What is the SEO value of my blog?

We received a question from a reader that I thought was worth answering in a dedicated post: “What is the SEO value of my blog?”

It’s not surprising that this question comes up — as a blogger, there are several reasons to think about SEO. My guess is that there are two main reasons behind the question: either you want to improve your visibility or someone working with outreach has contacted the blogger.

There is no fixed SEO value

The fundamental problem here is that there isn’t a fixed value to find out. In Google’s early days, you could maybe say that PageRank was the SEO value, but that’s hardly true anymore and it’s also no longer possible to find out. There are attempts to mimic PageRank in the form of Moz’s Domain and Page Authority or Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow, but these are neither very accurate nor well-functioning in Sweden. They only describe link strength.

The most common way to make an assessment might be to look at Majestic’s Trust Flow combined with how much (and how good) content there is, and how old the blog is. Another way is to assess it within a vertical rather than for the whole blog — how well does it rank for keywords in that vertical?

The third model, which I find the most honest, is simply to measure traffic from search engines. A blog that drives a lot of search traffic, especially on important keywords, should be considered to have greater SEO value.

I prefer to focus on relevance

Relevance is becoming more and more important from my perspective. Our goal is always that a link should be something a person can see and feel that it fits well. Of course, this is difficult for search engines to judge, but it’s a good guideline since we all know that Google is moving in that direction.

So if this is about outreach and deciding whether to link to a service or product, I would ask myself: does this product fit my readers? Is it interesting? Is it something I would otherwise write about? If it’s advertising and you’re trying to get the best possible payment, then use your traffic as an argument.

If the goal instead is to grow your audience, I don’t think you should get stuck on numbers (unless it’s visitor stats in Google Analytics — then it’s okay to focus on that). Instead, start learning SEO. You don’t have to become a pro, but you can do quite a bit yourself. A good place to start is our SEO school.