A study conducted by Perficient Digital, which looks into the structure of blog posts, has found that the majority of blogs are making a vital mistake that could have an impact on the whole website’s rankings.
Perficient Digital found that the issue is to do with link depth. This is the number of clicks that it takes to reach content after landing on the website’s homepage. What Perficient Digital concluded is that more than two-thirds of analysed blog posts had an average link depth higher than five clicks.
Content that is more than five clicks away from the website’s homepage is not likely to rank well within the search engines unless the page has a link profile containing numerous links providing a direct route to that content.
Furthermore, from the sample of 100 posts analysed by the American digital consultancy, a total of 31.5% were found to be a minimum of 21 clicks away from their homepages, with 9.5% being more that 50 clicks away. Within the sample, some posts were found to be over 1,000 clicks away from the homepage, which is not ideal at all.
Another insight from the study found that the vast majority of posts were found to be evergreen in nature (92%). This is content that always remains relevant, in comparison to temporal content, which is time sensitive.
The full results of Perficient Digital’s study can be seen here.
The main lesson to be taught here is that in order for your website to be found in the search engines, not only does the content need to be well-written and relevant to what you do, it must also be located in a place where users can easily get to it. No-one is going to click 1,000 times to read a blog post – most would leave the site significantly earlier than this.
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