SEO Hero : A Dataviz Gallery

What is the SEO Hero contest ?

It’s a challenge by Wix, a company selling a website editor platform.
They had a pretty bad reputation in terms of Search Engine Optimization, and created this contest hoping to demonstrate they do know SEO.
The goal ? Start from a fresh, new, virgin domain name. Only use so called “white hat” techniques, religiously follow the Google guidelines.
Try to rank for the “SEO Hero” Term.

Mars 15, you outrank Wix ? You may win $50000. Or not. A judge will decide whether or not you used malicious techniques and may exclude you.

Who are the SEO Hero players ?

Mainly SEOs of course. Winning or just performing in such a challenge proves you’re someone, and can’t harm business 🙂
The French SEO community is pretty dynamic on the subject, and they are doing rather well :
As I write this, 3 Frenchies are in the TOP 10 of the SEO Hero challenge.

The choice of some contestants are most surprising : Check SEO Hero by Jessy for instance : whooo !
Edited on Frontpage 1.0 ? So it would seem ! However it ranks 17 in the contest for now. Not so bad, huh ?

Are the players using an seo friendly website structure?

What we wanted to see, is the internal structure of the competitors’s websites.
Are they only counting on off site signals, or do they optimize their internal linking as well ?

Hopefully, we develop a tool that allows just that.
Let’s see what the SEO Heros look like…

No particular order here, just a bunch of random crawls and views of the sites’s architectures.

This website looks pretty much like the Enterprise. Will it reach for the stars ?

A Ninja Seo Hero has more than a tool in it’s backpack… will it be enough ? The second view reveals a pretty compact internal mesh. All the content seems pretty on topic.
It’s a construct that may well concentrate linkjuice.

That’s My SEO Hero ! A WordPress site, we a hierarchy, and the juice that flows within each category.

Homepage first, then important pages, then many small articles : a well planned content and internal structure

Yay, another starship !! Howver, looks like the html sitemap blurs the hierarchy…

Another SEO Hero Star Trek Fan, it would seem 😀

Let’s talk about everything in the SEO World, one letter at a time, shall we ?

Oh my dear, what a deep forum you have !

You think I write too much ? Nether mind, just drop all the juice into that mega-menu of mine, Google will recognize its own (or let’s hope so)
*news below*

Bubble bobble anyone ?

A last one?

About our Tool

This dataviz tool has been developed from scratch. It has gone public on the french market since more than a Year, and processed many websites.
This English version is still in its infancy, but already usable and ready to rock.
Give us a try, you won’t be disappointed.

SEM Eye show you your website like a crawler sees it.
Seen all those pictures above ? Are they all the same ? Hell no !
Each one is specific and reflects the internal hierarchy, structure, and juice flow of it’s internal pages and links.
It’s an invaluable tool to understand, and see, what goes wrong with a site, what block a crawler, what section to improve, and more : show something to your colleagues, boss, client : a concrete base on which discuss and point what needs to be improved.

In this blog post, I only took 2 basic views of some websites. There’s more (and interactive tools, too).

Some news from seoheronews

Updated on March 4.
Dmitriy kindly asked for a dataviz of seoheronews.com
You’re lucky, it was already there in a previous version: It’s the one now taggued “*news below*”.
This crawl was made on February 11. And the viz shows that it evolved quite a bit in less than a month.
All that was visible then was that big mega menu. Now, the result is much more polished, eventhough there are still some structural problems.

Here is the before and after state, side by side :

The menu flattened the hierarchy of the website. Now, its way more balanced, with only a few top pages in the menu, that concentrate the linkjuice.
Then, less important pages. Howver, we can see some pages going deep in the crawl depths. imho, it’s a mistake.
Some pages are way too deep.


Imagine this was your client’s website. You sold him some internal linking optimization, by giving him proof that his website had no real hierarchy. A month later, you come back and show him a neat, optimized version.
He can’t doubt your hard work, he will see the improvement, and can even display the High resolution dataviz in the meeting room !


Next, here is a view that shows the hierarchy from the url point of view (/cat/article is attached to /cat/, even if linked from the home)
You can see a big orange page, on the bottom: it’s the seo glossary, with many children pages. What is more annoying may be on the top right side: a succession of several pages with a larger crawl depth than the rest of the website. Abnormal I would say.


Here is a view of the internal linking with the very same spacialization :

From this view, we can use another algorithm to show the clusters, at macro scale.
It’s a force directed spatialization: the pages tend to repulse themselves, whereas the links attracts the pages. The interlinked pages then tend to stay together and form clusters.
That was before :
And here it is now :

Try it for yourselves!
Create an account on self.sem-eye.com and you’ll be able to crawl and view your websites like you nether did!

More info

Here are the rules of the WIX contest: https://support.wix.com/en/article/wix-seo-hero-contest

Some other articles about this contest, supporting the French competitors

https://www.searchdatalogy.com/blog/seo-hero/
http://www.beetle-seo.com/seo-hero/
http://samuelhounkpe.com/856
http://gain-de-temps.com/betises-de-referencement/seo-hero-french-team
http://www.lereferenceur.fr/blog/seo-hero-fin-concours-wix-approche/
http://www.laurentbourrelly.com/blog/54570.php
http://lavoixdebretagne.fr/2017/02/13/bretagne-soutient-seo-hero-francais/
https://www.jambonbuzz.com/referencement/coup-de-pouce-frenchteam-seohero-2017-02-10
https://www.loichelias.com/seo-hero-quand-le-marketing-tue-le-spirit-forthelulz
http://blog.mediamiu.com/seo-hero-go-frenchies/
http://www.chocokuland.info/index.php/2016/11/22/63-seo-hero-peut-etre-romantique
http://www.djibouteam.fr/seo-hero-concours-wix/