While most of these signals are well-known, it’s often forgotten that signal consistency sustains high rankings for relevant user queries.
Rising to the top in SEO isn’t about chasing the latest SEO buzzword.
Instead, it’s far more effective to ensure that Googlebot and Bingbot can:
Crawl a critical mass of a website’s relevant, engaging landing pages.
Clearly understand the site’s unique selling proposition.
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SEO output
Rankings are the result of dozens of critically important, heavily weighted SEO signals.
Unlike Google updates, publishers retain control over those inputs and can regularly measure and improve their websites’ signals.
This is the essence of SEO: it’s an ongoing process based on measurable, verifiable data rather than individual, biased opinions.
This is why collecting a website’s server logs and conducting annual defensive SEO audits are critically important.
Embracing these best practices and integrating them into a comprehensive SEO strategy is what sets consistently successful website operators apart.
SEO signals
Shifting the focus on what actually matters in SEO isn’t difficult.
At the most basic level, it requires tapping into and regularly monitoring the two main sources of verifiable data:
Google Search Console.
Bing Webmaster Tools.
While both these free services provide excellent insights, it is the former that tends to allow for more profound insights.
That’s because, especially when it comes to large websites, Google often allocates more resources for crawling. This results in more in-depth and more frequent re-crawls of a website.
Consequently, the data provided, despite the intended latency between crawls and sample data updates, shows how Google reads and understands a website.
Paired with Bing Webmaster Tools, these two data sources represent the best source of verifiable information about a website’s basic SEO health signals.
Even without any additional analysis, Google Search Console can be used to tap into existing visibility, when high impression low / CTR page representation in SERPs is improved to include a unique selling proposition.
The more advanced step is to verify findings and analyze potential SEO issues or signal inconsistencies. This involves crawling the website in a manner similar to search engine bots.
Several tried-and-tested analysis tools are available for this purpose, with Oncrawl, RYTE, Screaming Frog, and Lumar standing out as particularly reliable.
These tools, along with others, should ideally be used simultaneously as part of an annual defensive SEO audit or when addressing unexpected ranking drops.
Ideally, a comprehensive analysis should include server log data, recorded and stored in perpetuity.
However, this represents an advanced level of big data analysis that few companies can perform regularly in-house.
For large websites with extensive data, partnering with SEO audit experts provides superior insights.
While in-house teams understand their website’s intricacies, external providers bring the advantage of experience across diverse web platforms.
These insights often help address lingering legacy signals and guide SEO efforts toward the most impactful changes for ranking growth.
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