What do the metrics in the "Recommendations" module mean?

The Recommendations module allows you to see a recommended list of pages to optimize and/or create. You can see;

a) A complete list of all the pages for your site which have strong potential for growth in organic traffic, by optimizing the page for existing ranking keywords and/or by suggesting new relevant keywords from competitors;

b) Clusters of content topics and keywords with good organic potential where you could create a new page. These clusters occur where many of your top 100 competing sites are ranking together for keywords where your site is not ranking at all or where it is ranking poorly outside the top 3 pages of Google. (N/B: Use 'Frequency across domains' to find the most relevant topics and filter out the inevitable noise in the marketplace - the higher the number the more relevant it should be).

Tip: You can download the complete table using the CSV download icon from the top right-hand side of the table.

Hidden Columns

You can also use the column selector to only show the data you are most interested in. There are many hidden columns including, Google Analytics/Adobe Analytics (Omniture) data about sessions, eCommerce revenue, eCommerce transactions and organic goals. If this is included in your package and you have connected your web analytics data to the platform then this additional data can give you a new dimension to the insights you can derive from the market, e.g. you can produce a revenue-driven SEO & Content Marketing strategy.

Explanation of Key Terminology:

URL/Suggested Topic - This column lists either the existing ranking URL (filter by the selected domain to just see these) or a suggested topic for new content creation (the URL you create does not have to use the recommended keyword - it is just a label created by our algorithm!). N/B: Sometimes we will suggest a new page and you will find you actually already have an existing page for that topic. Do not be alarmed, it just means that your existing page is ranking poorly and should be optimized - the growth opportunity is still there whether it's existing or new!

Recommendation - the platform's recommended approach to achieving the best possible return from this URL; the three categories of recommendation are 'Optimize', 'New keywords' and 'New content'. These are categorized in the following way:

• 'Optimize' - Optimize this existing URL in order to increase its ranking for keywords for which it is already ranking, so that you can increase the ROI from this URL. These pages usually are ranking towards the bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 for keywords with decent search volumes.

• 'New keywords' - These pages often rank for 1 or more keywords in the top 30 results but we have found a number of additional relevant keywords from your top 100 competitors that this page could also potentially rank for. Review the keyword suggestions and use 'Top Competing URL' (exclude Wikipedia, 'Frequency Across Domain' and 'Avg Search Volume' or 'Potential Visibility' to filter the most relevant keywords from the set. Then include these keywords in your content and meta data (don't forget external and internal links) to try and get this existing ranking URL to rank for additional keywords that are likely to generate more organic traffic, conversions and revenue.

• 'New content' - It is recommended that you create some completely new content around the suggested topic shown in the URL/Suggested topic column. Do also check your site to see if you have a poorly ranking page in your site that could also be adapted or optimized to use these related keywords and capture the opportunity.

Visibility Score - an estimate of the current organic visibility for existing ranking URLs based on rank, search volume and a Click-thru rate model (CTR%). This will naturally have a zero value for suggested new topics or keywords where you are not ranking.

Potential Visibility Score (Mean) - an estimate of the amount of additional incremental organic visibility that this URL could get over and above what we estimate the URL's existing visibility to be for the selected period. As this module is looking at "existing content", it is based on current ranking keywords and their respective ranking positions, search volumes and click-thru rate model. This estimate is based on a "ladder principle"; it does not assume that you can rank for #1 for every keyword, but makes a reasonable assumption that you could improve rankings to the average visibility of the competing sites above you. This is helpful as it is more realistic and it also changes as you improve your ranking and visibility.

N/B: Occasionally, the Potential Visibility can be different for keywords ranking in the same position with the same search volume as the number of competing sites above them will differ as we only include the top 100 competing sites, and occasionally other niche sites will appear for some keywords).

Potential Visibility Score (Max) - an estimate of the amount of additional organic visibility that this URL could get over and above what the module estimates the URL's existing traffic to be for the selected period. As this module is looking at "existing content", it is based on current ranking keywords and their respective ranking positions, search volumes and click-thru rate model. This estimate looks at the maximum potential visibility gain assuming you rank for #1 for every keyword.

N/B: This data is always populated unless you rank #1 for this keyword in which case you cannot get any more visibility for this keyword or if the keyword has 0 search volume in the period.

Potential Visibility Value (Mean) - this is a reflection of effective savings in PPC spend from ranking organically. This is, therefore, an estimate of the potential value that could be created by either increasing your organic visibility for an existing ranking URL or by creating (and ranking organically for) completely new content. This value is calculated by taking the PPC for each keyword multiplied by the Potential Visibility Score (Mean).

Potential Visibility Value (Max) - this is a reflection of effective savings in PPC spend from ranking organically. This is, therefore, an estimate of the potential value that could be created by either increasing your organic visibility for an existing ranking URL or by creating (and ranking organically for) completely new content. This value is calculated by taking the PPC for each keyword multiplied by the Potential Visibility Score (Max).

Ranking Keywords - the number of keywords this URL ranks for within the first 30 organic results in Google's SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Keywords - the total number of related keywords for this URL. This includes keywords ranking <30 and keyword suggestions from competing pages.

Avg. Monthly Search Volume - the average monthly search volume for the keywords that are most relevant to this URL

Avg. Keyword Frequency Across Domains - "frequency across domains" is a measure of keyword relevance. You can use it to filter the market data to eliminate very long-tail or brand keywords from the market. The higher the frequency the greater the relevance of the keyword to the URL, as more competing domains from the top 100 competing sites rank for this URL's keywords in the top three pages of Google's SERPs. This column provides the average frequency for each URL shown in the bubble chart.

Avg. Competing Pages - the average number of competing URLs to this URL. This is an indication of how competitive the cluster is and is a very similar relevancy metric to Avg. Keyword Frequency Across Domains as the higher the number the more relevant the keyword.

Avg. Relative Strength - the relative strength of the selected URL when compared with competing domains in the SERPs (for the keywords for which the URL ranks). This metric is based on a combination of Majestic's Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics. The higher the average relative strength, the more likely the URL is to be considered a stronger URL when compared to others in the SERPs. If you see a negative figure in this column, it means the link profile of your domain is generally weaker than that of your competitors.

Filtering the chart:

You may notice that you're able to modify the bubble chart by choosing from a number of metrics for the x-axis, y-axis and the z-axis (bubble size).