Claudia is the natural search insight and technology manager at Argos. For her talk at Brighton SEO 2017, she discussed how to get more out of the data that’s available for free. To start things off, she recommended some key SEO tools that are available for free across the web.
Free Tools
Keywords Everywhere
She started by introducing Keywords Everywhere – a Chrome/Firefox plugin that allows you visualise keyword data within search engines, or anywhere keywords present themselves, including Search Console, Moz, SEMRush etc. Keyword data presented includes PPC data and competition data.
Moz Tools
Claudia then went on to recommend MozBar for the breadth and depth of features it provides, including domain authority, metadata visualisation and where the internal, external, followed and no-followed links are found on your page.
MozCast
A great tool to “keep an eye of stuff”. MozCast does nothing tangible for your website, rather, it lets you visualise turbulence in Google’s SERP landscape.
Search Console
Owned by Google, Search Console is a great tool, especially for its search analytics feature. While the data is only available for the past 30 days, once you collect this data (via APIs), it can become immensely powerful.
External Factors
Claudia urges SEOs to take a step back and take a look at the wider picture, i.e. what are the external factors that influence a user’s search behaviour? Essentially, what happens in real life can influence our online behaviour. Claudia uses the examples of weather and the influence it specifically has online. For example, during a sunny day, it would be perfectly normal for engagement to increase for BBQs while on a nice day with drizzle, it would also be normal for engagement across Gazebos to increase.
Events
Events can also affect user behaviour, events like the Easter weekend, Mother’s Day, EU referendum etc. Anything that’s a significant social event can influence online behaviour. Understanding, for example, that the World Cup is coming up can be really useful in order to allow you to prepare your landing pages around HD-ready, larger televisions.
Trends
Like events, trends can also influence search behaviour. For example, Claudia suddenly found that around July 2016, there were more sales of Argos’ Nintendo DS products. Whilst it was very confusing at first – especially with the console already being around for years – it was the prevalence of PokemonGO that was responsible for this shift. So, if you’re not sure why a certain product has seen an uplift in sales (aside from ranking influence), consider trends. If you’re wondering whether a certain trend around a product is occuring, search the related keyword and Twitter to work out whether there’s hastag around a top-selling product of yours.
To finish her second segment, Claudia closes on pay day and the real effect this always has on eCommerce stores.
Mixing Metrics
Claudia then moved onto the notion of “mixing metrics”, similar to mixing colours, and how overlaying metrics can give you data more dimensions and power. She defines “Primary Metrics”, like primary colours, to be things like clicks and impressions – factors that cannot be influenced by any other metrics. Secondary metrics were defined to be metrics that were combined with others, for example, conversion rate that is calculated by dividing your amount of sessions with transactions.
Learn Excel
Claudia finishes her talk urging people to learn Microsoft Excel. Nothing else will give your data as much power as spreadsheets do. If you think you know excel, go back and learn more about it. It’s absolutely fundamental in order to allow you to manipulate and present different datasets. For instance, “=vlookup” and “=sumifs” are particularly useful.
