As an industry, SEOs are great at doing and bad at explaining WHY what they do is valuable. We share tools we've built to make the value we drive more accessible.

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Communicating Value
Through Better Data

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At Verve, we’re not patient people

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So we build a lot of tools

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tools to give us better data and get there quicker.

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generally we follow this process
Forecast
The Opportunity
Do Report / Analyze
UnderstandThe
Problem

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we think most are pretty good at these parts
Forecast
The Opportunity
Do Report / Analyze
UnderstandThe
Problem

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…and really, forecasting and reporting are just about communicating the value of what we do.
Communicating
Value
Do
Communicating
Value
UnderstandThe
Problem

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yet it’s these parts that, as an industry, we struggle with
Communicating
Value
Do
Communicating
Value
UnderstandThe
Problem

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Getting C-Suite Buy-In
The Way We
Present Technical
Data

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we’re working with increasingly large and complex datasets

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which is why we hire incredibly smart and talented people

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people that get what the above means

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but decision makers, at businesses, for the most part, don’t

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Almost all businesses are obsessed
with what their competitors are doing

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so we compare to industry averages to give context

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… to show the scale of the problem
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
Brand Compound Money Other

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because comparing to that competitor creates action
Competitor A
You
Best Links

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We don’t tend to do these sorts of comparisons
for technical SEO, though.

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but honestly
‘you’re 4x more likely to click on a broken link on your site than your competitors’
sounds way more compelling than
‘4% of your links are broken’

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Data collection would and does take ages though

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We love Screaming Frog, but there must be a better way

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a few years ago, Fili explained how to run ScreamingFrog on the Google Compute Cloud

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We recently wrote an updated explainer, here:
https://www.vervesearch.com/blog/running-screaming-frog-on-googles-own-servers/

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If you set it up right, it can be considerably faster than normal

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…but it’s still too slow to do this

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What if, instead, you could run it on lots of machines at the same time?

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enter the sites into a box

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run a script…

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And now you have Screaming Frog spider running on six machines at once

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now you’re crawling at 9k URLs a second

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Crawl an entire industry
in less time than it usually takes to crawl one site

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making these graphs possible

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That communicates
value/importance/need
way better than any single data-source could

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Tutorial, with working code, to set it up yourself:
https://www.vervesearch.com/blog/screaming-frog-google-compute-cloud-automatically-crawl-an-entire-industry-fast/

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Comparing Crawls
A Problem of Our
Own Making

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How often have you had a developer claim to have implemented
recommendations, yet nothing has changed?

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You end up comparing old crawl files in Excel

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we ended up making that problem 10x worse for ourselves

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so we built a tool that compares crawls
‘mistaken’ developer alert

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Download it, and read the tutorial, here:
https://www.vervesearch.com/blog/compare-screaming-frog-crawl-files/

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Getting Accurate
The Way We
Measure
Opportunity

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If you ask Google Keyword Planner the search volume for
‘cheap windows laptop’ it’ll say:
100-1k

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Tool providers come back with roughly similar numbers to each other:
Provider Search Volume
SEMRush 2.4k
SEOMonitor 2,900
Searchmetrics 1,541

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But what’s happening here:
Keyword Search Volume
cheap windows laptops 2,900
cheapest windows laptops 2,900
cheap windows lapptop 2,900
windows laptop cheap 2,900

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Google’s been amalgamating the search volume of close variants
(misspellings and plural versions) of queries since 2012

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they’ve been amalgamating the search volume of differently ordered
keywords since early 2017

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if you’re conducting keyword research in the 10s or 100s of thousands
there’s no easy way to spot these duplicates

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…which means that we end up reporting these keywords:
Keyword Search Volume
cheap windows laptops 2,900
cheapest windows laptops 2,900
cheap windows lapptop 2,900
windows laptop cheap 2,900
… as having 11.6k search volume

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that leads to un-reachable forecasts

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we fixed it with the concept of
Canonical Keywords

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A canonical keyword is the simplest form that keyword could take,
with all the words in alphabetical order.
that means no pluralisation, no conjugation, no misspellings,
no pesky word order differences.

