Non-linearity (numerical data that does not graph as a straight line or “curvy” data) shows up repeatedly in SEO, Internet Marketing, and Business in general. If you would like to understand these things on a deeper level, then watch the below video.
You don’t need any math skills already to get meaning out of it!
Related Posts:
Approximate Transcript of the video above:
Hi, David Hood here. The Dallas SEO Geek, and this video is about the exponential and search engine optimization. What is the exponential? I’m referring to exponential distributions of numbers, a lot of times data and information or trends in terms of what people are doing or really anything numerical at all that involves a distribution of data points. Actually, most things in the world are curved lines like this. Now, it might have a bump up here and then resume its exponential curve, and then, with a bump. Sometimes they’re bumpy like that. In general, things are not going in a straight line, although over very short periods, they can appear to go as a straight line. This is what is so deceptive and why many people kind of assume distributions are straight lines.
An example of this is the stock market. If you look at the value of the stock market in 1984, let’s say I guess that’s about 40 years ago versus today. You’d think, “Wow, they just were doing nothing, just complete slackers.” If you use this as sort of an overall development and increase in value and productivity in the United States, you’d think, “What were they doing here? It seems like they were doing nothing.” But, if you were to go back to 1984 and look at this graph over the same time period, but back also beyond, it’s going to look pretty much exactly like this. Not exactly, you can see there’s bumps and it’s not consistent, but in general what you’ve got is, you’ve got exponential growth.
That’s essentially what happens. At some point, the development in the future will dwarf dramatically what we’re capable of now. The rate of increase at which we are doving our society in terms of technologically is increasing as well. So, what does this have to do with SEO? I think I’ve diverted for long enough. It’s important for understanding our world in general, but it’s definitely very important for SEO. The first thing is click through rate. Essentially, if you look at the number one position, they get 37% of the clicks, on average. It can vary quite a bit. Number two, 17%. This is an exponential drop, it’s not an exponential increase, so you notice that by the time we get to number five, it’s ten times less than number one. Ten times. The value of being number for a search versus being number five is ten times more. It’s actually higher than that, but at least numerically with the amount of visitors, if this gets searched 100 times a month, if this is a search phrase and you’re number one, you’re going to get about 37 visitors to your site. If you’re number five, you’re going to get about three to four visitors per month for that search phrase to your site. This is an example of an exponential distribution.
This is important to understand why, like if someones like, “Hey, I want to get you your first page.” It’s maybe for a low competition search phrase, being at the bottom of the first page of something that doesn’t get searched a whole lot, isn’t really probably going to make a big difference in terms of your traffic. It could. It depends on a lot of factors, and it depends on how valuable that is. But, it’s important to understand that really when I see bottom of the first page, I see that as an opportunity to make it to the top. It’s better than being on page ten or nowhere at all, but it’s definitely not the goal of any SEO project. We want high rankings for highly competitive things. Now, if something gets searched a lot, then being on the bottom of the first page is going to make a big difference if it’s a really important search phrase. It could even drive a lot of traffic.
Traffic growth – here is an example of a highly competitive niche. You can see that the total traffic cost varied a bit on this organic traffic. This is straight out of Sam Rush. You can see right here, it’s so low that it looks like it’s zero. It’s not actually zero, but it looks like it’s zero. They’re getting exponentially more. It’s orders of magnitude more. That’s a way of saying essentially when you add a zero to a number, that you’re adding an order of magnitude. It’s orders of magnitude higher. That’s an example of exponential growth. Obviously, they were penalized here, but I think if you were to look at this growth right here, this is maybe a more normal, an average growth that you would expect for a site, but over a longer period of time. That looks like it was about a year.
The growth of your traffic …I try to explain to people as we build the digital asset that is their website, through SEO, that when we start seeing rankings, that’s a great sign, but it doesn’t mean that, “Oh, okay, well this is going to be a little bit more than this, but it can’t be that much more.” No, it could be ten times, it could be 100 times, it could be 1000 times more, the traffic that you’re getting now or the traffic you had initially. But, if we go from nothing to a little bit of traffic or to some pretty good rankings that aren’t driving a lot of traffic, but that are better, that’s a really great sign because it snowballs. We go from someone who has no traffic to start, no organic traffic. You got to start somewhere and it’s going to start with a few visitors. Then, you take care of those visitors and you do some other stuff, and it grows.
It usually doesn’t grow overnight as you can see, and Google has slowed this down as well. It’s pretty hard to take something from the competitiveness of this niche that this is in. This is a lawyer’s site and do that really quickly. It still can be done. It depends on how aggressive you want to be. The quality of the link, this is really important. One link can be far more powerful than tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of links. A hundred thousand links could actually be bad for you, but even if we take that out of the equation, the quality of the link, I mean if you think about it, if I got a link from the homepage of Google saying, “SEO consultant,” that would rank me pretty stinking well for SEO consultant, right?
But, as opposed to sending 10,000 links to these crappy sites that are in China and Russia. There’s automated content. There’s tons of other links. It’s just a really low quality site and there’s not actually any real traffic, etc., etc. Then, it doesn’t matter how many of those you can send, you’re never going to make up for the Dallas SEO consultant, but even if you could, it would be very, very hard. You would have to have just tons and tons and tons, I don’t even know how many of those links. Again, it’s still not true, because those would hurt you, the mass links would hurt you, but even if they didn’t. I’m repeating myself a little bit.
All right. Authority of a website – as you build your off page, and maybe even some on page authority, and just overall authority, that’s just the best term I can come up with for Google, how they look at you and how powerful you are. How much space they think you should take up, how much gravity your site has, for lack of a better term, in terms of attracting people. Like a brand new site is going to have basically no authority, maybe it’s one in domain authority, in terms of [Mauss’ 00:07:30] metric domain authority, one. How much more powerful is YouTube or Google.com than your domain authority one site. Well, it’s just, it’s an astronomical number. Even if you get ten times more authority, that’s still going to be pretty low authority. You need way more.
At each step, at each order of magnitude of increase in overall authority of your brand and your site and all that, it’s going to increase exponentially, your results. You need, for each next step, you need a lot more than it took for you to get on all the previous steps. Let’s say going from domain authority 30 to domain authority 40, that’s more domain authority juice overall to go from 30 to 40 than to go from zero or one to 30, by a lot. Not just by a little, but by a lot. It’s a lot more.
Okay, I think I’ve geeked out long enough. Thanks for staying with me. I appreciate you watching this. Let me know if you have any questions. This is a little bit of a, I’m kind of a math nerd a little bit, so, this is a little bit of a passion of mine. If you would like for me to do a free analysis for your website, look at some of the exponential math that is involved in your specific situation, go to my website, fill out the discovery form, and you will get a free analysis. Thank you for watching. Have a great day. Bye.
