When researching tips and tricks for Search Engine Optimization one statement in particular caught my eye: The 80/20 Rule. I have heard about it in my retail management class, consumer behavior class and principles of marketing class, so it must be relevant, right? A concept as simple as 20% of efforts drive 80% of results can be applied to such a wide spectrum of ideas.
Reading further into this principle on Intergrowth’s site, I found that this concept helps emerging brands steer their SEO investments towards the highest-impact opportunities to scale organic traffic and revenue.
-> A business spending $100,000/year on marketing shouldn’t spend the money to implement every SEO best practice. They won’t see the ROI to justify 80% of those efforts.
-> A business spending $1,000,000/year on marketing should implement every SEO best practice.
The Principle Can Be Broken Down Into 4 Elements:
- Indexability Optimization
- High-Impact SEO Positioning
- The Remaining High-Priority Technical SEO Fixes
- Authority
Expanding on the 80/20 rule in SEO, it can also guide content creation and link-building strategies. For example, when analyzing your website’s traffic, you might find that a small number of blog posts or product pages are attracting the majority of visitors. Instead of spreading yourself thin trying to optimize every single page, you can focus on enhancing these top-performing pages—updating content, optimizing keywords, or building more backlinks to increase their authority. Similarly, in link-building, focusing on acquiring links from a few high-authority sites rather than a large number of low-quality ones can significantly boost your site’s domain authority and rankings. The 80/20 rule encourages a smarter, more strategic approach, allowing businesses to make the most of their SEO efforts by focusing on the tasks that truly make a difference.
3 Responses
Interesting information. Its neat that the 80/20 rule can be applied to SEO. I also liked how you made bullet points of key ideas within the blog post–it made it really easy to read.
I really like how you expanded the principle into 4 elements. I think being in depth with your SEO Search and work is absolutely important to cover every base. I also like how you mention enhancing top-performing pages. SEO doesn’t always have to be about starting a website from the ground up, but can also mean making what’s efficient even better
Hi Melody!
This is so interesting! You really did a great job of explaining and diving into this topic when you wrote this post. It’s so interesting how the 80/20 rule applies to SEO as well as other classes I’ve been in as well; and I really enjoyed how you explained it by breaking it down into 4 parts.