How Data Science Can Change the SEO We Are Aware Of

The gap between SEO and Data Science is closing in with every passing day. Though data science; more specifically artificial intelligence isn’t a naive concept it’s catching up with the trend over the past few years. 

Data science is a mixture of big data and artificial intelligence for analyzing and processing data, it is known as datasets. The buzzing term “Data Science” is an amalgamation of several tools, algorithms, and machine learning regulations used to find the hidden patterns of the raw data.

Data science is not a naive concept in SEO; back in 2011, Google introduced Google Brain which was a team working towards transforming Google’s products with artificial intelligence, to upgrade them faster, smarter, and much more useful. 

95% of the total searches on the internet are on Google, as the main search engine. Understandably; the internet giant has invested loads into new technologies for improving their service quality. Google Brain rolled out RankBain in the year 2015; which is a game-changer algorithm for enhancing Google search results, enabling better quality results. 

Of the total searches; there are around 15% of keywords that have never featured on the Google search bar before; RankBrain allows Google to automatically have a better understanding of the keywords that are searched with and present the most relevant search result page.

Let’s dive in and introspect top tips from the industry on how to use Data Science righteously to achieve SEO targets. 

These tips can be discovered as answers to some essential questions regarding the mixed process of data science in SEO. The Q&A format will provide a better understanding as it will provide greater relatability and make the execution simpler.

Which are the most useful analytics tools that can be used for making SEO more quantifiable and predictable?

First things first; decide on the source through which you will be getting data. Here are a few popular marketing analytics tools that the world uses to make its SEO more predictable and quantifiable.

BigQuery: Companies processing large datasets use this big data analytics platform. It runs on Google Cloud Storage Infrastructure.

Excel: Indeed, Excel isn’t everyone’s favorite; yet it retains the position as the easiest and fastest way to manipulate a large amount of data that can be used for further process.

Tableau: It is an interactive data visualization software enabling the user to transform data into an interesting interactive visualization.

Google Analytics: It is probably the most popular tool used to measure SEO success globally.  

Google Search Console: It is a FREE SERVICE that helps the user supervise and maintain the website’s presence on the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It logically explains the rules and regulations of how a search works on Google and how the search engine platform sees the website.

The above-mentioned services help with useful information on what currently is working or not working for your SEO campaign. These services are hugely used and have massive contributions to successful SEO campaigns across the globe. 

Google Keyword Planner: This  Google’s keyword tool has a whole new lot of features assisting users to identify a particular keyword’s high or low popularity, filter low-volume searches, and effortlessly create multiple keyword combinations.

Keywordtool.io: Keyword Tool is an excellent alternative to Google Keyword Planner. With a FREE version of this tool, you can generate up to 750 long-tail keyword suggestions for a single search term.

Screaming Frog: The SEO Spider Tool from Screaming Frog is used by SEO agencies and individual consultants worldwide. The tool will crawl a website, you want to scrutinize the common URLs and identify any existing issues. 

Social Media Analytics: With the rising significance of social media, companies around the world can’t afford to lose the opportunities and avail the advantages the social media platforms provide. Analysis of gathered data from the social media platforms helps in the right decision-making for businesses.

How can you align Data Science with SEO along with all your Marketing activities? 

Keeping best SEO practices in tandem with other marketing channels for better mileage against marketing activities is a prime goal for any internet marketer, today. It is important to take a few cautious steps to accomplish this challenging task. 

It is important to know the dependent and independent variables of SEO, where each focuses on predicting the outcome, also known as an outcome and predictor variables. 

The dependent variables rely on other factors of the independent variables. Any change in any one variable of the independent variable changes the whole math. The variabilities of the answers which have been asked to the audience will take you to the right answers. 

According to the business lingo, a variable is an event, a valued proposition, or something else that a company can measure its performance on. Studying and mastering the art of the interplay between these two variables to measure their effectiveness is one of the important marketing strategies. Using these two variables and keeping a tight watch on them can help your company optimize the marketing impact. 

Many marketers suggest the usage of data to measure your website’s usability. You can also check your website’s navigation to enhance it (if need be). A good user experience means an increased number of visitors browsing your website and are likely to spend more time on it. 

You can create better, more effective marketing campaigns in the future by realizing your goals and understanding your audience better. Your business will witness the best upward curve while your marketing campaigns will be based on the audience needs.  

