Imagine a world where everybody is invisible. It sounds like something out of a Harry Potter spins off. But for businesses and creators, the worst thing about making a good product/service is no one noticing them, and the best way to garner organic attention on a budget is through the internet. This is where the field of SEO comes in. If you type “What is SEO” in the almighty Google search bar, you would see- 54,90,00,000 times. So it’s safe to say that explaining what SEO means and what it does has been done to death and then some more. But as the SEO industry is reaching towards its $100 Billion marks, it’s safe to say that cookie-cutter tools for SEO aren’t relevant anymore. Where businesses are launching customizable & affordable SEO packages, using mainstream solutions is probably a bad use of resources.
And this is where Data Science enters the picture. In layman terms, Data Science is the study of data and finding meaningful patterns from that data. In the 60s and 70s, this used to be done by hand by Analysts, but now an excel spreadsheet has more power than an army of pen and paper analysts provided you have the right data points. So how can you use Data Science to get the one up on your competition while keeping up the Jones of the tech world, i.e., BIG TECH?
A right mindset to have would be to have a very data-driven approach. Your feelings, intuitions and the prior experience with customers may cause more harm than good when selecting the data metrics. It’s not like reinventing the wheel, but more like learning how to drive a crane or a locomotive- the parameters are the same as a family vehicle, but on a much larger scale.
So here is the list of ways how data science can help you out:
1. Researching the right keywords.
SEO and keywords are like peanut butter and jelly. Nigh inseparable. But it’s often tempting to jump the bandwagon of the most searched keywords and phrases and incorporate them into your marketing strategy. But if your business is for a niche audience or a brand new idea, it would be anything but challenging to compete against the well-established companies in the search results for the same keywords and queries. Data science can tell you what your competition’s keywords are avoiding, or the relevant businesses adopting are. This can create a clear differentiation between you and the mainstream market, and if done correctly, you’ll have a few winners on your hand in no time.
2. Understanding User Behaviour.
With the proper use of data science, you can compress the analytics interpretation concept significantly. This can also help segment your website from an analytical standpoint. If you made a new post or published a piece and the click-through rate is less than average or above it, you would get to know what your audience likes and what it doesn’t without needing to sift through the analytics spreadsheet each evening. All the above could be done with mechanical parameters using data science, giving you a clear picture of what works, what doesn’t and what could work in the future.
3. Achieving higher click-through.
When a player does a correct tennis service, and it’s so quick that the other player can’t return it, it’s called an ace. If you hit 30 Aces out of 100 serves, your ace-percentage is 30%. Similarly, your click-through rate is the number of times your website was visited when shown by the search engine for a particular keyword or phrase. Data science can tell you what keywords are working the best and what can be improved upon and again, these can be automated, so you need not sift through websites each day. Automate a program, and it’ll give you results in real-time, which can be game-changing, especially when you’re about to launch something new like a product/service launch.
4. Achieving High Dwell Time.
Attention is the commodity in today’s economy, and dwells time is precisely how long a user lingers on your page. Increased user time spent on a page may signal google that it has the information that the user needed, strengthening your position on the search metrics.
High dwell time and bounce rate are inversely related to each other. The more a customer stays on your page, the lesser is your bounce rate and the higher your rank on the SERP. When you customize an affordable SEO package for your business, this is perhaps one of the criterias you must consider.
5. Choosing the correct Tools and Resources.
The world of SEO is continually changing, and a surprising amount of SEO professionals lack access to accurate data, which leads to making assumptions. When the belief goes right, nothing changes- You still attract the same number of queries and clients and business goes on as usual, but when you go wrong. It’s tough to find the problem. A data-driven approach ensures that you focus on the parameters that matter to a product or service and ignore the noise. Which car the client drives is essential, but the colour of his leather seats isn’t. Data science can also highlight the pitfalls in analysing data itself. It can show that you can have a better track record by focusing on parameters x, y & z instead of a, b & c. You are thus saving the business precious resources and time.
Wrapping-Up
The aforementioned steps are usually enlisted in most affordable SEO packages by a virtuous digital marketing company that enjoys being in trend and forging trends. The steps may be general and relatable but as SEO professionals, our job is to use them into creating a niche-driven framework that invites exceptional traffic to our website and subsequently, eStore (should we have one).
If you’re looking for solutions that can alter the way your website functions, then implementing data science solutions is the right way to go. Feel free to reach out to us and discuss the next course of action for your business.