Bloggers blog, that’s what we do, but are we structuring the content well enough to impress the search engines? A recent study by Perficient Digital finds that many bloggers are making significant mistakes that could negatively affect their search rankings.
Link depth refers to how many clicks it takes a visitor to get to a piece of content on a website, post landing on the website homepage.
Perficient Digital discovered that two-thirds of blogs have a greater-than-five average link in their blog posts. Content that exists so far from the website homepage is not likely to rank unless it has earned several backlinks pointing directly to that specific post.
The study reveals that 31.5% of the blog posts analyzed were 21 clicks or more from touchpoints at the website homepage.
This study said that 9.5% of blog posts were 50+ clicks away! Some blog post content was even more than 1,000 clicks away. One thousand!
As a blogger, your takeaway should be this:
- if you have valuable content on your blog,
- but those posts don’t rank well
- then make those posts simpler to find from your website homepage.
Data from the Perficient Digital study is based on 100 randomly selected blogs. Each blog was crawled and scoured from the homepage to the sitemap so each blog structure would be fully mapped out.
Another nugget of information is that 92% of the blog posts examined were evergreen as opposed to temporary content. This suggests that building a harbor of evergreen content, rather than a blog of fleeting pop-up content, would receive better search results.
See the full study details on Perficient Digital‘s website for further information.
Have questions about this article? Contact Janelle for a Marketing Consultation. We’ll figure it out together.