SEO Snack: Week of March 31st
Quick Week Summary
What I worked on this past week
This past week was a lot of setting up tasks/projects for the upcoming quarter (mainly this month). With this comes a good amount of keyword research as well as just overall organizing content (google docs, sheets, etc.). I also finalized which platform we will be using to showcase analytics (and organize all analytics internally) with clients (more on this below). We also had our quarterly internal team meeting which is always a full day!
Week Insights
What I struggled with
Client process vs. Ours
One thing that was a bit of a struggle is making sure that the process we have internally for page edits (and other work) works well with what clients have for their content process. A lot of this is based on just having good conversations around how things can work but also bending your process to the clients. In my opinion, we should bend more than they do because ultimately the work is for them and we don’t want to add more to their plate in the marketing arena when we are their marketing partner.
What was a bigger headache than it needed to be
Scheduling GA4 Reports
I originally was having issues with scheduling reports because I wasn’t scheduling reports, I was trying to schedule explorations… Eventually, I figured it out and just shows that even though you might think you know a lot, you don’t know it all.
What went well
Wrapping Up Q1
Easy answer to give but it’s always nice to feel good about wrapping up a quarter. We have a few outstanding Q1 tasks still but overall the quarter went well from a task and analytic perspective across many clients.
What to look out for or tune into
Universal Analytics Deletion
Coming July 1st of this year, UA properties will be deleted (although my guess is they will push this date back like they did last year with the transition to GA4). If you want all that old data, you’ll need to download it (better to do it before than just in case that date is the true date).
What weird things happened
Solar Eclipse
Not SEO or analytics (and technically not last week...) but pretty cool to see today!
Key Takeaways
1. Analytics “Platform”
So over the past quarter, I’ve been researching and testing different analytics platforms (I don’t know what to call them really…) that can pull in all data we have (social channels, ads, keywords, etc.) into one place that makes it easy for us internally and for clients to see data in an organized way.
There were 3 main platforms I looked at (although I dove into many others that just didn’t make the final cut), Databox, Agency Analytics, and Looker Studio. All have great features and integrations, it just depends on what you need it for. One key integration for us is SEMRush.
Now it’s best to state that we’ve been using Databox for a handful of months now so to make a transition, the “new” one had to bring a good amount of an upgrade. When comparing/testing Agency Analytics, it just came down to their new Beta SEMRush integration didn’t cover overall rankings (it was mainly position tracking campaign-based) and just didn’t hit the mark for us.
For Looker Studio, there is an upside here but for myself to take the time to create reports, connect integrations, etc., it doesn’t make sense for us right now. Now who knows, later this year maybe we make a transition but right now Databox is where we’ll stay.
The only bigger issue I’ve seen across the board is that a lot of these platforms aren’t shaping to “important” analytics (that can be different for so many, so I get it’s tough). Example being avg. engagement time is not in Databox but avg session duration is. With other apps, software, etc. continuing to change, these platforms need to as well.
2. Process Bending
This topic hits on what I mentioned above about how I’ve been struggling a bit with “matching” the content process of a client to our internal content process. The main reason I want to bring this up is that I feel like a lot of folks would take the stand of “we are the marketing agency so we should use ours and you (the client) need to change yours to match us”. I don’t agree with this.
Now it may depend on the relationship/partnership you have with clients but for us to be a partner with our clients, there has to be push/pull on things. I believe that all the work we’re doing is for the client's benefit (whether that’s leads, saving time, improving brand, etc.) so why would I force them to change their process, spend more time, and learn new things if it really doesn’t impact the content (or performance of it) at all.
It’s something to continually look at, am I asking clients to do something that they don’t want to do and it doesn’t impact results?
Resources To Look At
1. Mobile SEO Guide
A quick guide for mobile SEO since (and hopefully most of us know) a lot of traffic is mobile.
2. Links Importance Article
This is the article diving into the “importance” of links. Again, I don’t think this is 100% true but more just pushing us to spend time on other pieces of strategy.
