In local SEO, we can often see that websites that cover one topic from lots of different angles seem to rank better in Google. These are websites with 200 pages all on the same topic.
Each page can be a source to send links to and then internally link back to the main ranking page to send juice to. Be it the homepage that we try to rank or the money pages. For this test, we check out if there is a correlation between the number of pages on a topic and rankings.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
Test 336. Is there a correlation between the number of pages per topic and rankings? So his hypothesis is the more pages we have on a certain topic, the higher you rank in Google, right? Sounds good. My theory is, it would, of course. So the background information: In local SEO, we can often see the websites that cover one topic from lots of different angles seem to rank better in Google.
These are websites with 200 pages on the same topic. It could be an electrician who has a page for each suburb in their City and all relative services or related services. Each page can be a source, it sends links and then it internally links back to the main ranking page. So it could be a home page that we try to rank or money sites. That's always kind of been case. This is really relevant too since we know that multiple inner links will help rank, even just on its own. So it makes sense.
He set up the test running and intitle and intext search operator for the five top search results in the SERPs compared to ranks 82 - 85 in a given search, specifically ABC electrician.com. So intitle would be, electrician results taking from Google pages. He is reporting that intitle gave much better results intext.com returns pages where the menu items have the keyword in it, which over inflates the number of pages and messes up with the data.
But the results are the strong correlation of negative 0.59 with rankings in numbers of page for sites:domain.com, which is intitle:electrician. Bottom line more pages you have a certain topic, the better your rankings are. Here is his graphs on that. Marc, I know you might be on here, so if you have anything that you want to add, you can just put it into the chat box, and I can let everybody know.
Correlation is not causation. When a local website has 300 pages such as an electrician plus suburb, this means it's in the hands of an SEO guy. You know it's been SEO when this happens. Therefore, you know there's other things that can be done to the website apart from mass building pages. So you can't really single out the factor of having many pages as the one that moves the needle.
We can't say that clearly because there's other things going on. What's clear to say is ranking number one for suburb level query is fantastic. And if it also helps to power your home page, the money pages, then why wouldn’t you build more pages, right? Of course, so thank you Marc for that.