Data-driven SEO content refers to productions made based on user data collected, analyzed, and interpreted to plan editorial strategies and is valuable for natural referencing.
How are search behaviors changing? What is the impact on the results pages? How can mastering and understanding the data from your Internet users maximize the ROI of your optimized content campaigns? Step into a new editorial approach: data-driven SEO content production.
Integration of data in SEO
It’s a fact: SEO is not an exact science. Nevertheless, current computer science and artificial intelligence knowledge make it possible to refine natural referencing strategies and the tactics they integrate.
This is why data analysis is invited more and more when defining an SEO strategy as a whole: we speak of data-driven SEO or natural referencing driven by data.
Indeed, Google processes a monumental amount of data daily, no less than 3.5 billion daily requests, according to Live Internet Stats!
Added to this is the multitude of data collected as Internet users browse sites and blogs by the various tools of the Mountain View firm’s galaxy or other agencies and companies specializing in data mining.
If it is humanly impossible for us to represent such a mass of data, it is nevertheless quite exploitable once screened with the appropriate tools.
From SEO to AEO, the metamorphosis of search engines
Today, because of Google’s developments in terms of linguistic understanding, we are gradually switching from the logic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to that of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
Indeed, the deployments and updates of algorithms in recent years have helped transform the search engine into an answer engine.
User research intent
At the end of 2019, the deployment of the BERT algorithm caused a stir in the SEO sphere.
This update has greatly improved the understanding of user search intent using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.
Thus, Google BERT has made it possible to offer more relevant results according to the search context of Internet users, in web search, mobile or voice search.
Rich results
Rich search results aim to offer Internet users the answer deemed most relevant by Google by highlighting important information.
A prosperous result can thus present opinions, photos, or prices, whereas a classic result will only display a title, a URL, and a description.
In particular, integrating structured data on a page increases its chances of appearing as a rich result on the SERP.
These consist of integrations of semantic tags that improve Google’s understanding of specific content.
On the results page, the element valued by the structured data can be presented in a particular way and adapted to Internet users.
Suppose the integration of structured data and the appearance on the SERP of rich results increase the relevance of the answers for the user.
In that case, it is a question for your site of visually taking up space on the search results page and increasing your CTR (Click To Rate).
Voice search
In recent years, voice search has been gaining ground; Siri, Cortana, OK Google, and Alexa are all voice assistants used daily by some 20 million users in France alone! According to Google, 27% of global searches are done through voice search.
It is, therefore, a fundamental underlying trend that is changing rapidly. Moreover, voice search is the perfect illustration of the metamorphosis of SEO into AEO.
Indeed, Internet users who carry out this search type use natural language: “What is the weather like in Lyon? “for example. The answer must be unique!
Why use data to produce your SEO content?
Most of the developments in search engines aim to improve their understanding of language to optimize the user experience.
This is evidenced by the February 10 deployment of the “Passage Ranking” algorithm, which focuses on improving results for long-tail queries.
With this new AI, Google can better understand specific passages within a page to unearth relevant “hidden” information.
On the human side, we understand the need to write relevant content that meets the expectations and questions of the target audience.
Take the bandwagon! Data analysis benefits all stages of your SEO optimized content strategy; from upstream understanding to downstream learning, the benefits of data-driven content are manifold.
Define and understand your audience
Using analysis tools, you can collect an impressive amount of information about your site’s audience to define them better and understand their needs and behaviors.
- Who are your internet users?
- Where do they live?
- What are they looking for?
- How do they get to your site?
- How do they navigate there?
- Which pages do they spend the most time on?
- Which ones are they not interested in?
So many questions that the data allows you to answer, personalize and specify your personas, but also to define a powerful SEO content strategy that meets specific objectives.
Determine relevant KPIs
The collection and analysis of user data are significant assets for setting the most relevant KPIs in the performance measurement of your editorial strategy.
These performance indicators are linked to the commercial, visibility, or notoriety objectives determined by your company as part of the implementation of your SEO strategy.
The Internet user data collected allows you to stay consistent and effectively define your priorities. Indeed, each objective corresponds to a specific data repository, thanks to which you can decide on the best actions for your campaign.
Offer SEO content with high added value
Correctly interpreted, user data gives you detailed knowledge of your audience. Thus, you can determine the questions and needs of your Internet users to offer them content with high added value., which is perfectly optimized for SEO.
