Are the metrics in Moz's SERP analysis relevant in my area?
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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?
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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?
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