Data-driven SEO is the key to making better business decisions

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How data-driven SEO can help you understand and reach customers to drive your business success

In 2020, Covid-19 led consumers to a mass increase in online activity, and many businesses followed them. As we slowly emerge from the pandemic, it seems that situation is here to stay. But as competition for web traffic intensifies, having the right data on your website, and knowing how to analyse and leverage it, will make all the difference. In a sea of competing information, the question is, where to start?

Why start with SEO?

When it comes to bang for your buck, search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most effective channels for online investment.

SEO is a set of techniques, such as meta tags, backlinks or keywords, that aim to improve the appearance and position of your website in organic search results. Ultimately, SEO practices help establish your area of authority, attract your target audience, and enhance your website’s performance across various search engines.

Let’s say you are a new car buying comparison site. Based on some research and data analysis, you identify that most of your customers are mobile users, and that your competitors’ sites aren’t optimised for mobile search. By choosing to focus on page load speed, which is a factor used by search engines to evaluate websites, your company can distinguish itself from competitors and ultimately enhance mobile crawlability.

As your website ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs), more customers see and click on your listings. In the case of users of Oncrawl’s technical SEO platform, SEO has been the route to successfully address new markets, decrease payback time in marketing spend, and increase qualified leads by nearly 70 per cent.

Developing an SEO strategy

Your SEO strategy is the roadmap to your business standing out in your industry, both in the eyes of search engines and in the eyes of potential customers searching for information, products and services in your sector. Because of this, your SEO strategy must be tailored to your business and your objectives.

When developing your strategy, you need to determine the “why” of your business plan and take into account your site’s objectives over time. Do you intend to build brand awareness, drive traffic to pages with paying clients or advertisers, or create immediate visibility for limited-time offers or news?

An SEO strategy should also be developed with conformity and compliance in mind. With the rapidly changing laws and regulations, particularly those regarding internet privacy, it’s important that your site and your strategy are compliant with data security regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. A good strategy will also build on user-friendliness – the design and layout that affects user perception – and “search engine friendliness” or technical SEO.

Technical SEO is driven by data. Without knowing what already exists on your site, making informed decisions about how to optimise it would be difficult. A tool such as Oncrawl can collect data from crawls, scraping, analytics or other additional sources and aggregate it all on a single platform. Such data gives you the ability to segment pages and consequently compare, isolate or identify those that are key to your business strategy. Acquiring data from multiple sources also enables you to blend the data and extract insights from cross analysis. The information provided from the data and analysis thus helps you confirm your priorities and adjust your SEO choices accordingly. For example, cross-analysing data can confirm that key metrics such as page titles or content are related to the number of SEO visits, or the organic traffic, for any given page on your site.

No matter how sound your SEO strategy is, its success will depend on your ability to collect and analyse the data on which it is based.

The benefit of an SEO crawler

Crawling is extremely important in SEO as a data-collection method. Firstly, search engine bots such as Googlebot or Bingbot crawl the internet in order to gather information for search results: it’s a key step in the process leading to your site being indexed and at the heart of how search engines understand the information on the web.

Marketers and SEOs also use crawlers. Not only does this help them better understand how a search engine looks at a website, but it also enables them to obtain the technical SEO and website data required to analyse and build an SEO strategy.

SEO crawl data provides insights into duplicate content, the indexability of a website and load time performance, as well as how information is distributed and maintained across the website. Regular crawls with a crawler such as Oncrawl are often the most effective means to identify new pages, broken links and other errors that can prevent your website from being an effective business channel through organic visibility.

Providing the bridge between crawl data and success

At Oncrawl, we focus on key elements to ensure that SEO leads to business success for enterprise businesses and companies with large websites. The Oncrawl application has strong technical capabilities that can easily handle complex website architecture commonly found in enterprise websites.

Once the data is collected from websites, log files and secondary sources such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console, our users have unlimited and unrestricted access to the data through both an interface and a robust API. This enables them to feed their data warehouse or work directly in formats natively compatible with data visualisation and business intelligence solutions.

Using the right solutions for technical SEO ensures that you can efficiently guide your SEO strategy development and strengthen your decision-making process. The difference between SEO as a nice-to-have improvement and SEO as the single most effective marketing channel for your business is the data at your disposal.

To find out more about Oncrawl, please visit oncrawl

Originally published on Business Reporter