Public Policy SEO Rankings

What is this?

This is Tallest Tree's ranking of public policy organizations (think tanks) based on their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) success. The model is inspired by the world of sports analytics, where a team's accomplishments must be considered in light of their resources.

How do you define SEO success?

There are many ways to define success in SEO. For policy organizations on this list, success means traffic to their website. That makes "organic search traffic" (site visitors who find the site by Googling terms, not by clicking ads) a key measure of SEO success.

But having a high number of site visitors isn't necessarily a sign of SEO success. Some sites naturally have built-in advantages in terms of traffic because of other factors like domain authority, backlinks, budget, size of their content library, etc.

To get a more accurate picture of who's doing the most with what they have, we need to account for these advantages. That's where multiple regression comes in.

How does regression work?

Multiple regression is a statistical technique that allows us to create a formula for predicting traffic based on known advantages. We can then compare each organization's actual traffic to its predicted traffic. This gives us a ratio that indicates whether the organization is over-performing or under-performing relative to expectations.

The regression formula is:

Predicted Monthly Organic Traffic = (Domain Rating × 150) + (Backlinks × 0.005) + (Expenses × 0.0000005) + (Indexed Pages × 0.05) + 1000

These coefficients were determined through regression analysis of the dataset and refined to align with industry benchmarks.

What metrics are included in the model?

The model includes these variables as inputs:

• Domain Rating - A measure from 0-100 of the website's authority, calculated by Ahrefs based on the quality and quantity of backlinks.
• Backlinks - The number of links from other websites pointing to the organization's website.
• Expenses - The organization's total expenses, as reported on their Form 990.
• Indexed Pages - The number of keywords the site ranks for (used as a proxy for indexed pages).

What do the rankings mean?

Organizations with a ratio above 1.0 are getting more traffic than expected based on their attributes (over-performing). Organizations with a ratio below 1.0 are getting less traffic than expected (under-performing).

A high ratio suggests that an organization is doing especially well with SEO fundamentals like:

• Creating content that matches search intent
• Optimizing content for relevant keywords
• Structuring content in a way that's visible to search engines
• Building internal links between content
• Growing traffic through compounding content

Data Sources

The SEO data (Domain Rating, Organic Traffic, Backlinks, Keywords) comes from Ahrefs, a leading SEO tool. The expense data comes from each organization's most recent available Form 990 tax filing.

Limitations of the Model

Like any model, this one has limitations:

• It doesn't account for factors like social media success, email list size, or offline impact.
• Traffic estimates from Ahrefs are approximations based on their data.
• Expense data may not perfectly reflect an organization's investment in digital marketing.
• The model doesn't distinguish between traffic quality or conversion rates.

About Tallest Tree

Tallest Tree provides SEO, content analytics, Google Ad Grant management, and website care for publishers, think tanks, and other nonprofits. We created this Public Policy SEO Rankings to provide transparency in the policy organization space and help organizations benchmark their performance.

For more information or to discuss how we can help improve your organization's SEO performance, pleasebook a call with us.