Search Marketers across the world suffer a blow whenever there’s a debate about SEO being Mathematical or just Gut Feel . Product and technology teams go by logic and impact numbers for new optimization ideas, but the main question remains unanswered ‘Can we actually quantify everything we do for SEO? ‘.

"SEO is just the way you are"

Well to be honest, there are some decisions which can be quantified and there are certain decisions which are solely based on your gut feel. Let me try and explain this with an example.

Let’s say for instance your webpage is ranking on the 5th spot on the Search Engine Resultant Page for a particular query and you plan to move to the top spot. It is extremely difficult because the competition for the top slots is really high. Firstly, you evaluate a bunch of onpage factors like Title tag, freshness of the page content, UGC etc. Secondly, you compare some traffic metrics like impressions, clicks, average time spent by a user on the page, bounce rate of a particular page or template etc. Then you compare your webpage with the competitor’s webpage for the same parameters and try to identify the gaps.

Now, let’s try to strategize this the best possible way –

The Mathematical Side of SEO:

You analyze the Title Tag for Keywords, Character Limit and Pixel Limit. You will try to identify which particular theme related to your website is being searched more in the “Keyword Planner” tool and plan optimizations accordingly. You check the Bounce Rate of your page. If the Bounce Rate is high, that means the user isn’t getting what he or she is looking for on your website. The most important is the content analysis, a lot of people just believe in keeping a certain percentage of the targeted keywords. But Google thinks in a different way. Google takes in to consideration a lot of factors like Keywords, anchor texts, font, presence of a keyword in comparison to other websites etc. One of the most important analytical methodologies is the TF*IDF analysis which gives an idea of what all keywords one should include as compared to other webpages for the same search query.

The Gut Feel Side of SEO:

The title tag you want to keep will have the Keywords you identified based on your mathematical analysis but the exact structure of the Title tag will be based on your Gut feel. Generally, people use targeted keywords, synonymous keyword and the brand name but in different permutations and combinations. Just to give you an example, here’s a screenshot :The targeted keyword is “Men’s Formal Shoes”, you can clearly see that all the different brands have a different structure of title tags and they all occupy top positions.

Brand A : Brand A uses the keywords in two different forms i.e. ‘Men’s Formal Shoes’ as well as ‘Formal Shoes for Men’ . It also uses the brand name in the title tag.

Brand B : Brand B on the other hand starts with the Main Category of the Product i.e. ‘Formal Shoes’ and then uses a combination of Generic Keywords and the targeted keyword.

Brand C : Brand C starts with the targeted keyword and then uses a combination of Generic Keywords and the category keyword.

As we can see there is no particular pattern for the Title tag Structure, hence it will be based on your gut feel.

Now to reduce the Bounce rate, you need to find out what the user is exactly searching for. It’s tough to get such data until and unless you have a direct connection to the neurons of the users or you conduct interviews with each and every consumer. One possibly cannot include all the information different users search for but can include an aggregated version which satisfies majority of them. This is where your gut feel plays a role. A few Examples are -

a) A particular specification related to the search

b) The expected discount on a product.

Now let’s talk about content . The content on the page is essential for a crawler to compare your page’s relevance for a search query and decide your rank. What you won’t be able to decide is what type of content will be a winner for your webpage. Gut feel plays an essential role here.Let’s say you have a webpage about a particular Monument. As an optimization strategy a lot of people will just use the name of the Monument as a keyword multiple times in the content. I have explained earlier as well that Google Algorithm doesn’t only consider the keyword density but a bunch of other factors as well for ranking. Keeping that in mind, it is difficult to figure out the structure of the content. One can include the summary of the Monument, the history of monument, other places nearby etc. Either you can put in all the information (which might lead to over optimization), or you can choose a theme and write around it.

. The content on the page is essential for a crawler to compare your page’s relevance for a search query and decide your rank. What you won’t be able to decide is what type of content will be a winner for your webpage. Gut feel plays an essential role here.Let’s say you have a webpage about a particular Monument. As an optimization strategy a lot of people will just use the name of the Monument as a keyword multiple times in the content. I have explained earlier as well that Google Algorithm doesn’t only consider the keyword density but a bunch of other factors as well for ranking. Keeping that in mind, it is difficult to figure out the structure of the content. One can include the summary of the Monument, the history of monument, other places nearby etc. Either you can put in all the information (which might lead to over optimization), or you can choose a theme and write around it. Breadcrumbs helps the users to navigate through the websites, help improve the linking architecture, attribute keywords as well as help search engine understand the relation between the pages. Ideally there shouldn’t be too many levels in the breadcrumb, the keywords shouldn’t be over optimized but different people use different breadcrumb structures. Let me illustrate the same using an example of drumsticks. E.g. –

Brand A: Brand A directly links the listing page with different drumsticks to the Homepage, assuming the homepage will be given more value. The final level of the breadcrumb is a link to the current page.

Brand B: Brand B inserts a layer of category i.e. “Drums and Percussions” between the homepage and the product listing page.

Brand C: Brand C on the other hand doesn’t link to the homepage using the breadcrumbs but does a better categorization breadcrumb linking.

Now there two arise -

a) Which Brand is ranking 1st?

b) Which Brand has the most optimized breadcrumb usage?

Let me surprise you, Brand C Ranks number 1 even though it doesn’t have a homepage linked in the Breadcrumb(Other Factors might play a pivotal role). But according to me, Brand B has a better Breadcrumb structure.

Confused which structure to use? Well, your Gut feel has a proposal ready for you to evaluate.

Conclusion

Not trying to prove that Math isn’t important for SEO. I have made it pretty clear with all the examples that both Math and Gut feel go hand in hand. At times you might not be convinced with your Gut feel, but you can always consider your Gut’s proposal, evaluate it using a mathematical model or just start experimenting. There’s no harm in that. If it works, clearly you are a winner but if it doesn’t you can always try an alternative.

Have you come across similar situations as an SEO expert where the metrics point to a certain decision but your gut points to another?

Feel free to comment about your experience.