Use Data Or Be Used By Data!

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The October 16 issue of Seotistics is here for you!

It's easy to talk about coding or scripts but what about storing your SEO Data?

More importantly, how can you curate your digital assets over time and improve their quality?

I don't see this topic discussed often, excluding the mere operational perspective, i.e. storing data to BigQuery.

🏢 The Foundations

Before all, it's important to know why we store SEO data:

• GSC data lasts up to 16 months
• Ease of use (you can't extract data every time)
• More capabilities, e.g. processing data
• Ownership, as your database is better than Google keeping your data
• BigQuery gives you more GSC data

The latter is the ideal solution due to its excellent capabilities to connect with existing Google APIs (and get more data).

Talking about databases requires you to have a minimum understanding of SQL:

👗 How Does This Fit Into SEO

Imagine the following:

"your boss/client asks you to get a report to compare this year to last year.

You go through GSC data and notice that you can't complete this task.

You compare GA data and notice clear incongruencies."

Welcome to the life of the average professional!

This isn't even our fault because many businesses don't know/care about storing data.

As SEOs, it's not our job to know it all in terms of data but we can give recommendations and tasks to other teams.

Having a source of truth solves the problems I listed above and in most cases, it's easy to achieve.

Unless you work for huge websites, storing data and defining some processes is now simple (and cheap).

🔋 How To Add Value

Unlike SEO, this stuff is linear in most cases. Yes, it's not that simple but you don't need to overthink it!

The process you can follow is:

• Store data
• Create data pipelines, i.e. what to do with data
• Define processes to use data
• Act on data

This is once again reminiscent of my Data Analysis chartflow that sums up how you could do it.

Let's show this with a real-life example:

"Website A has stored all of the data it needs on GBQ. It prepares monthly reports that speed up decision-making and save headaches for managers.

They don't spend time checking the accuracy of reports or questioning YOU."

While this scenario is ideal, don't think it's so far from reality.

If you count how many hours are saved and the increase in operational efficiency, this can add a lot of money for medium/large websites.

Now scale it to Keyword Clustering on GSC data, reporting with many data sources and put them all into processes.

You can augment your SEO strategy with additional elements that make decision making SO much easier. decision-making

🧮 How You Can Start Today

The idea is simple and you can easily add value, here's what to store:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics 4
• Content Plans (via Airtable)
• Customer Data

By Content Plans I don't mean the documents but some information, such as clusters, authors, publishing date and so on.

This is the usual piece of advice I give to people because it's so effective. Take a look below, please:

For Ecommerce, Customer data or other non-SEO data can make a lot of sense, especially if you are interested in financial estimation.

Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 have native connectors, so this is easier.

For simpler projects, it's more than acceptable to upload CSVs manually as a quick way to show the value of this project.

Later on, consider connecting Airtable and Google BigQuery with Make or adopting a similar solution for peak automation.

Curating Data

What we saw above is an example of curating your data to make them more usable.

Labeling your own data is invaluable because NO tool can be as accurate as you.

Imagine clustering GSC data based on YOUR clusters that you defined manually, plus additional info.

This is something that strong content websites do all the time!

😓 The Struggles Of SEOs

The struggles of many professionals involve the quality of data and their consistency.

There are actually many more problems that make your life harder and storing data is one stop towards order.

It's not the ONLY thing needed, absolutely not, but it's a great beginning to actually gather data!

P.S. SEO data is by nature inaccurate, the best you can do is use Google tools and avoid 3rd-party tool for important decisions.

☁️ Cloud Functions

Yes, if you use Google Cloud Platform, the solution that also includes BigQuery, you can create your custom functions to process data.

Think of them as tasks that run online whenever you want!

The choices are endless but this topic it's tooooo long for a single Seotistics issue.

🔗 Connections To Other Concepts

Storing data is a necessary element to talk about Content Management and Strategy as a whole.

This reflects on SEO Operations, which I named SEOps, as a lean way to streamline your processes.

The storage of SEO data allows for data mining and what entails, such as Exploitation & Exploration.

Why all of this may sound bizarre, they are actually simple concepts.

👥 Join Our Community

Our Discord community offers a small place where we can talk business and SEO.

If you hate all the noise of social media, then this place is for you.

Join our Discord Community!

🔎 Analytics For SEO Ebook (v6)

This ebook is aimed at SEOs or Business Owners who want to explore the combination of SEO and Analytics.

If you want to start building your data empire, this is the (initial) path to take.

It will teach you or your employees to:

👉 Avoid common pitfalls that cost you money 💸

👉 Create meaningful analyses that add value 💯

👉 Shorten the learning time of Analytics ⏳

This comes with monthly updates because I want to create the Ultimate Guide out there.

v6 includes the following information:

✅ Strategy in terms of SEO & Data

✅ Decision Making

✅ Integrating Data with SEO

Unlock Powerful Insights Now!

v7 will include additional info on DataViz and topics on request.

📚 Recommended Reads - Peak Content 🗻

Some recommendations as you usual and only peak content.

For SQL, my advice is to stick to one book and practice a lot.

My ebook can help you with some concepts too, if you don't have much time to go through other lengthy resources.

Otherwise, focus on learning SQL and BigQuery nonstop.

• ​SEO Dynamo: The Road to Six Figure with Niche Sites and PR Links​
• ​Get more insights out of your Google Search data with BigQuery​
• ​Learning SQL, 3rd Edition​
• ​🗝 The 4 Key Documents You Need For Great SEO​
• ​Connect GA4 and BigQuery​

📞 One-Hour Call

If you have doubts about SEO or Analytics, you can book a call with me.

Have doubts about your content website or with your data?

Look no further, I can help you:

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Book A Call Now!

❗️ Feedback and Recommendations

If you have ideas/recommendations for the next issues of Seotistics, you can simply reply to this email.

Marco Giordano
​SEO Specialist & Data Analyst

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Bernerstrasse Süd 169, Zurich, Switzerland
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