Today, it is inevitable that you are well-versed with the ways you use data analytics. Honestly, if you don’t and are facing problems with it? Then it’s a grave situation; next to impossible to achieve success.

Your audience will interact with your brand in many ways. There are several important metrics you should keep track of like social interactions, mentions, sentiments, and reviews. 

These interactions are essential to building the relationship between the customer and your company.

• The trend graphs will be helpful to discover the points where the improvement is needed along with the preferences of buyers and exit traps.
• Make a record of the best sources of traffic and identifying the traffic gives more engagement through comparing data.
• Enable track on all the parameters and record the data in a specific sheet.
• Eradicate the obstacles to increase CTRs/conversions.
• Specify the ‘actual’ and ‘targeted’ audience and mold them in a way they will have the potentiality.
• Demonstrate the reports of other channels performance along with SEO – attributed results and multi-channel funnel reports.
• Compare the ROI gained from SEO – goal acquisition based on SERP results from paid search with comparison to organic traffic.
• Select the low-conversion pages but rank well and start optimizing them to get a decent amount of traffic.

Gauging data and interpreting it correctly is the parameter of success. Make yourself able enough to use data science appropriately through regular trials and experiments. This will lead to improvements to your website which will eventually satisfy your audience’s needs and wants.

What problems could be a matter of bothering while performing server log analysis?

Logfile interpretation is the prime method of rectifying the technical problems and onpage problems for SEO. It provides you the liberty to improve your SEO performance. Your log files help you to understand the crawler behavior of the search engine for your website. It records every tiny information such as the record of each visit to your website and much more information regarding, crawlers interaction with your site It becomes more useful now for the admin to take the crucial action for a better SEO result.

But, you have to make it a routine to check the log files on a regular basis to avoid any inconvenience such as bugs and hackers attack. It will become more difficult to retrieve and regain the former position once it’s been hacked. Remember precaution is prevention.

There are several issues that SEO specialists should pay attention to when they perform log analysis. It helps to identify the website’s architecture or internal link structure; the site map of the very website is also necessary. For the content part, they need to be very cautious about duplicate, low-quality, or irrelevant content; this affects your site’s performance.

There are some URLs that don’t get crawled often by the crawlers. You can know this by analyzing the log files regularly. You can know about the crawling behavior by continuously checking the log files. You would be amazed to know Google isn’t crawling some very important pages as well. The log will help you to know the source of those URLs and directories which are getting the most and the least attention from the search engine.

Sometimes it can be the command issue the admin might be given to the crawlers. The admin sometimes knowingly or unknowingly enables no index on the page. Please do check regularly on this command, you might lose potential traffic if some of the pages are not getting indexed.

It has been noticed that Internet users are becoming more impatient. You should get a higher bounce rate. If the page loading time is a little higher. A short page loading time is a vital part of the user experience for your website. Moreover, people are expecting every document to be indexed as mobile handset-friendly. Google has set its parameter as Mobile-first indexing otherwise you can lose your chance in good rankings.

One of the surveys suggests  47 percent of visitors expect a webpage should be loaded in two seconds or less.

Server log analysis is still to be added in the strategic process. People are considering server log as the error demonstrating tool only. But, it is a needy part of your strategy making. The specific crawling budget must be allocated to the server log analysis and strategies, otherwise, it will be going wasted.

Brief pointers on server log potentials what helps in data analysis

• Page load time checking, indexing, bounce rate, responsive pages, response errors, and redirects.
• It makes you know what are the mis-opportunities and where the crawl budget is being wasted.
• Crawler behaviors such as what to index, what not to index, and duplicate crawling or indexing pages.
• The traffic movement reports for unusual traffic.
• Whether your redirect pages are working and which page needs a redirect page.

A big part of your development depends on the crawling behavior and  Server log analysis makes it possible for you. Look for problems while performing log analysis to eliminate crawling issues that might be weakening your SEO efforts.

Is your Big Data Analysis accurate? If that is so, then how can your SEO specialist get it right?

Data gathering helps the enterprises to reach the target goals in the market. It is necessary the data gathered must be accurate, otherwise, you may experience a downfall. The analytics could help you in this.  Companies must pay attention to the accuracy of their analytics. Because the derived data insights from accurate analytics can help you to achieve the desired goal. 

Accurate Big data analysis should be the prime gain for SEO specialists.

• One of the biggest challenges for SEO specialists is data synchronization. Many of the tools provide vast amounts of data. 

