Some Feedback on Displacement Scores
I just got an email from a good friend about the displacement scores we’ve been testing. I hope you all can have similar success using this measurement!
Dave,
Here’s some interesting data I found that might help your research. I googled the following phrases:
you can do this
“you can do this”
Once without quotes, the second time with quotes. When I googled it without quotes, the education.byu.edu/youcandothis page didn’t show in the first 50 results. When I googled it with quotes, we were 5th on the list. I was curious to see the displacement scores for the phrases, so I checked it out:
you can do this - 8,748 (something like that)
“you can do this” - 16
Using your legend, it matches perfectly. You say that for a score of 11-70, “penetrating the top ten will require active link strategies as well as a coherently crafted relevant page.” We haven’t done many linking strategies, but we have done a coherently crafted page…(like all our pages, we’ve made sure that the title, URL, h1 tag, and body text match the keyword). In your analysis of the data, I think our lack of linking strategy is made up by the fact that we are an .edu domain. That gives us the beef to make up for the lack of incoming links.
Anyway, your scores matched the data. An .edu domain with a well-crafted page was able to break the top ten search results for a keyword with a 16 displacement score. It was not able to break the top ten search results for a keyword with an 8000+ displacement score. Just as I would have expected.
Displacement vs. Keyword Competition Model
A reasonable measurement for how difficult a certain keyphrase is to rank in search engines is the “Keyword Effectiveness Index” or the keyword competition model. Simply put, you take the number of searches in a given month for the target keyphrase and divide it by the number of estimated results that appear where the engine says “Showing 1-10 of [5,000,000] websites for [keyphrase]“.
# of searches / total estimated results = KEI
(Some SEOs like to square the number of searches to make for an easier number.)
One of my qualms with this measurement is that it pulls in all the junk web sites out there into it. For instance, one keyphrase may bring up 200 million results and another will pull up 50 million. The KEI for each will be much different, yet when there are that many sites, you’ll inevitably have to optimize your site and actively campaign for it to rank higher. Another reservation I have to making the KEI value a major measurement is the fact that users can’t even go past 1,000 results if they wanted to. Indeed, most users stick to the top ten results, and the vast majority concern themselves with the number one spot, period.
The Displacement Model
How difficult is it to enter the top ten? Now this seems to be a more worthwhile measurement. The Displacement Model is built on the assumption that the top ten is the main target goal for sites outside the main results. To grab a spot in those rankings, one of the current top ten will have to leave, in other words, must be displaced to make room for you.
While Google’s algorithm is built on quality links and page relevance, I felt that comparitive analysis of random samples and the top ten for any given keyphrase would yield some possibilities. After over a thousand data sets obtained from vigorous querying, I pored over the statistics and developed what I can the Displacement Score: a measurement that attempts to explain the difficulty of displacing a site from the top ten.
The Tool
I’ve made the Displacement Score available to all! I recently read that Google has stopped issuing new API keys, so I’ve made mine available for 3 queries a day. I hope you all won’t run on the bank here and deprive me of my alotted 1,000 queries a day, but I don’t use them up, so feel free to use the tool to your heart’s content with your own API keys if you have one.
Honestly, I’ve run this score through as much statistical analysis as I possibly can and now launch it with the hopes that you can give any peer reviews, feedback, and what not. In the end, it ought to help you at least sift through your keywords and identify target markets with effectiveness.
Search Engines, the Answer?
In response to many online marketing constraints, many webmasters favor search engines for these reasons:
- Getting listed usually is free.
- Search engines are almost always the starting point for most users.
- Organic results (results obtained from non-paid sources) are more trusted than paid ads.
- Search engines are major thoroughfares for the bulk of internet activity, and as such, can refer high amounts of traffic.
- Users spend more time on sites referred by search engines.
Yes, search engines are highly effective at producing targeted traffic. And, they are all of those things. No web site can expect moderate or better success without passing through search engines at some point. But the door swings both ways:
- Search engines are not perfectly relevant and are updated frequently without notice to improve relevance, necessitating sometimes drastic changes to web sites to maintain ranking position.
- Search engines often take weeks to months to even list your site. For exceptional results, on average, they require years of consistent modifications.
- Algorithms that determine relevance are highly safeguarded by search engine companies. Thus, no one outside the company knows positively every factor that will improve rank.
- Sites compete over search engines more easily than offline. For most keywords, small businesses are unable to segment themselves away from bigger companies without incurring substantial expenses that they are unable to afford.
Search engines are definitely one answer to improving marketing strategy online, but clearly not the answer.
