Combining SEO Data to Make Better Marketing Decisions – Whiteboard Friday

So let's prioritize first because this is a big deal.

church robes

First of all, we are going to remove things in Canonical. Let's say there are some canonical issues with our website. Let's say we run a large e-commerce site and we're having some canonical issues on our category pages, our product pages.

How do we prioritize how they should be addressed? We can collect them as individual tickets. We certainly shouldn't raise them all at once.

How do we divide them? The easiest answer to many technical traffic problems is to combine it with your traffic data. For example, by joining in the organic sessions or conversion data you get from analytics, you can immediately add value to these. You can't necessarily judge how likely Google is to fix your canonical, but because you don't know that, weighting those pages and templates based on the amount of traffic they receive is a good way to get some priority data into the tickets. Would be a very good way. What you are making.

So this is the first one. We connect our tech thing, and we connect it to some source of traffic to get some priority.

Choosing Your Content

The second one is probably the one that people are most common with, is that when you're sitting there, and you're writing content, you have to choose what content you're going to work on next, and often which The way we do this is that we connect to third-party metrics. We go and connect, and we get things like search volume, and we get things like difficulty that you'll find in Moz. These are the kinds of things you're going to bring here, and it will help you prioritize.

But you can also draw other parts while you are sitting there and passing by. You can rank very easily, for example, you can see how featured snippets look; What the search features appear on those particular keywords looks like, and can change your preferences for what you're looking for.

You can use AdWords, and this, again, will give you a more different feel, essentially, if your business is spending a large amount of money on a keyword, it's more likely for you to write some content for it. There may be a possibility.

technical problems

Moving on to the third example, let's say you have another technical issue. This time, we've got a dropdown on our website, a language dropdown, and we're pretty sure from crawling the website that it's creating an infinite loop screen with an infinite number of pages.

But how important is it? Obviously, an infinite number of pages looks pretty bad, and we'd definitely slap it a big old A in a technical audit.

But if we connect to another piece of data, for example, logs, we can see what Google is actually doing. And at that point, we may realize that yes, this is an immediate problem. Google has already found and crawled many of these pages and is currently crawling them too.

Or we might simply find out that no, in fact, it hasn't actually visited any of them, and that's a problem, but maybe it's not a problem we have to solve right now. We've got a little window. It doesn't need to go into this sprint or the next instant.

As you can see, all these things change order as we add these other data sources.

deleting pages

Let's move quickly through some others here. So, let's say we're deleting pages from our website. We are trying to determine which pages should be removed.

Again, we tie back in with analytics, but for example, we don't just pull organic sessions, because if you're trying to decide which pages to remove, when it comes to stripping and thinning If so, it is a type of loaded bit. a website. Deleting may mean no index. This could mean 404. This may mean a redirect to another page.

How you should or shouldn't treat those things matters partly for organic traffic, but also matters for all traffic. I've seen people say, “Yes, this page should be 404'ed because there is no organic session.” It doesn't get any organic sessions, but the email team keeps sending traffic to it, so they shouldn't be 404ing it at all. It should not be an index or equivalent.

By joining together a number of different metrics that you're going to get from one source, it will again give you some information about the priority of it and how quickly you should do it.

Ranking fluctuations

Take the one in the middle. The great thing that you get with Google Search Console is that you get all your keywords. The great thing you get with Rank is that you get a much richer SERP model than you get from just Search Console, which gives us a very short SERP model.

However, you have to pay for rank data, and you don't have to pay for Search Console data. This generally means that most people track a subset of their ranks, and they track, they have all of their keyword data or as much as the search engine will give you in the search console.

This is when you're trying to look at things, maybe you're looking in your search console, and you're like, “Okay, great, I know we lost traffic, but I Don't quite know why, and I'm struggling to figure out how the rank is being put into the search console.”

If we're involved here with our rank tracking data, we'll immediately get all the information we need about a SERP feature, for example, that's coming up. And because they're all naturally integrated into Rank and Search Console, it's a joy to combine your rank tracking data with your Search Console data.

And you won't track them all, but you will track a representative sample. And you can say, “Okay, maybe this entire segment of product has gone down, but we can see at least 100 examples of them.” This is because Google changed the product snippet layout as it recently did in the US, and this has caused this second occurrence.

paid vs organic

On our last example here, connecting your AdWords with Search Console can also be very valuable, and connecting your AdWords and your Search Console and your rank, these are all things that go on in the keyword world, but they give you different- Separate bits give data.

So again, your rank gives us that rich SERP data, and we can get much better things and things that we can use to better model the click-through rate. We can get the rank, but we can also get the pixel height.

And then we've got AdWords, which tells us how much our business is spending. At a really basic level, we can just say, “Okay, great, we don't rank very well for this keyword, but we're spending a lot of money on it. So let's refocus our effort.” Focus. Let's sit down and connect with the team and try to figure out how we can grow those keywords.” Again, this is changing our priority.

But we can do much more than this. Once we have all that data, we can start transforming it in other ways. We can say, “Okay, great, we've got the AdWords data and we've got our Search Console data. We can find differences where we're performing very well organically.” But maybe we're still spending a lot of AdWords money and say, “Okay, can we reduce the amount of ads we put there and instead spend that ad money elsewhere on other keywords? Where we don't organically rank as well, because we'll likely select more of that than other keywords?”

So this is a priority.