Customers today trust SEO companies to optimize their websites in order to deliver top results in the search engines. Sitechecker decided to do a study to find out how some top SEO companies optimized their own websites.
Study methodology
The Sitechecker study included 100 top websites that rank for certain keywords in the SEO niche, such as SEO blog, SEO agency and SEO tips.
The study did not include some of the well-known brands, like SEMRush or MOZ, because they have more than the average number of pages on their websites. SEO blogs that offer forecasts, guides and announcements were not included either as they did not rank for the selected keywords.
Site Checker monitored the top 100 websites and tracked all the daily changes made on them for the month of August. A Google Sheet contains the raw data about how many changes were made in the month to things like content and meta tags as well as how Website Scores changed in the month.
The data for this research has been derived from the infographics here:
Courtesy of: https://sitechecker.pro/
Traffic and Website Score
By Traffic, the median monthly traffic of the top ten websites was 635k visitors and the median website score was 81 points.
By Website Score, the medium website score of the top ten websites was 94 points and median monthly traffic was 15k visitors.
Domain Age and Website Score
Domain Age refers to the amount of time a website has existed. By Domain Age, the top 10 websites had a medium Domain Age of 23 years and a Website Score of 83 points.
By Website Score, the top 10 websites had a medium Domain Age of 8 years and a median Website Score of 94 points.
Linked Domains and Website Score
By Linked Domains, the top ten websites had a median Website Score of 81 points and median Linked Domains of 42k.
By Website Score, the top ten websites had a median Website Score of 94 points and median Linked Domains of 2k.
Page Efficiency and Website Score
By Page Efficiency, the top ten websites had a median Website Score of 74 points and a medium Page Efficiency of 474 visitors per page each month.
By Website Score, the top ten websites had a median Website Score of 74 points and a median Page Efficiency of 58 visitors per page each month.
Number of pages in Google Index and Website Score
By number of pages in Google Index, the top ten websites had a median number of pages in Google Index of 7500 and a median Website Score of 77 points.
By Website Score, the top ten websites had a median number of pages in Google Index of 345 and a median Website Score of 94.
Number of pages in Google Index and Page Efficiency
By number of pages in Google index, the top ten websites had a median number of pages in Google Index of 7500 and a median Page Efficiency of 8 visitors per page monthly.
By Page Efficiency, the top ten websites had a median number of pages in Google Index of 257 and a median Page Efficiency of 474 visitors per page monthly.
Website Score Distribution
Out of the top 100 websites, the Website Score of:
- 10% was between 90 and 100.
- 76% was between 50 and 90.
- 11% was between 30 and 50.
- 3% was between 0 and 30.
In the 30 days of the study, 60% of Website Scores remained the same, 26% of Website Scores declined and 14% improved. The median improvement was by 19 points and the median decline was by 11 points.
Domain Age and Total Number of New Pages
By total number of new pages, the top ten websites had a median number of 823 total new pages and a median Domain Age of 15 years.
By Domain Age, the top ten websites had a median number of 33 total new pages and a median Domain Age of 23 years.
Interesting changes made in the month
The changes mentioned below were only a few of those made during the month of August and only nine of the websites out of the 100 did not make any changes.
Adding new pages
Brian Dean of Backlinko created a Digital Templates Library and added 76 templates to it in various formats. Sitechecker did find an issue with one link that referred to non-existent page. Adam Enfroy added new review pages and a list of five redirects to affiliate links.
Two websites added pages relating to niche SEO services. One Click SEO Agency’s page was about real estate SEO and First Page Sage SEO Agency added an industrial Internet of Things SEO services page.
Crevand SEO agency added new pages but Sitechecker found some of these to be duplicate content. It also found that HighMark SEO Agency and Detailed added pages but both of them had links referring to unnecessary pages that need to be deleted.
Deleting pages
Site owners, such as Matt Diggity of Diggity Marketing, work on their own sites and he deleted some pages.
Changing Title and H1 tags
Brian Dean detected a typo in an H1 tag and fixed it. Adam Enfroy tends to experiment with his titles to keep them relevant to the content and increase CTR. For example, he changed “How to Start a Blog Like a Business: $203k in one year (2020)” to “11 Easy Steps How to Start a Blog (to make money) in 2020.”
Nathan Gotch of Gotch SEO also changes Title tags to increase CTR. For example, he changed “Apply to join Gotch SEO Academy” to read “Gotch SEO Academy is now Open” on his Academy page.
Changing content
Brian Dean made some changes to blog post descriptions.
A final word
Sitechecker concluded from the study that young websites make more changes to help them get ahead than older ones which keep growing steadily. It found that most of the top 100 websites have good or perfect website scores when looking at domain age, traffic and linked domains. It also found that website owners actively work on their own websites but there are occasions when they may not notice mistakes.
Photo credit: Diggity Marketing / Unsplash
