In today’s digital landscape, data is king. As marketers and SEOs, we have access to a wealth of data from various sources, including website analytics, search console data, rank tracking tools, and more. However, often these data sources exist in silos, making it challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of our online presence and performance.
In this insightful Whiteboard Friday video from Moz, Dominic from Piped Out delves into the importance of combining your SEO data for smarter decision-making. He discusses how joining different data sources can change the priority of your tasks, reveal new insights through combined metrics, and ultimately lead to more informed and effective marketing strategies.
The video covers six hypothetical problems and demonstrates how each of them becomes easier to tackle when you integrate data from multiple sources. Here is what the video covers:
1. Prioritizing Canonicalization Fixes: When addressing canonicalization issues on a large website, data on organic traffic and conversions from analytics can help prioritize which pages to fix first.
2. Content Selection: When choosing new content to create, combining SEO metrics like search volume and difficulty (from Moz) with traffic data and ranking information can guide your decision.
3. Assessing Technical Issues: Crawling data can reveal technical problems like infinite loops caused by dropdowns. However, logs can show if Google actually crawls these problematic pages, helping determine how urgent the fix is.
4. Deciding on Page Removal: When removing pages, data from analytics (organic sessions, all traffic) helps decide the appropriate action (noindex, 404, redirect).
5. Understanding Ranking Fluctuations: Combining Search Console data (limited SERP information) with rank tracking data (richer SERP details) can provide a clearer picture of ranking fluctuations and their causes (e.g., Google SERP layout changes).
6. Optimizing Paid Search (PPC) vs. Organic Search: Combining AdWords data with Search Console and rank tracking data can reveal opportunities to optimize PPC campaigns based on organic ranking performance.
Dominic also offers valuable insights into the “how” of combining data, exploring various methods ranging from using Excel and VLOOKUPs to leveraging data warehouses like BigQuery. He weighs the pros and cons of each approach, helping you determine the best fit for your needs and resources.
Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or just starting to explore the world of data-driven marketing, this Whiteboard Friday video is a must-watch. It will inspire you to break down data silos and unlock the true potential of your SEO efforts by making smarter, more informed decisions.