Are the metrics in Moz's SERP analysis relevant in my area?
-
Our site (https://loco2.com/) specialises in train journey planning at ticket booking, so we want to improve our ranking when people search Google for a specific journey they want to make (eg "London to Barcelona by train"). We have a set of about 400 Guide pages (eg London to Barcelona) which we want people to find when they search for those journeys. I've been trying to find out why some of those pages do better than others in search, and what our competitors are doing better.
I was hoping that the SERP analysis and Keyword Reports tool could help me with this, so I ran analyses for a set of the keyword phrases we want to rank for, but I was surprised to find that most of the metrics in both the basic and full reports don't seem to relate to how high in the search result a page ranks. The screengrab attached shows the results for "Brussels to Paris train", which are fairly typical - many of the top-ranking pages have fairly low scores for most metrics, and the metrics don't seem to have much effect on how high they are in the search results. ( I assume N/A means the Page Authority is very low, or is it not calculated for some other reason?)
I looked into this a bit further by downloading full reports for 11 keyword searches, and comparing the average scores for each metric with the rank, but I still couldn't see any effects of the metrics on the ranks. If anything, pages with higher Page Authority and Domain Authority were further down in search rankings.
Does this mean that link metrics aren't very important for the kinds of pages we're looking at? This makes sense to me, because if I'm searching for tickets from London to Barcelona I want to find a very specific results page which is unlikely to have many links, but I keep reading that link metrics are one of the most important factors in SEO. Am I misunderstanding something?
-
It looks like Moz's SERP analysis Reports are almost entirely based on link analysis. Does that mean that this isn't very relevant in my area?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Moz can't crawl my site
Moz is being blocked from crawling the following site - https://www.cleanchain.com. When looking at Robot.txt, the following is disallowing access but don't know whether this is preventing Moz from crawling too? User-agent: *
Moz Pro | | danhart2020
Disallow: /adeci/
Disallow: /core/
Disallow: /connectors/
Disallow: /assets/components/ Could something else be preventing the crawl?0 -
Unsolved MOZ says number one but I don't see it!
MOZ Ranking says my site is ranked number one for a keyword, but when I Google it I don't see my site. Why?
Moz Pro | | AleCam0 -
Moz Pro Tools
Hello I ran into a error while using Moz Pro Tools Crawl Site feature. Stating that my wordpress website could not be crawled. When contacting moz they sent me this screenshot stating the reason for this error is because of the odd ip address highlighted in yellow. Only time I've seen this particular ip-address is during local development. If anyone has any advice on how to fix this or what may have caused this issue. I feel this maybe effecting the site's overall search visibility. ednqnL7
Moz Pro | | willakawillow220 -
Why is my MOZ ranking better but my ranking worse
last week, I made all the recommended changes for my client's website, and our grade according to MOZ got better, but our rankings dropped?
Moz Pro | | lfrazer0 -
Ahead in all metrics, and not even close
For my chosen keyword(s), I rank below the #1 entry by far, am a little beneath the #2 in all metrics, but way ahead of the #3 entry in all metrics (domain authority, page authority, links, etc...). I don't even come close to the first page, however. I'm figuring there's something horribly wrong (and probably obvious) that I'm doing and just not seeing. The site in question is www.thedjbay.com and the most important keyword of choice is "tampa dj." I'm not sure if maybe there's some other metric I'm not getting, or something really bad I'm doing with my site overall. Thanks in advance for any help!
Moz Pro | | thedjbay0 -
Why would PA be 1 (0 links from 0 root domains) if it's linked to internally?
Question just about said it all: I've seen a number of pages on sites that have a PA of 1 (with the metrics being 0 links from 0 root domains) when I can see on the site that it is linked to internally - from the main nav (which is CSS, not Javascript) and also from the footer, if not other places. Why would this be? Update: upon looking further at the site, it appears that there's some kind of redirect going on, where the page linked to from the nav actually redirects to the real page. Would that eliminate PA, even if it's a 301? And additionally, is whatever is causing this lack of PA a reflection of how Google would relate to the page? Thanks, Aviva
Moz Pro | | debi_zyx0