Basic SEO: Pillars and Data

The 4 Streets of SEOPOLY SEO consists of 3 parts: technology, content and promotion. Everyone knows that. You haven’t? Then you are about to discover this. At SEOPOLY, we use 4 streets to explain SEO:

1. The Website Street
2. The Social Media Street
3. The Advertising Street
4. The Organic Results Street

We assume that to do SEO you must have a website; so technique + content we discuss in this street. Promotion we discuss in social, advertising and organic street. Promotion we discuss in social, advertising and organic street. So how do you get started with SEO? We discuss that in the next section where we explain the importance of data.

The 4 pillars of SEO: DATA

In SEO, everything revolves around “data. The search engines index your website and any parameters they deem important, they use this data to rank your website against other websites. The search engines index your website and any parameters they deem important, they use this data to rank your website against other websites. By working with this indexing data according to a simple roadmap, you can greatly improve your SEO. following components we need to collect our data:

1. Google Analytics (GA)
2. Google Search Console (GSC formerly WebmasterTools)
3. Google My Business (GMB)
4. Google Tagmanager (GTM)

Let’s take a closer look at all the components.

Google Analytics

GA gives you insight into your visitors. Through GA, you discover your high-performing parts and uncover obstacles in your website. GA roughly consists of the following major components:

• Target audience: who are your visitors?
• Acquisition: by what route do visitors arrive at your site?
• Behavior: what does a visitor do on your site?
• Conversion: what are your results?

It is not the intention to go into this at length, the important thing is that you learn to use the various reports intelligently. Some good GA tips:

• Create personalized dashboards
• Send yourself regular updates via email
• Create separate views for your key traffic sources and/or user segments
• Definitely set up conversion tracking
• Don’t pin yourself down to the standard ‘last click’ conversion attribution

Trust not only with data but certainly with basic settings, how is that data acquired. The basics start with the settings you can manage through the admin module (what is an account, property and view). Above all, remember that you are looking for insights that lead to action. And go to work with the insights gained. (Want to learn more about Analytics? read Avinash Kaushik’s books or blog)

Google Search Console

GSC can be viewed as Google’s engine, Google shares insights regarding the indexation of your website through GSC. This is the most important data for SEO. Check out the GSC indexing report and get insight into how Google rates your website. Is your website not being found for the right terms? (Then there is definitely something wrong with your on-page SEO, start filling in the SEO elements such as titles, metas and alt tags on your website with the terms you want to be found for). In addition to indexing data, you will also find data on site errors in GSC, site error resolution is an important task of an SEO. Also be sure to provide a sitemap because Google finds new pages through links. You can also format structured data and check that it is formatted correctly. After all, Google is a machine and thanks to structured formatting we provide Google with more insight into your data (code readable by the machine). After all, Google wants to get the best possible understanding of who you are, what you have to offer, and thus match you with searchers as well as possible. This is what an SEO does. You cannot use GSC until you have GA set up. Verify your website (property) in www.google.com/webmasters. Have fun! (my favorite SEO part). More info can be found in the Webmasters Academy.

Google my business

GMB, also called Google Places gives your business a location on the map and when you type in your brand name a “knowledge panel” on the right side of the search results (on desktop). Google initially pulls your business data (NAP = name address zip code) for verification from various other sources such as business directories and directories. Google’s goal is to index as much data as possible, it must be as accurate as possible. By linking and comparing all the data with each other, Google can increase the reliability of the data (and thus retain people longer by striving for the best possible user experience). By installing and verifying GMB, you give Google more insight into the accuracy of your data (address, hours of operation, contact information). Google is ultimately just a machine, the more correctly Google can assess your information the more trust you get and thus visibility. Go to business.google.com and put your business on the map.

Google tagmanager

If you want to measure just a little more than you can measure with GA, I recommend installing GTM. This allows you to easily measure events on your site (clicks on phone numbers, email addresses and form redirects). Such events should normally be the reason for your website’s existence. GTM also allows you to add code to your website more easily without bothering your developer. Just a little more complex so be sure to create a test container to test your new tags and triggers. Tagmanager is just a bit more complex and requires more than basic knowledge. So don’t start with this and as a beginner, it is best to leave it aside for a while.

How to use the 4 SEO pillars practically

Installation

Want to install GA, GSC and GTM and start with GMB? You can find plenty of good and comprehensive tutorials for this through Google itself.

Links

Assuming everything was installed correctly you now need to link the various components. In GA, you can import GSC data. In GMB, you can link to GA, Youtube and Adwords. Ditto, a simple search “how to link Analytics with Google My Company” will get you the relevant answers from Google support.

Now what about all that data?

Now you can analyze your data (indexing, company visibility, events on your site and insight into your visitors) from different sources. To analyze your data, it is of utmost importance to know what you want to achieve. You need to think about that before you build your site. We do that in the next step: strategy and website.