How to empower your SEO and digital marketing strategy with data

After your , content and outreach strategies are in place, you should be well on your way to digital marketing success. 

At this stage, you should have optimized your website for a strong page experience, created lots of entity-driven content, and gained inbound links providing you with rankings and traffic.

Now, you’ll need to empower your team with the right data to help you continue to grow and shape your digital marketing strategy.

Setting up your dashboards

Fortunately, a myriad of tools can help organize the data you need to keep your traffic growing.

Here are some data points you can look at:

• Overall KPIs: Are your site’s sessions, impressions, clicks and conversions trending up or down?
• Keywords ranking: How many keywords are ranking in the top 1-3, 4-10, 11-20, or in the top 100 of Google? What keywords are gaining or losing traction? What is the estimated traffic cost of these keywords? What keywords are seeing the most volume and conversions?
• Pages trending up/down: What pages have a high volume of traffic? What pages are losing traffic? These pages can be optimized and expanded to add more optimized content and internal links.
• Striking distance keywords: What keywords are in the top 20?Once you identify these, consider adding internal and external links to those pages and perform on-page SEO to push those keywords higher in the SERPs.
• Content optimizations: What content can you add to pages trending up or down?Type the target keyword for the page, and use questions from Google’s People Also Ask box to enhance your content.
• Audience demographics: Google Analytics includes a plethora of audience reports, including age, gender, interests, geographical targeting, devices and more. Use this data to build your persona profiles and target keywords for each persona and buying stage.
• Attribution: This reflects the buyer’s journey. Understanding where consumers come from, what pages they visit, and where they go after leaving your site can help you improve the user experience.

Optimization experiments

It’s important to look at your data and develop actionable plans based on your findings.

Some ways to use your data:

• Optimize articles trending down by doing better on-page SEO or adding more semantically related content.
• Build internal and external links to pages and/or keywords that are trending up or down.
• Write more content for a specific target persona and buying stage.
• Focus your efforts on channels and partnerships that are yielding traffic and referrals.

Every time you update a page, create new content or add links, you should create an annotation to determine if the changes made resulted in positive growth.   

If you continue producing content and building links without checking your analytics and data, you may waste valuable time and resources.

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