Sitechecker Research How Top SEO Companies Optimize Their Websites
Tags: Research, Site Rank, Seo Services, SEO, Communication

How do the top-ranked websites of a particular niche optimize for search engines? We approached this topic diligently through in-depth research. We focused on the SEO niche, which includes SEO blogs, tools, and agencies. In this article about sitechecker research for SEO we’ll see how top companies optimize their websites.

Are you wondering why we chose this particular category? The answer is simple: we wanted to know how the experts that teach us how to do SEO tailor strategies for their own websites.

Methodology of Research Sitechecker For SEO

We used keywords like SEO blog, SEO agency, and SEO tips to rank the top 100 websites with Ahrefs. Then, we used Sitechecker to monitor them.

We excluded our own site, as well as a few top-ranked websites that have many more pages than average (Seositecheckup, Seobility, Woorank, Semrush, and Moz).

There are many perfect guides, studies, instructions, and forecasts on SEO blogs. However, we didn’t include them in case they didn’t rank by the keywords mentioned earlier. Our goal was to make the sample very specific, so it would lead to definite results. We intend to extend the research to the top-ranked 1000 websites in the future.

From August 1 to August 30, we used our Site Monitoring tool to track the changes on the 100 SEO websites from our sample. We observed the changes in content and meta tags that occur. The research also focused on fluctuations in their website score within a period of one month. So, there was a great volume of raw data to work with. We built this infographic after conducting a thorough analysis.

To understand the infographic better, we recommend you to go through this legend first: How to read this infographic

Top SEO Websites by Website Score, Traffic, and Page Efficiency

Let’s start with the most relevant measurements and interesting facts from our research. All graphs from this section contain data from measurements taken on August 30.

Traffic and Website Score Sitechecker Research SEO

Ranked by Traffic: The top 10 sites have average monthly traffic of 635K visitors and an average Website Score of 81 points. Ranked by Website Score: The top 10 sites have average monthly traffic of 15K visitors and an average Website Score of 94 points.

Domain Age and Website Score Sitechecker Research SEO

Ranked by Domain Age: The top 10 sites have an average domain age of 23 years and an average Website Score of 83 points. Ranked by Website Score: The top 10 sites have an average domain age of 8 years and an average Website Score of 94 points.

Linked Domains and Website Score

Ranked by Linked Domains: The top 10 websites have 42K linked domains on average and an average Website Score of 81 points. Moreover, ranked by Website Score: The top 10 websites have 2K linked domains on average and a median Website Score of 94 points.

Page Efficiency and Website Score

Ranked by Page Efficiency: The top 10 sites have average page efficiency of 474 monthly visitors per page and an average Website Score of 74 points. In addition, ranked by Website Score: The top 10 sites have an average page efficiency of 58 monthly visitors per page and an average Website Score of 94 points.

Number of Pages in Google Index and Website Score

Ranked by Number of Pages in Google Index: The top 10 websites have 7500 pages in Google index on average and an average Website Score of 77 points. In addition, ranked by Website Score: The top 10 websites have 345 pages in Google index on average and an average Website Score of 94 points.

Number of Pages in Google Index and Page Efficiency

Ranked by Number of Pages in Google Index: The top 10 sites by Number of Pages in Google Index have 7500 pages in Google index on average and 8 monthly visitors per page on average. Moreover, ranked by Page Efficiency: The top 10 sites have 257 pages in Google index on average and 474 monthly visitors per page on average.

Frequency of Content Updates on Top SEO Websites

Let’s see what the dynamic metrics tell us.

Website Score Distribution Sitechecker Research SEO

Firstly, 10% of the top-ranked SEO sites have a Website Score of 90–100

Secondly, 76% of the top-ranked SEO sites have a Website Score of 50–90

11% of the top-ranked SEO sites have a Website Score of 30–50

Finally, 3% of the top-ranked SEO sites have a Website Score below 30

Throughout August 2020, the Website Score decreased to 26% of the analyzed websites. So, it increased by 14% of them, and it remained the same for 60% of the websites.

Past Website Score and ∆ Website Score

Ranked by Increased Website Score: The top 10 websites had an average improvement of 19 points. In addition, Ranked by Decreased Website Score: The top 10 websites had an average decline of 11 points.

Domain Age and Number of Total New Pages

Firstly, by Total New Pages: The top 10 sites had 823 new pages on average and an average domain age of 15 years.

Secondly, by Domain Age: The top 10 sites had 33 new pages on average and an average domain age of 23 years.

Number of Total New Pages and ∆ Google Index

Top 20 SEO Sites by Positive and Negative ∆ Google Index

Top 20 SEO Sites by Positive and Negative ∆ Traffic

Sites by Broken Pages

Top 20 SEO Sites by Changed Description and Title Tags

Finally, the top 20 SEO Sites by Changed H1 Tags and Content

Highlighted Changes that Top SEO Websites Made in One Month

New Pages Added

Several of the top-ranked websites added important pages: One-Click SEO Agency added a page with info on its SEO services: real estate SEO expert.

HighMark SEO Agency added tag pages and images. These additions have no value since some of them lead to incorrect destinations. Firstly, page Sage SEO Agency added a page about a new service: Industrial IOT SEO Services.

Detailed had issues with new links to incorrect pages as well. Cleveland SEO added a few new pages of content, but some of them have duplicate content.

Brian Dean added templates in different formats in a new section: Digital Templates Library. He made the same addition to his Marketing Hub project a year ago. Obviously, it turned out successful.

Brian’s SEO Marketing Hub project is also growing. So, through our research, we detected a problem with a link referring to a non-existent page. The issue is with the URL’s format.

New review pages appeared in Adam Enfroy’s project. The links use high-volume keywords, such as best web design software, WordPress, and coding. He also added a list of affiliate links.

Deleted Pages Sitechecker Research SEO

Matt Diggity has been actively deleting pages from his blog, as a way to make room for better content on similar topics.

Changes in H1 and Title Tags

Nathan Gotch made a change in the title tag on one of his pages. Our guess is that Google Search Console showed that the target audience was asking for course start dates. Moreover, the title now includes that info.

Brian Dean changed typos in a few H1 tags. In addition, Adam Enfroy also changed titles to make them more relevant.

Content Changes

We noticed a few post description changes on Brian Dean’s blog throughout the month.

Changing robots.txt

WordPress automatically generates robots.txt archive pages. Matt Diggity disallowed them.

Sitechecker Research SEO Overview

These were not the only changes that website owners made, but we highlighted them as the most important ones in our findings. Interesting fact: only 9% of the sites didn’t make any changes throughout the month of August.

These are the conclusions that sum up the research:

Firstly, most of the sites ranked at the top by linked domains, traffic, and domain age have an impressive Website Score

Secondly, newer sites are making more changes, but old ones keep growing as well

Finally, website owners are very focused, but slight SEO mistakes still occur

Here’s the infographic in full. If you find it useful, feel free to share it with anyone who wants to learn more about SEO.