Leveraging SEO Data for Insight

This is an old presentation from BlueGlass X (2012) and goes over techniques and tactics to understand the data your pulling on your client, website, and competitors in your industry. There may be some outdated information or tools in here since I haven’t overhauled it since that day.

Some things covered:

• SEO Tools (Screaming Frog, SEMrush, MajesticSEO)
• Canonicalization
• On-site and off-site analysis
• Link trends and quality
• Semantics, entities and concepts

Leveraging SEO Data for Insight

1. What can tools show you? -Hard numbers Lots of pretty graphs Obscure terminology Tactics- Not Strategy
2. Which means… You have to use your own analysis • Draw your own conclusions • Create an actionable plan from those conclusions
3. Tools- Screaming Frog Alchemy Facebook Debugger
4. Quick On-Site Strategy Check –What are their priority categories and topics? Are they segmenting with subdomains? What’s their topical dilution? How are they segmenting according to intent?
5. Cross-Data Check– SEMRush • Sort by directory hierarchy • Breakout categories 1-2 levels down • Cross check with SEMrush for categorical volumes • Look for open opportunities and weaknesses
6. Cross-Data Check– SEMRush
7. Canonical Strategy– Where are they consolidating blog posts or other equity to within the site? • Are they consolidating into static pages? • Are they using an internal canonical strategy?
8. Facebook Debugger (this warrants its own post)
9. What does this tell me? Are they: • Leveraging OG with “verbs” and “actions” to increase sharing? • Are they fully optimizing content and site for sharing?
10. Semantics, Concepts and Entities -What’s the topical strength of category pages • What user base are they targeted? Do? Know? Go? Multiple? • Are these pages intended for transactional, information or direct traffic?
11. Concepts and Entities Overall Makeup vs. “Density”
12. Analysis Off-Site-Who are they? What are they doing? More Importantly, how are you viewed?
13. Tools:  Majestic SEO, AnalyticsSEO, SEMRush
14. What are we looking at? • Commonalities • Promotional timelines • Potential link quality
15. Link Trends-What’s your natural backlink cadence? What’s your competitor’s cadence? Low points in backlink generation High points in backlink generation
16. Link Trends- Majestic
17. Anchor Text Distribution- The obvious- What are they building for? The not so obvious- How does that tie into the overall topic and theme of the site?
18. Unless they’re doing major cleanup, the Pre-Penguin trail is there. • What did they find important? • What phrases were their efforts concentrated on? • How are you performing in comparison?
19. Manual querying– ~
20. GoRank– Does heavy lifting for you • Full phrases • Drills down to individual words • Helps show relationships between phrases
21. Link Quality Snapshots– AnalyticsSEO Benefits: • You can potentially see their skeletons & low quality links • You can identify which competitor has the highest “quality” links Drawbacks • Only AC rank for judging quality • Trust scores aren’t integrated • Cross-reference AC Rank with Trust Scores In Majestic
22. Various Tracking Graphs • Track specific URLs against your competitors that are performing better than you [Majestic] • Track your pages that are struggling to perform for high volume phrases above the fold • Track the drop off of referring domains • Indicator of feed links • Indicator of non-static links • Only momentary value
23. USE YOUR JUDGEMENT! What tactics are helping vs. hurting strategy? Use your brains.