Use Data Or Be Used By Data!

The Jun 10 issue of Seotistics is here for you!

Welcome to this Seotistics issue with a mini-guide on what the f*** is strategy.

Every business "consultant" or SEO alike mentions strategy and tactics like they were the same thing.

Today you will learn why this is wrong and how to craft better plans.

P.S. Shout-out to my friend Wolfgang for helping me with this, he's an expert in strategy and military science, as well as an SEO based in Berlin!

P.P.S. Next issue is planned for June 18 but you'll get an email on June 17 for my course launch!

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Strategy 🆚 Tactics

Strategy is related to achieving goals.

Strategy is often mislabeled as "abstract", not actionable and not practical.

"Strategy is theory, it doesn't tell you HOW".

Well OK, strategy doesn't need to explain you the nitty-gritty but it does have to take challenges into account.

One of the most common mistakes in war planning was exactly this one. Assuming the enemy wouldn't adjust their plans and played a static game.

In SEO, as you make changes, your competitors will do the same.

Tactics involve single battles, and how to achieve what the strategy wants.

Strategy vs. Tactics - FourWeekMBA — *A great example by* Four Week MBA in this excellent article

The same applies to SEO and pretty much anything else.

Do you recall when I mentioned different tactics back then? This is the perfect time to check them again (Recommended Reads below).

*Cluster 1 is strong and competitors can't attack it. Cluster 4 is subject to flanking, where competitors attack your weakest side.*

What is described above isn't a strategy but a tactic you rely upon to achieve what you designed in your strategy.

The 🔑 Elements of a Good Strategy

Among all the books I've devoured, the best explanation was provided by Rumelt:

Diagnosis- The challenge(s)
Guiding Policy - Dealing with the challenge(s)
Coherent Actions - Doing the job

These 3 elements form a kernel. This definition contradicts the perspective of many people who think the strategy is ethereal.

In practical terms, you must identify challenges without even creating processes.

SEO data can help you to quantify the level of the challenge and to improve the efficiency of your Coherent Actions.

A Process You Can Use Today

Let's see how to prepare a strategy with an example.

I am working on Website X from scratch and I have to define what to do and how to prepare a solid strategy.

Here are the 5 steps I follow:

Assess competition
Define challenges (Diagnosis)
Create a policy to play around with challenges (Guiding Policy)
Define processes (SEOps)
Do the job (Coherent Actions)

The first step involves studying the SERPs and doing Keyword Research to assess what's happening.

Then, you will notice that some competitors are definitely stronger and pose challenges.

So you create a policy, a way of dealing with them that translates to SEO processes.

The World If | Know Your Meme — *The world if people understood strategy and didn't call content+links a strategy.*

You finally execute and see how it goes.

Actions such as optimizing pages and/or clusters can be considered tactics.

And as you may notice, only doing that doesn't make you rich or replace a strategy.

☁️ Data: Opinions Or Facts?

Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.

Edwards Deming

As Cassie Kozyrkov, a prominent figure in the world of Decision Science, correctly points out, the opposite is also true.

It makes sense if you consider what I told you early on. Even with data, you may just have an opinion.

A common misconception is that data is objective and can't fail because "data says so" or "Math is Math!".

This is super common when using Semrush/Ahrefs data as the ultimate truth or even Search Console data, especially if sampled.

This part is crucial to understand that showing some data doesn't make you better.

A solid strategy combines SEO, Business and Data (Analytics in this case) to achieve a common objective.

A strategic misalignment can result in a loss of budget (and rankings later).

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My social media followers already know:

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Showcase #1 of the course (v1, first release)

Tactics + Processes: What You Often Do

In practice, most of you often mean tactics and not strategy.

Stuff like:

Keyword Research
Internal Links
Audits

are processes.

Thinking about how to do something is often about tactics.

Like I discussed in this past Seotistics issue, tactics can also look like this:

Every tactic can also be expanded into a strategy but in this case, it's not a great idea.

The distinction between strategy and tactic is in the scope.

🌉 Operational: The Third Level

Strategy and Tactics alone work but some often insert another layer called Operational.

While anyone agrees that Strategy & Tactics exist, there are some controversies about this third level.

The plot below is too detailed for us SEOs but the key takeaway here is that there may be something in the middle.¨

The Institutional Level of War — *Source:* https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2016/5/5/the-institutional-level-of-war

Many business books claim it's below Tactics, supporting day-to-day activities.

This doesn't make much sense to me as Operational was born as the bridge between the two other layers.

The original concept was formalized once again from military science (Carl von Clausewitz) to make sense of the gap between the 2 layers.

In SEO, this would be about campaigns or anything that pieces tactics together.

But even so, you can do fine with the knowledge of the other 2 layers.

⚠️ The Alternative

A big part of the industry goes like this:

Read LinkedIn Carousels with basic ideas
Call them tactics or strategies, based on the day
Prepare a Content Plan and call it a strategy

After reading this newsletter (and the past issues), you should be able to create solid strategies with a little bit of practice.

Recall, the most important thing is having order.

Once you are able to structure a project with clarity, it will be much easier to work on it.

The reason why I advocate for the use of data is because you can make more informed decisions and force you to study more.

Even some knowledge of R/Python/SQL can help you add value to your SEO projects (and also if you do Marketing, uh).

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