Map out a strategy by leveraging your search analytics data. In this session, you’ll learn how to understand and develop a framework to find and test your results, and learn how to get actionable insights from your data.
Speakers:
Leslie To, VP of SEO – 3Q Digital
Dave Roth, CEO – Emergent Digital
“Who has used the new Search Console?” asks Leslie To, VP of SEO at 3Q Digital.
One or two hands raise per table; everyone waits with baited breath to hear what the Search Console is. Instead, we are launched into a side-by-side comparison of the old Search Console and the new Beta version. Despite its limitations, the new Google Search Console gives more historical data on organic search terms than ever possible before.
Testing Meta Data Optimizations
End-to-end measurements:
- Take a baseline. Thirty days of data will give you a start for looking at search trends and gives enough insights into weekend trends as well. Be sure to consider seasonality.
- Implement Meta Data Changes Only: making long-term changes over short-term searches will lead to inconsistent optimizations and you’ll be making changes every other day!
- (?)
- Validate Results: Make sure data is statistically significant. Use a 95% CI.
Prerequisites
Statistics. Don’t make thing too complicated by trying to test more than one variable at a time. Be patient; SEO is the long-game. Make sure you are using all the data to make informed, strategic decisions.
Told through the story of a 3Q client. Search through the data to find areas where YOU can make changes quickly, if not immediately. There will be things that you learn about (for example, declining traffic from desktops) that you cannot effect. Take note, watch how consumer search trends change, but don’t fight it. Change with it.
“I cannot pull desktop search volume out a hat,” To declares. She then explains how Q3 is retiring their desktop crawler and focusing on the mobile aspect of search. Again, let the data direct your decisions. Go through the search process, from query to impression to click and find the bottlenecks.
Start at the beginning. Paid media is the largest and fastest growing forms of media in the world today. Google Analytics is free and doesn’t suck that bad.
Set up your goals and customize your views. To do these things you have to understand what your goals are. For your analytics to become actionable you have to understand the goal that you are moving towards. This sounds simple enough, but the when facing a screen full of numbers most people, clients and grizzled digital vets, will become obsessed with improving metrics just to see the increase or to meet some arbitrary “industry standard.” Determine the goals of your company, short and long-term, and then find which metrics are tied to these goals. From there, parse through the data and take the actions possible to improve these metrics.
Attribution: There’s more to it than the metrics. Approach every decision with the understanding that the user is a human being making choices. Every touch point is chance to make a connection, to meet the needs of someone out there yadiadiahh.
The moral: “Do your own analysis and figure it out.”
