Improve Your SEO Decisions Based Upon Paid Data, and Vice Versa

There’s no definitive way to operate your SEO team. Whether these professionals work within a business, an agency or a large corporation—there are plenty of variables to account for. Effective SEO relies on high-quality data. In turn, high-quality data relies on a specialized, consolidated analytics group. Third-party data providers prioritize the research of today’s constantly changing consumer markets, offering the high-focus information acquisition strategies which elude in-house teams.

These third-party providers, themselves, are becoming quite popular: By 2020, brands and agencies are expected to pay $79.27 billion in SEO spending. Much of this spending stems from in-depth analytics, consumer behavior research and cross-market studies driven by highly specialized teams—teams that needn’t expend valuable time navigating segmented business architectures.

Considering that paid data is the heartbeat of successful PPC and content marketing campaigns—and that 45 percent of companies rely on the content and SEO integration, alone—the importance of quality data seems larger than life.

In 2019, data analytics and SEO strategy require plenty of time, energy and research. While some companies opt for in-house team crossovers to craft fluid digital marketing campaigns, many have chosen paid data sources to assure top-tier strategies built to last.

If your business uses paid data, it’s on the right track. It isn’t enough, however, to simply reap your third-party’s provided analytics. They’re good at their job, integrating your digital marketing needs with countless measures designed to locate, obtain and analyze information with great insight. But, to bring your digital marketing approach to the next level, your SEO team will need to stay in touch with them.

By working closely with your paid data team, you can eliminate strategy creation downtime. You can also shift your campaign’s focus at a moment’s notice. Even if you’re not incredibly concerned with speed, you’re likely still concerned with SEO and PPC alignment. Where content is considered, maybe you could use a more hands-on approach to collaborate and execute your business’s SEO processes.

Whatever the case may be, working side-by-side with your third-party provider assures a wealth of benefits. Here’s the best part: You won’t even need to weigh down your SEO team to do so.

Let’s take a closer look at the great potential of this side-by-side relationship—one side at a time. First, we’ll cover the foundation which makes such a partnership awesome: A small, specialized SEO team.

Prepping for Success: Giving SEO Its Own Department

There are a variety of in-house influences at play when determining organizational placements. These influences help you make better decisions, optimize your strategies and create efficient campaigns. As the digital climate becomes increasingly demanding, however, many in-house SEO teams have found themselves working overtime.

This is mostly due to the increasing demands of SEO—, particularly for SEO managers. As Google’s ever-changing algorithm list subverts goal targets, and as consumer behavior adapts to annual industry trends, it makes sense for team members to diversify—right?

Well, not necessarily. Digital Marketing Institute has covered the stresses associated with rallying to various SEO positions. Mostly, they’ve found that driving traffic with SEO, landing successful PPC campaigns and having success with analytics has placed a heavy load on SEO managers—as well as their teams. Modern SEO teams need to nurture online communities, negotiate backlinks, conduct keyword research, extract meaningful data, conduct marketing analysis, manage website content and more. These processes take time—and slow SEO strategies are destined to miss many of the curveballs our digital world constantly throws.

Let your SEO team be its own department, handing the other responsibilities to your other teams conjoined with it. As for data-based responsibilities, your third-party provider has it covered. We’ll definitely cover the importance of working closely with them, but—for now—focus on building a firm foundation on your end.

Tips for Building the Team

The main benefit of giving your SEO team more breathing room is that of segmentation. A group of SEO professionals can further section themselves off, assigning different roles to tasks like link building, technical SEO and content marketing. By prescribing task crossover at a much smaller scale, you’ll increase speed and efficiency greatly.

A segmented SEO team will be primed to work alongside your third-party data provider, too. This isn’t necessarily because they’ll have fewer responsibilities to manage, however. Your SEO team might have less task diversity, in-house, but they’ll make up for it in quality within their area.

The most successful SEO strategies are those which rapidly adapt, utilize and extrapolate future meaning from data. Your paid data provider is constantly working to stay ahead of the curve—and they succeed because they’re highly specialized, executing stellar strategies within their niche.

When specialized, third-party data meets a specialized, in-house SEO team, the result is an obvious one: a highly optimized, actionable environment for innovative strategy creation. If both sides aren’t only up to date with the SEO world’s current demands—but one step ahead of them—your campaign will win the race against its competitors.

Working Alongside Your Data Provider

If you can optimize your SEO team, incorporating communication from your data provider can greatly increase your profit margins. In the long run, even a little tactical cooperation can return months, or even years, of unpaid traffic—giving your budget more flexibility to empower other areas of your business.

Already, we’re seeing how a smaller, specialized SEO team can result in more efficiency when a third-party provider enters the scene. This assumes, of course, that you’re making both ends meet after redefining your SEO team’s approach to digital marketing.