Also, take the trouble to adapt and vary the formats according to your objectives: snack content, in-depth articles, interviews, or, why not, videos and podcasts.
Indeed, to move from the search engine to the response engine, we are seeing more and more multimedia content flourish in the form of enriched results, depending on the typology and the search context.
The natural referencing of tomorrow does not pass only by text: be creative and daring to seduce your core target!
Maximize your ROI
By creating perfectly optimized and oriented content to meet specific needs and objectives determined upstream, you maximize your editorial strategy’s ROI (Return On Investment).
Save time and money by going straight to the point by defining an optimized content strategy built based on factual data drawn from your site and the experience that users have of it.
Produce new data
By conducting a data-driven SEO content strategy, you create a virtuous circle. Indeed, the initial data helps you define your action plan, which will generate new user data to be exploited.
Thus, instead of starting from a blank sheet with each new campaign, the data obtained allows you to learn lessons on the successes and areas for improvement of your SEO content. Experiment, analyze, adjust your editorial strategy, and evolve at the pace of your customers.
Five tips for an effective data-driven SEO content strategy
Developing an action plan to enhance your SEO content strategy using user data requires following a few key steps.
Define your goals
As mentioned earlier, defining the objectives of your content campaign optimized for natural referencing will allow you to stay aware of the format of the articles and the information to be communicated.
Each goal will include relevant data that will give you all the information you need to provide your reports with differentiating elements with high-added value for your target.
Perform meta-analysis of data
The interest of a meta-analysis of data is to obtain the most exhaustive possible inventory of your site and that of your competitors.
To do this, the Google panoply, such as Analytics or Search Console, will provide you with valuable information on your Internet users and their behavior over the pages of your site.
However, it is necessary to go further than collecting data about your SEO content.
Thus, data such as all your URLs positioned on the first three pages of the SERP with information related to their content and net linking, crawl or log transmission, and technical performance are valuable. Resources to use.
Evaluate your chances of success using specific criteria
In the context of a data-driven SEO content strategy, it is not simply a question of finding a subject and an angle of approach that is likely to appeal to Internet users.
The use of data is at the heart of the production, through the evaluation of various criteria, including:
- possibility of positioning oneself on the request.
- research intent.
- competition.
- number of backlinks.
- authority of competitors.
- number of words needed.
- semantic field to be developed.
Many tools exist to help you analyze these different parameters and guide you to the ease, or even the possibility, of positioning yourself on a targeted request.
Examples include SEMrush, UberSuggest, Optimiz Content, SEOQuantum, and Yooda.
Meet EAT criteria
In its quest for excellence and to improve the user experience, Google increasingly considers the so-called EAT criteria for Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness (Expertise, Authority, and Reliability).
Thus, for your various texts and content to be considered credible in search engines’ eyes and position themselves better, it is necessary to respond to these three points. This is especially true if your site deals with a sensitive sector such as healthcare, law, or finance.
These EAT criteria, therefore, do not only depend on your content but also your professional credibility. This is why taking care of the other aspects of your site’s natural referencing, particularly your net linking campaigns, is essential.
Plan your editorial production
To publish your articles at the most reasonable time and be calm, it is essential to plan the writing of your SEO content.
To do this, nothing is better than establishing a specific editorial calendar that considers a maximum of parameters: subject, nature of the content, objective, persona, team in charge, etc.
This essential tool will allow you to monitor production precisely and more effectively analyze the KPIs of your campaign over time.
Warning: if the editorial calendar is established before your data-driven SEO content strategy starts, it must remain flexible!
Both intrinsic and extrinsic events can disrupt this schedule, which you must be able to adjust according to your needs and, over time, to match your audience’s expectations.
Data-driven SEO management: the future of content production?
Given recent developments in search engines and their efforts to improve the understanding of Internet users and their search intentions, the production of data-driven SEO content has a bright future ahead of it.
Indeed, faced with the growing amount of content accessible on the web, only a subtle analysis and understanding of the data and what it reveals about your audience will allow you to stand out from the competition in the long term.
Likewise, the uses and behaviors of organic search are evolving at lightning speed; what is true today may not be so tomorrow.
Only the data remains, a factual and impartial witness to these upheavals, the mastery of which will allow you to deploy a natural referencing strategy as close as possible to your customers.