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removing pluralisation is hard
Keyword Plural
bacteria bacterium
genius geniuses
woman / man women / men
tooth teeth

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Excel has no ‘fix all’ button for spelling mistakes

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Fixing word-order is possible with VBA, but painful

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https://www.vervesearch.com/keyword-cleaner/

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Once you have a canonical keyword you can count the amount of times that appears in your list – crosschecking
against the landing page and search volume to make sure amalgamation definitely has occurred, then you just
divide the search volume of each by the amount of times it appears.
Keyword Canonical Search Volume Adjusted Search Volume
cheap windows laptops cheap laptop window 2,900 725
cheapest windows laptops cheap laptop window 2,900 725
cheap windows lapptop cheap laptop window 2,900 725
windows laptop cheap cheap laptop window 2,900 725

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We’re not saying this gives you accurate search volumes on a per-
keyword basis, but it fixes the big-picture.

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that means you set achievable targets

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I talked about it at SMX West and Russ recommended an improvement:

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As of last week, we now solve (common) acronyms
and remove stop words

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Showing The Real Value
The Way We
Measure and
Report Links

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there’s this weird gulf growing between tech SEOs and hipsters PRs outreach people

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To the extent that type-casts technical SEOs as the boffin in the basement we don’t think it does us any favours

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there’s a significant role for tech SEOs in outreach
that we don’t think most are addressing

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By not targeting sites strategically, outreach can often prove
ineffective.

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(this might be why some agencies have stopped offering link building)

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As tech SEOs, we know that domain crowding is a thing

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We looked at who was ranking for 450k commercial SERPs in the UK
(with at least 1k searches a month)
Thanks to for the data

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There were only 300k domains ranking, out of a possible 4.5 million
0 500,000 1,000,000 1,500,000 2,000,000 2,500,000 3,000,000 3,500,000 4,000,000 4,500,000

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Only 135k domains appeared more than once
0 500,000 1,000,000 1,500,000 2,000,000 2,500,000 3,000,000 3,500,000 4,000,000 4,500,000

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50% of traffic in the UK goes to just 73 sites

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When we know that Google has over 200 ranking factors, our primary
metrics take into account just one or two (links and authority)

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That’s what leads to the outreach team presenting links from the BBC,
The Telegraph and The Guardian and being told:
“ great, but our agency built 35k links this month ”

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we all know how

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“We want 250 links a month”

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“50 links of DA 30 or higher”
“100 links with an average TrustFlow of 35”
“20 links, 300 shares and 5000 views”

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We suspected that standard SEO metrics weren’t all that useful

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We looked at how well they correlated with rankings
(looking at 10k sites ranking for 1k high-volume commercial terms)
Thanks to for the data

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and they definitely correlate
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Average TF Average CF Average Domain TF Average Domain CF Page Authority Domain Authority MozRank MozRank - Subdomains Domain Rating

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But when you ask
‘what percentage of SERPs can those metrics correctly guess the order of?’

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They start to look less compelling:
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2%
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10%
12%
14%
16%
18%
Page Authority Domain Authority Domain Trustflow MozRank Subdomain Domain Citation Flow Trustflow Citation Flow Domain Rating Mozrank
Percentage of Time Metric Correctly Predicts Ranking Order

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You can read more about this study here:
https://www.vervesearch.com/blog/SEO-metrics-study/

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That’s because they don’t take into account language

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…or relevancy
TF 24 TF 50

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…or how Google sees the sites
DA 40
DA 60
site-wide manual penalty

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because we’re not a tool provider we can use whichever (and however
many) metrics give us the most accurate results

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So we built an algorithm that takes into account off and on site metrics

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https://www.vervesearch.com/linkscore/

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by communicating the value of what we do we’re better able to:
work across teams
get changes made
get appropriate budget

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show the full SEO value of your work

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Don’t accept the defaults – build, create, test

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If you’re going to build something cool – share 

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