Title: A stepwise audit framework for keyword selection and estimating visibility for low performing websites: a study of cmsdu.org

Authors: Prakrit Saikia; Himadri Barman

Addresses: Centre for Management Studies, Dibrugarh University, India ' Centre for Management Studies, Dibrugarh University, India

Abstract: Search engines like Google scans millions of websites for processing a given query. The results presented to any user are the outcome of a very complex backend mechanism which includes factors like the keyword and historical performance of the website. Therefore, a website with better historical performance can easily outrun a 'low-performance' website while competing for a similar keyword. A website with low rating across audit tools has been considered as 'low-performance' website in this study. Therefore, this study suggests an audit framework; namely the relative competitive indexing framework for keyword selection through systematic website auditing and statistical tests like structural equation modelling. The proposed framework suggests factors like 'keyword frequency' and 'SEO difficulty per keyword' as crucial and which can impact search visibility significantly. It also highlights other search variables which are identified as crucial for website search visibility. The study illustrates the procedure for selecting keywords based on a website's own ability to compete for those keywords and also highlights the minimum required frequency of keywords based on the intensity of competition. This study specifically fills the gap between website competitive strength, keyword competition and required number of frequencies within the metadata of a website.

Keywords: website audit; SERP; search engine optimisation; SEO; core web vitals; keyword research; keyword classification; search engine marketing; website link network.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2023.132870

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2023 Vol.18 No.2, pp.104 - 133

Received: 02 Jul 2022
Received in revised form: 22 Mar 2023
Accepted: 10 Apr 2023
Published online: 13 Aug 2023 *

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