Hi there,

Is it possible that the Website Auditor – in exceptional cases – is even MISLEADING and giving the WRONG recommendation?

The Auditor suggests me NOT to use my main keyword in the beginning of the title and meta description because my competitors don’t use it.

But my competitors don’t use it because they are not specialized in that keyword. Their websites are about other content - that content is very related to my content but my content is a specific subcontent ( a niche) that doesn't make sense for them to put at the top position..

So most likely they are not better than I because of their strategy to leave my keyword out - but simply because they have a different focus. So why should I imitate them in that case?

Maybe it is GOOD if I do NOT imitate them and put my keyword on top instead.

Maybe the Auditor is MISLEADING in that case…? Mayb it would hurt my website to follow his advice...?

Best
Gotom

Please keep in mind that WA relies on the relative analysis method. So it takes the average values of your top 10 competitors as standard ones for you. If they occupy top positions for your key phrase but don't have all of the phrase in their page elements, such an absence is considered normal by the application. That is why you are recommended to imitate these - average - keyword densities.

However, the competitors' might be optimized for other, but related, keywords and have a very large number of backlinks, and hence rank high for your keyword.

Although it is useful to pay attention to the percentage and score in your project reports, you should analyze your competitors' page elements. Very often it makes sense to find a competitor website whose content has the highest keyword density and to try to keep to the proportions used in its page elements.

If you are interested to read discussions of similar concerns, please check out the following topics of our SEO forum:

when-100-may-not-be-the-objective-t1509.html

higher-optimization-rate-better-ranked-t1693.html

If you need help optimizing a particular page element, please let us know and we will do our best to help your out.

You are absolutely 100% correct. The entire premise around which this software is built is faulty for that very reason. You may be competing against pages that rank highly because of domain age, number of backlinks, page rank etc. while WA is only looking at the on-page factors and offering you misleading advice as a result.

It won't be misleading if you arm yourself with a basic knowledge of on-page optimization techniques and start using the tool's recommendations creatively. Reading our free SEO guide will be more than enough to make a good start.

If you understand how the software works and what it does, you can use it almost as an unfair advantage. It was not meant to be something that is blindly followed without thought. It helps you understand HOW the SE bots see your page. And how your page compares to other higher ranking pages, but only primairly based on form and structure (CONTENT).

Granted there are other factors used in the ranking of sites, but on page content is the #1 factor, and you have to test things out, you maybe don't want to be average, but being average of the top 10 sites for a key word search that has billions of matches isn't really that "average".

While getting long tail keyword #1 rankings is great, often times you need a good broad base of keywords because you can never really tell exactly where your conversions are coming from. And obviously the more traffic your site gets the more likely you are to make sales.

I'd argue that it isn't the premise that it faulty, but people's interpretation of the report.

There is a strong arguement to say that mirroring a high ranking site in terms of content, links, etc should deliver a high ranking site and it is this assumption that the report is premised on.

However since you may be competing against well optimised sites or poorly optimised sites, your insight and understanding should enable you to determine how close to 100% you want to strive. Personally I am looking to achieve a level of optimisation that feels reasonable given the report summary and my intuition, and this has differed significantly from site to site or even from page to page.

I use the report as a starting point, to help me understand what the competitor site is doing and why it may be top, and then I try to beat it.

Maybe the report should come with a health warning along these lines, but used sensibly I don't see any major issues with it.

In my experience, I have found there are two reasons sites get listed in search results:

1) Well optimized pages

and/or

2) Links with relevant anchor text

The more competitive the term, the higher the odds are that search results are weighted more toward links and anchor texts. Oftentimes for a specific term, you'll find there are 9 pages listed that have 75%-85% optimization and there will be one site with 50% optimization. Chances are that's the site with a ton of links with anchor texts relevant to the term you're optimizing for.

Try re-running the Website Auditor and removing the most poorly optimized page out by adding "-site:http://www.poorlyoptimizedsite.com" to the end of the term you're optimizing for.

Good luck!