Ahrefs, a popular online tool widely used for SEO and backlink analysis, have released an in-depth study which found that 91% of the 1 billion pages they have in their extensive database don’t receive any organic traffic from Google.
Organic traffic is often the most valuable traffic source as the ROI is a lot higher than with other mediums such as paid advertising or social media, but is also one of the most sought after and competitive channels for this same reason.
In this study the Ahrefs experts analysed 1 billion pages to find out why so many pages are getting no Google traffic and, more importantly, what you need to do to be in that 9% that does!
There are obviously hundreds of issues that can be preventing your web pages from ranking well and obtaining organic traffic from Google, check out our article here on the most common reasons why you’re missing out, but the Ahrefs study highlights two main factors that stand out from all the rest as highly possible.
Backlinks
SEO’s don’t just say it for the sake of it, backlinks really do count – and here’s the proof.
55.24% of the 1 billion web pages analysed had 0 backlinks, and a further 29.79% only had between 1 and 3 backlinks. But surely this could be a coincidence? Not a chance! Here’s more proof that the number of backlinks pointing to your webpages really does impact your search traffic:
There is also evidence that shows the more backlinks your website has, the higher the number of keywords your website will rank for:
Link building is one of four cornerstones of a successful SEO strategy, read our full article here.
Off Topic
In some instances you will see that websites have an impressive profile of backlinks but still not receive any organic traffic from Google. Via their analysis, Ahrefs concluded that this was due to the following 2 trends:
- They were using black hat link building techniques
- They were writing about a topic no one cares about
It should be no surprise to anyone that if you’re writing about a topic that people aren’t searching for, you aren’t going to get any search traffic as your content isn’t relevant to any search queries.
Read the full report here.