You hear it all the time, data is one of the most important things to make a successful campaign. That was the topic of Barry Schwartz’s interview with Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive.
Wil has been doing SEO for 20 years now and Seer handles large accounts from what I saw on their site, and maybe we SEOs could learn a thing or two from this interview.
Wil’s core advice centers around looking at data.
Make sure you look at SERP and other related data when you’re doing your SEO or running Google Ads.
Does Page Speed Matter for Rankings?
Wil says that, if you need to know if Page Speed is a ranking factor…
… you want to take the top 10,000 keywords (or 1000 or 100 depending on how big/small your niche is) and look at the top 10 sites that are ranking for them
… and then examine the page speed numbers for each of them.
That, I think is a fantastic piece of advice, right here.
We SEOs need to be looking at data a lot more for each niche or client project – rather than following general ranking signals across the board… like most of us do.
We need to look at massive data sets we have access to including using Google Ads (Adwords) to access data we cant see inside Google Analytics.
I also know from personal experience and from ranking a client for a very difficult set of keywords that page speed is not an important factor – for his niche!
Page speed may matter more for a gossip site but may not be as important for a medical site.
Pull your own data… seems to be the mantra here!
All of us need to become “data guys”… if we are to become experts in our profession.
On Google Fooling Clients
Google expands keywords knowingly and unethically in Google Ads … so be careful there with your budget – as Google makes fools of people and they are swindling people of bad clicks (15% of the time) as they are making more money ignoring these things that CAN be fixed.
Google uses its best minds to have advertisers spend more money on their platform and not to help you save money or clicks.
It does equate to stealing… and is willful ignorance! They know its happening – but they wont fix it as it will hurt their profits.
They’re just acting in their best interest.
There is no incentive for them to fix and use the information they have.
Moving to exact match variants features is a great example. With exact match close variants… 99% Of the time it works. The 1% of the time it does not work – they know when there is a mismatch and they wont tell you when you fall in this 1% because it is worth millions to them.
Wil also gives some great advice on how you should run your own company…
- Get the job done!
- Don’t fret over employee timings and be a rigid boss or team lead… just get the job done!
- Donate a percentage (10%) of your income to charity so you do your duty to give back to the community.
Two of My Top Highly Recommended SEO Tools
Here’s two awesome SEO Tools that I recommend everyone doing SEO must have access to.
These two will help you get insights into some decent data for each SEO project you do.
SERPworx – browser extension that helps you look at some nifty data for each site in the SERPs with an overlay on the page itself and also unravel a whole bunch of key metrics for each page/site you visit through a sidebar. You can even connect up your Ahrefs account with it to pull more data for your analysis. I highly recommend this to every SEO who is serious.
PageOptimizer.pro – I need to say much about this tool. This is really the gold standard developed by Kyle Roof. If you’re doing SEO and need to optimize your on-page elements by looking at the top ranking sites so you can quickly check what things you need fixed and where and how you need to optimize your content. You can’t do top level SEO without this one… because this tool gives you all the key data points you need to optimize your content for top rankings and ranking boosts.
Of course there is a ton of other tools that I use and depend on for my SEO like Ahrefs etc. I will put up a resource page on which I will list out top tools and what each will help achieve.