Posts, which I have linked below. If you do have a question please Tweet me with the hashtag #SEOQandA to @CharlotteLewis_ and if I get a few responses I will put together my answers in a video for you!

As always, thanks for reading and here are my previous SEO posts if you fancy a read:

5 On Page SEO Tips for Bloggers – Read Here

5 Link Building SEO Tips for Bloggers – Read Here