So, what exactly can you do with this type of co-navigation? Your data provider certainly isn’t against communicating with your SEO team—and you can even craft a custom-tailored duo-strategy between the two parties once your campaign’s needs are visible.

Below, we’ve outlined the best ways to partner up with your paid data provider.

Use Social Media Repost and Share Data

Social media data should be your launch point. Since 2010, Bing and Google have been visible about their use of social signals to drive search result ranks. Both providers offer ways to view results either created by or shared by, friends in your social network. They even offer real-time content viewing via Bing Social Search and Google Realtime Search.

The use of social media influence in digital marketing is undeniable. This said, the type of social media influence matters. In most cases, there are two types of authority to consider: page authority and human authority. While page authority concerns social media profile relevancy and your business’s landing page statistics, human authority concerns a user’s relevancy themselves.

Leave the page authority to your SEO team—as the metrics involved are relatively easy to gather. Target clickthrough, e-commerce purchases, page views, likes, and followers. These signals tend to provide accurate depictions of page authority.

Meanwhile, coordinate with your data provider about the procurement of content shares, repost data and follower retention across your various social media accounts. The major factors to prioritize are your brand’s social rank, human rank, and author rank.

Because these metrics take time and nuance to accurately depict, your paid data provider is better suited for the job. Once both “halves” of the social media analysis equation meet, work alongside your paid data provider to craft a lightning-fast strategy to boost your SEO campaign’s page relevancy.

Exchange Affiliate Networks with Your Provider

The path of SEO and data effectiveness is a two-way street. It’s difficult for a single brand to land a top spot on Google, but two players are much better than one. Ask your paid data provider about their affiliate network, and offer insight about your own.

High-profile affiliate reps are incredibly valuable—especially when your networking opens opportunities for powerful, data-driven SEO content. The affiliate marketing world has an estimated global worth of $12 billion, having a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent.

While your SEO team focuses on optimizing around choice keyword phrases, working with your data provider’s affiliates via guest posts, surveys, studies and more, your data provider can focus on garnering insights to encourage more engagement.

It’s important to offer your provider the same opportunity, too. Invite them to offer valuable insights into the world of specialized data gathering, and connect with your affiliates about featuring these valuable insights to boost readership. Before long, you’ll have a healthy collection of posts, snippets, social media shares, and query answers to give your SEO campaign a facelift.

Plus, you’ll have even more data to extrapolate—opening the doors to B2B marketing and more.

Drive Organic Search to Increase CLTV

CLTV is your business’s combined loan-to-value ratio. This expresses the effectiveness of your SEO campaign’s investments, more or less—identifying prospective audience increases, sold e-commerce products and digital marketing enhancements as assets.

The line between organic search and CLTV can be difficult to determine, too. Because their cause-and-effect relationship involves a lot of hoop-jumping between social media, page views, search rankings and more, extrapolating meaningful information requires in-depth insights.

Fortunately, you can sidestep the many pitfalls between both points by coordinating SEO and third-party data to improve organic search. The more advanced your paid data becomes, the more your SEO will be integrated into your brand’s products and services. The objectivity of purchases, returns, cart abandonment rates, delivery locations and even suggested products is easy to examine—and experiment with.

On your end, prioritize your SEO campaign’s scale once your third-party provider offers these metrics. In most cases, SEO strategy growth fails because it becomes more complicated as a business moves faster. If you prioritize your scaling resources, however, you’ll be ready to hit a home run in your SEO campaign as soon as the data arrives.

In turn, you’ll be able to give your third-party provider new environments for analysis—exponentially growing the power of your metrics. With more resources comes more spending power, so you’ll be able to drive your business’s growth with higher campaign investments. Because this growth will likely outpace the costs of paid data, the assets you’ve invested in will have great returns.

Taking Your Campaign to New Heights

While the above strategies will outfit your SEO campaign with cutting-edge approaches, there are several “passive” benefits of working closely with your paid data provider. Rest assured: Effective team coordination will achieve most of your strategy’s underlying goals.

When combined, both teams can dominate search engine results. One of your SEO keywords might perform well in one channel, for example, while data suggests that a specific cross-channel approach is likely to reach more consumers. The result is organic optimization, which leads to great ad efficiency.

Coordination can also empower and optimize your brand’s landing pages. If your team’s SEO keywords are inserted into a strong PPC plan, you’ll both boost campaign performance and quality scores. As your provider tests various ad copy, it can give your SEO team information on the highest-converting strategies available.

The digital world might be packed with data, but there are those who’re incredibly experienced in its extrapolation. By segmenting your SEO campaign’s tasks, outsourcing specific roles and conjoining results driven by specialization, the possibilities become limitless.