It may sound cliche but as an SEO expert, you would have been asked numerous times to explain rankings. Rankings specifically of highly visible head terms. Rankings help in gathering more traffic and increase the conversion rate.
And when you have an appealing business website, you surely want to get your brand tons of eyeballs. You want to advertise your business to as many people as possible at one time.
The normal rules to rank on top don’t always work. Google goes beyond our normal understanding of ranking factors. The two key factors behind the ranking are competition and search intent.
“Apparently, satisfying searcher’s intent is the place where you should focus”: Hypothesis at Distilled.
One of the founders at Distilled, Mr. Will Critchlow tries to join the dots between his colleagues work and some of his client’s work to define a strategy for different sized business sites.
Tom Capper who presented the “Two-tiered SERP” at Search Love London conference laid the foundation of it. The correlation and the hypothesis go as below:
The presentation mentioned the correlation between domain authority and rankings has decreased. The stats from Feb’17 looked much different 18 months later and has a significant drop.
This drop led to a thought that some other factors might also be playing a role in defining the ranking. There are some other data which is used by Google or some other metrics that have been taking the place.
There has to be more granular effect participating in the page ranking and not just Google not using links or fewer links. This defines what we call “Two-tiered SERP”. Many SEO services in USA and others are still figuring out the term.
According to Tom, the correlation between domain authority and rankings was higher for the search results between 6 to 10. The first top of the search results has very less correlation.
This means that the traditional ranking factors played a part in lowering down the position whereas for the top other factors were playing a role. The traditional ranking factors were not taken much into consideration further for the top results.
However, if you’re a smartphone user then you might be well versed in voice search trends and voice search ranking factor. Well, the above mentioned are the finest tip that can be helpful in ranking your w and can be counted as prebsite better professional SEO services.
It can be said that the top 5 positions are more authoritative than the ones appearing at lower search engine positions. This doesn’t mean that the domain authority ranking is very weak but yes, the correlation between them is less.
This is the two-tiered SERP that we observe in the bunch of data. More and more content campaigns and content strategies of different and varied business sizes are adopting two-tiered SERP.
Many clients at Distilled come to them and ask to define a content strategy or make one for them which can get a ton of links. Clients want to use these link building strategy to make their business site more authoritative and rank better.
An anonymous case study of a B2B website by Tom Capper:
The two-tiered SERP strategy works better on smaller sites than the bigger ones. The consulting client had comparatively less domain authority than that of their key competitors. They came to us with an idea of increasing the domain authority to rank on the top.
According to our content strategy, we put out a bunch of pieces and gained them good traction on the website. Soon within 18 months, they were able to leave behind their competitors and thus we concluded that rank and domain authority go hand in hand.
But this strategy did not work with the websites having big content in place or are at already a good rank and have good domain authority. Thus, adding huge content pieces did not really move the needle.
Having said that, it can be concluded that Two-tiered SERP plays a part in bringing up a lower domain authority site to good domain authority and the ones who have already got the competitive edge needs to concentrate on user experience, conversion rate, and intent research.
Create a website that satisfies the searcher’s intent and answers below questions:
- What is searcher’s actual intend behind searching the particular topic?
- Does your website satisfy the intent?
- Are you competitive enough that the searcher will not choose your competitor or bounce back?
- Does staying on your site going to satisfy their every need and get their things done?
And if the answer is yes for most of them, then you will probably rank on the top and be more powerful.
So design a content strategy that is directly going to rank high. Always make your best efforts to satisfy the search intent of the user and you are going to incrementally improve on the head terms. To rank on top is the crucial part of most SEO campaigns and professional SEO services provider.
