Many people don’t realize the huge impact that big data has on the modern world.
As an example, search engine optimization is only one of the multiple areas of business marketing that’s affected constantly by big data.
Big Data Explained
Big data sounds like a scare word, but not only is it a real thing it’s actually useful. How useful? So useful it’s completely changing how SEO works!
Big data is a short hand term for the vast amount of data that’s been collected, analyzed, and used to improve the way many businesses interact with their clients. It’s a major part of the decision-making process these days, and for good reason. It helps with:
Showing potential clients that transparency is socially acceptable, allowing for the gathering of institutional data standards
- Giving companies more options in terms of how to analyze data that’s unique
- Making the cloud accessible to everyone, allowing easier data storage
- Social media sites find and compile more individual data
- Find and install the necessary infrastructure to analyze and process huge amounts of data
These days, there are a number of big data companies in the industry. However, Google is generally considered to be the original trend setter. This means Google has a major influence on how data searching works.
While it’s impossible to know every single factor, there are 4 major ways SEO is being affected by big data.
Content Becomes Data At Breakneck Speeds
Content is a fancy word for published information. At least, it used to be. As Google grew larger it started using content as a way to gauge relevance. You can understand more about this and learn more about on page SEO on Matthew Woodwards blog.
They turned content into data, allowing their search engine algorithm to easily analyze and adapt to what their customers needed.
Over the years, search results have become more refined and structured. The more data was collected and analyzed, the more structured it became.
More than one SEO firm executive has noticed they must keep up with Google’s learning curve if they’re going to stick around. If they can’t keep up with Google, then they’ll be out of business. Once content was turned into data it allowed Google to create algorithms to continue the work. By now content and other SEO information is collected by an almost artificial intelligence!
Big Data Gives Incredible SEO Insights
Thankfully, the information is there for SEO firms to keep up with Google. As Google builds more infrastructure to collect and analyze data, they make it easier for marketers to take note of patterns.
Without big data, SEO firms would have no hope of matching pace with Google. It just couldn’t be done!
- Local SEO
- Compliance with quality guidelines
- Mobile Optimization
- SEO ROI
- Global SEO
- Content Marketing
Customized Analytics Are More Precise
Ask any online marketer what their end goal is and they’ll tell you it’s more conversions. Conversions are incredibly useful for finding the connections between content, backlinks, and other SEO tools and traffic, conversions, and page views.
Analytics systems such as Bing’s Webmaster Tools and Google’s Search Console allow SEO firms to view their web content in comparison to the larger data network. This allows them to adjust their web content as needed.
Analytics tools are quickly becoming the most important systems for tracking page views, conversions, the amount of time viewers spend on any one page, and other important search factors.
Social Media Is Being Searched
If you want a major treasure trove of big data, look no further than social networks. Facebook alone has over 1 billion users. Then there’s Twitter, Instagram, and millions of public blogs and Patreon pages.
Google processes over 20 petabytes of data every year. They can’t afford to miss out on any bit of information posted on the web.
Since social media websites have already set the framework for networking and data search, they’re becoming increasingly important in terms of how Google gauges relevancy. For proof, look at the latest research from Searchmetrics. Being able to properly use social networking sites correlates with better rankings. The higher the rank, the higher the correlation.
Conclusion
Google and other search engine companies aren’t about to let people know their search algorithms. That would quickly put them out of a job!
Unfortunately, this causes many marketers to miss the importance of big data in terms of how it affects SEO. However, if a marketer can keep in mind how important big data is, use the tools they have available, and stay on their toes then they can use big data to do just about anything.