1. Breaking down silos:
how integrated data sets
enhance SEO strategies
Slideshare.Net/ClaudiaHiggins1
@conductor
Claudia Higgins (she/her)
CONDUCTOR

2. Why I’m here
Claudia Higgins
@Twitter
#brightonSEO
To understand why I love this stuff, I think it helps to
know a bit about me.
Like most SEOs, I had a strange career history
before landing here, but I have never met someone
with a weirder career history than me.
I got a degree in primary education and was briefly
a primary school teacher, but that didn’t work for me
so I made the logical step to retrain as…

3. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
A tattoo artist.

4. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
That might seem insane, and it probably was, but looking back I can now see
that both of these professions leveraged some things I love:
1. helping people understand concepts and have what they need to be self-
sufficient,
2. creativity and visual communication.
So is that why I chose to move into SEO?

5. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
No, it was because I needed
a salaried job to get a
mortgage
But why did I stay?

6. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
- Because I am first and foremost an enormous nerd…

7. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
- … and I also have ADHD and love collecting information
and solving problems and mysteries.

8. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
But during my time doing in-house
SEO, I found that understanding SEO
data was usually like exploring a dark
building with a torch.

9. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
There was lots of useful stuff in
there but I could only see small
parts of it at a time. What I
wanted to do was turn the lights
on and look at the whole picture.

10. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
When I’m talking about SEO data, I’m
starting with the three data sets that
almost all SEOs have access to:
1. Rank data about where my site and
my competitors rank for different terms

11. Rank data #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
2. Data from Google Search
Console about where users are
seeing and clicking on our results

12. - site analytics data about what
those users do once they’re on
the site.
Rank data
GSC data
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
3. Site analytics data
about what those users do
once they’re on the site.

13. Rank data
GSC data
Analytics
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

14. what caused this change in performance?
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
But when they’re kept separate, it’s hard to answer the exact
kind of questions we need to be able to answer:
(This question usually comes from
ourselves, or more senior people in our
department.)

15. Credibility
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
If we can’t answer questions like this, it’s
going to impact our ability to be credible,
and believe me - I know how long it takes to
rebuild credibility after it’s lost.

16. where are our best opportunities?
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
(Being able to answer this question is vital to knowing
what we should be working on and why)

17. Credibility Effectiveness
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
If we can’t answer it,
we’re not going to be as
effective as we should
be, and we risk
spending our time on
things that don’t actually
make much of a
difference

18. what impact did our optimisations have?
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
This one has historically been hard, especially for those of us
with bigger sites:
Even if we record every optimisation we make, we then have to correlate that
with data from multiple sources to understand the full picture, and we have to
browse through dates for each one because we don’t know how long it will
take for the changes to have an impact.
That’s a lot of work to do for every optimisation we make.

19. Credibility Effectiveness Success
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
But if we can’t do it, how can we prove that our work has been successful?
Aside from contributing to credibility, buy-in and reputation, knowing what’s been
successful is vital for knowing which strategies we should be investing our time in.

20. `
What links SEO datasets?
Search Term Entry Page
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
For SEO, all the data we have can be connected to one of these two elements:

21. Search Term
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

22. Clicks
Impressions
CTR
Position
Landing URLs
Search
Term
Our rank
Our URL(s)
Competitors’
ranks
Competitor’s
URLs
Rich results
Brand/Non-Brand Keyword group
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
Analytics
Rank tracking

23. `
Page
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

24. Entry
Page
KWs driving
clicks
Impressions
CTR
Position
Landing URLs
KWs URL ranks
for
Bounces
Time on site
Pages visited
Conversions
Leads
Revenue
etc.
Site section Page type Category Author
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
Rank tracking Analytics

25. How do we bring all
these threads
together?
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

26. Excel & Google Sheets
● Export data from each source
● Store in their own tabs
● Create dashboard tabs
● HLOOKUP
● VLOOKUP
● INDEX/MATCH
● SUMIF / SUMIFS
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

27. PowerBI, Tableau etc.
● Easier to cleanse data to
match more easily
● Link data sets by URL or KW
● More interactive output
● Steep learning curve
● I LOVE IT
● I HATE IT
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

28. Enterprise platforms
● Most already ingest your
analytics and GSC data
● No longer good enough to
show you insights in silos
● Product development focused
on intelligent and integrated
insights
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

29. Credibility Effectiveness Success
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
Let’s come back to those three broad benefits of being able to see the big picture. How
much more credible, effective, and successful could you be if you could confidently make
statements like those on the next slides?

30. “Improving this page last month has
improved our ranks for these terms,
and increased revenue by x%, all
from non-brand clicks”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

31. “We’re prioritising improving the
position of these page 2 terms,
because the pages we rank with
convert really well”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

32. “We’re going to optimise the meta
descriptions for these pages, because
their CTR is below the average we
see for that ranking position”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

33. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
What other data sources could we plug in?

34. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
PPC Data? Technical Monitoring?

35. “These are the highest-converting
paid terms we currently rank outside
the top 10 for.”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

36. “We did an A/B test using PPC and
found that this meta description
would likely improve CTR”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

37. “Since the last algorithm update, our
slower-loading page templates are
dropping in both rank position and
visits”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

38. “We noticed this term was driving a
lot more clicks this month and saw
that you made some improvements to
that page a few weeks ago. It worked
really well - can we roll that
approach out to similar pages?”
#brightonSEO Claudia Higgins

39. #brightonSEO Claudia Higgins
Thank you!