• It becomes difficult to analyze the appropriate data result when any problem takes place. It creates confusion while listing out the specific solution for a specific problem from the vast amount of data gathered.

• The SEO specialists must learn how to synchronize the data in a way that helps to answer for a specific answer if encountered.
• They have to learn how to differentiate the identical data of different issues. They should synchronize the data according to the question. This method will help more.

If you have more than one source, then it is easier to have more accurate results. It isn’t recommended to rely on the data collected from one source, it is important to understand the data and adjust the requirement accordingly to forecast the market. 

It is important to find out the right tools to help you in a more effective manner to know Big data. Collect the data from various tools to validate the actual data and please add your Adwords data too. to make it more accurate.

• Using the right tool is always a challenge. The analytical results from several tools are different. In that case, you can use two or three different tools for a specific analytic. And can consider the common data, derived from these tools.
• The accurate data is the right gain for the analytics. The right analytic direct you for the action to be taken and the action is the metric for the KPIs.
• Every aspect is interlinked and directly proportional to each other.
• Ultimately KPI considers the conversions and customer loyalty. Hence actionable data gathering is the result decider.

Data is only the numbers that are obtained through constant efforts. The numbers specify the story of what situation makes this number to be obtained. In this way, every number has its own story. You must be aware to present the story behind the numbers. Just like football, a goal is the end result from the constant efforts from different players passing it towards the goal post. And that one goal is a number that can make you win the match. Hence it becomes a story.

Good decision-makers only take the reference of numbers to make stories and invest behavior to make the campaign successful.

Discovering the real analytics, paying attention to the stories behind the numbers, selecting the appropriate tool, and trusting in several sources instead of only one will make you successful and help you to minimize the instances where the inaccuracy in data analysis comes.

Brief pointers on big data analysis for effective SEO

• Using multiple tools for the validation of data sources must be applicable.
• Numbers can show the path but stories are the vehicle to achieve the goal never trust just one source. The more sources, the better your results.
• Every tool has its limits, due to which some data get left untracked. Use several tools to overcome these limitations.
• Emphasizing on real analytics which ones related to your KPIs. Ultimately it brings you conversion and customer loyalty. 

Which data should you as a marketer concentrate on to achieve your business goals?

The data analytics process flooded the companies with information and it comes in handy when the business is in a critical situation. But, it has always been a question to know which data to be taken?  

• Customer segmentation allows you to target a specific niche. The niche is a section united by a group of people. The derived data from analytics helps to create better segmentation. 

• Once you are done with segmentation, start targeting. As you have done the segmentation well, you will witness higher conversions and higher profits.

• Acquiring new customers is the task that all marketers focus on. But, they forget customer retention is as necessary as new customer acquisition. 

• You can retain them with good customer service. Not only good customer service will make the retained customer happy but also, the newly acquired customer will be satisfied with you. 

Remind the customer to modify the subscription near its compilation date. Constant reminding and offering some goodies (In case they refuse) to retain them, will work. Some services have no compilation date, but you have to forecast through the customer’s behavior that the customer is likely to end his/her subscription. Forecasting and responding to it can retain the customer.

Keeping the conversion rate alike to the current situation and maximize the behavior of the business. Because conversion rate is equal to profitability. Once it starts declining, the main motto of your business will vanish. Conversion rate is the metric that can measure your business benefits and can predict success in the future. It also helps you to know about the strategy which is not working or will be not working in the future. Of course, analyzing conversion rate only won’t help you alone to upclimb your website’s performance, there are other helpers too in the market.

CLTV- Customer Lifetime Value is a parameter that involves a method of calculating the net profit that a customer will generate for your business over the whole span of their relationship with your company, It also provides many insights to know your business performance and helps in optimizing your marketing budget.

Keeping track of the first-time visitor conversion rates and the conversion rates of the returning customers also helps in the longer run. There are some behavioral patterns that will be noticed when a new customer and a returned customer will interact with your website.

Keep the track of the traffic sources metric, It will help you to know the source of the visitors to your site. Whether it is direct, referral, organic, and paid. Once you get to know how the users are finding your website, you will be able to optimize your marketing budget. Eventually, it will maximize the impact and help to gain more customers.

Conclusion: 

Data Science is a source for the most accurate solutions as compared to unorganized data. This brings in a change and instills logic to our decisions and assists us to discover the right trends within the most successful time frame. 

The entire game revolves around logical answers and decision-making processes. However, having a data depot only works when you know how and when to use it.