Big data is becoming more important to modern marketing. You can’t afford to ignore the benefits of data analytics in your marketing campaigns. It is especially important when it comes to SEO.
Search Engine Watch has a great article on using data analytics for SEO. This article is a great resource for SEO professionals that want to develop a more data intensive strategy. However, we felt it would be helpful to create a primer for laypeople.
The following article has an overview of the science of SEO. Afterwards, we will provide some additional information on creating a more data-driven SEO strategy, particularly around the theme of earning backlinks.
If you’re active in the world of online marketing, you’ve likely heard about the possibility of using link building for search engine optimization (SEO). But what exactly is link building, and is it the right strategy for every website?
In this guide, we’ll cover the basics.
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let’s start with a basic description of SEO. SEO is a collection of different tactics designed to improve your site’s visibility in search engines. With the right approach, you can increase your pages’ likelihood of showing up for relevant searches, and increase their relative rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are more than 200 ranking factors that play a role in how pages are ranked, so as you can imagine, SEO is complicated. But generally speaking, tactics can be categorized as onsite optimization or offsite optimization. Onsite tactics are designed to improve the functionality of your website and produce content that closely matches keywords and phrases searched by your target audience. Offsite tactics, like link building, are designed to increase the relative trustworthiness of your site.
Keep in mind that big data drives search engines in 2020. Google is one of the most advanced data-driven companies in the world. SEO professionals need to understand the role of big data in the context of search engine optimization.
Why Does Link Building Matter?
When Google generates a list of results for a given query, it considers two things: the relevance and authority of prospective rankings. Relevance refers to the contextual match of a page, and can be increased with keyword optimization. But if you want to build authority, you need the help of links.
Search engines use data mining tools to find links from other sites. These Hadoop based tools archive links and keep track of them. They use a sophisticated data-driven algorithm to assess the quality of these sites based on the volume and quantity of inbound links. This algorithm is known as Google PageRank.
The authority, or trustworthiness, of a domain (and of individual pages) is calculated by studying the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. Having more links, from more referring domains, is generally associated with a higher “authority,” and therefore higher search rankings. The higher the authority of the referring domain, the more valuable the link is going to be.
Some websites attempt to earn links completely naturally by developing the best possible content and hoping for external sites to link to them. However, this approach is unreliable and inconsistent. It’s often better to build links with the help of external content; writing guest posts for external publishers grants you an opportunity to link back to your site naturally.
Link building isn’t just about cultivating authority, however. Because these links are fully functional, they can also generate referral traffic—and increase your brand visibility at the same time.
Building Links the “Right” Way
At this point, you may be thinking that building links is a surefire way to increase your website’s visibility, but there’s an important catch—there are “right” ways and “wrong” ways to build links with big data.
Google and other search engines understand that links can be manipulated to increase rankings unfairly, so they’ve devised systems that can catch and penalize unscrupulous link builders. If you want to be successful, you need to use the right tactics, which include:
As you can see, link building is simple in theory but complex in execution. If you decide to pursue link building as part of your SEO or overall online marketing strategy, you’ll need to be careful to build the best links you can—and avoid the pitfalls of “bad” link building.
How Can Big Data Assist With LinkBuilding?
This is obviously the crux of the article here. Big data is critical for linkbuilding in 2020. You can use data analytics to:
Big data is incredibly important in modern SEO. You should use data analytics to get the most out of your linkbuilding strategy.
