6 Free Tools to Score Comprehensive, Quality Web Pages

Editor Note: Searchmetrics is our partner for our SEJ Summit conference series this year, but we were not paid or perked in any way for this post.

In a world where “content is king,” traditional keyword research is not enough, and SEOs are increasingly responsible for developing a solid content strategy. Google’s Hummingbird update in 2013 and made this move critical.

Search Metric’s annual 2015 Search Ranking Factors study launched early this month, and it does much to illuminate the importance of semantically related and comprehensive website content. It shows correlations with how readability and length of web pages are critical to the new, holistic way of writing and presenting content.

In Google-speak, we need “good content,” a vague and subjective yardstick. What is “good content”?

SEO’s and writers need to be in step with what Google’s machine learning deems “good”. There are content metrics Google’s algorithms use that we as content creators should understand. This piece looks at several tools that help do just that.

Tools that score the quality of web page content help both SEOs and content creators discover content that will score high in Google Search (and be engaging for users) beyond their own websites. There are many tools to help evaluate your website, but my mission here is to help you find other high-quality web page content in your niche — as objectively scored by metrics — so you can learn from their success.

Marcus Tober‘s presentation at SEJ Summit Chicago identified two sites that represent the old keyword-research-only method versus the new semantic relevance for content creation. If you know of other websites that contrast old versus new content creation strategy, keywords versus holistic content, they are fantastic for understanding Google’s new ranking, which is no longer based on keywords.

Tober showed how eHow dominated keywords related to “how to boil eggs” before Google introduced the Hummingbird algorithm and how their entire website tanked in Google search results (SERP) in the past two years.

In contrast, TheKitchn.com was his example of a website meeting the criteria of the new “holistic” approach for content creation, and is killing it in the SERP for terms related to “boiled eggs,” at the same time eHow saw a stunning drop in ranking for the same related topics.

To go along with Tober’s examples, I use pages that rank from these sites for scoring with free tools. I also use a New York Times piece for some tests and a Wikipedia page for the last three. If the automated tools do their job, we should find poor scores for eHow and good scores for all others. Let’s see how the tools do.

Keyword Research Tools Find Related Phrases Ranking From a Webpage

There are three free tools that look at how tens of millions of keywords rank on Google and then find associated metrics for the web pages ranking on the keywords. Using their data, I can determine if Google is willing to rank many phrases or topics from one page. All of the co-ranking phrases for the pages have good search volume when examined with these tools, as it is the “most popular” keyword phrases they track.

The Kitchn piece has 66 comments, so you need to determine if you want to include comments as part of the analysis. Since you’re evaluating the content you have control over, it’s probably best to leave this out. Of course, more comments show more engagement, and Google will use this as a positive signal.

If many related terms rank from a single web page it is more likely to have comprehensive content, as is the case with TheKitcn.com.

Sure, links are super important, but the Search Metrics 2015 Study shows that technical and on page factors are just as important. If all other ranking signals are equal, a page with more comprehensive content should have more phrases ranking. To score competitor’s holistic content based on number of related ranking keyword phrases from a page, you might also find the “link equity” score from Moz or Ahrefs to see the extent to which links are helping multiple words from a page rank.

I chose one of the pages on Wikipedia that drives the most traffic to the site (according to SEMrush data), their entry for “Facebook.” Here are the other three pages:

Source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/6-free-tools-score-comprehensive-quality-web-pages/138027/