Brighton SEO – for 1 day 3,500 SEOs, Developers, Experts and Entrepreneurs meet to share the latest knowledge in the world of Search Engine Optimisation and Digital Marketing, metres away from Brighton’s pebbles, seagulls and rain (thanks for that Brighton, great welcome!).
It was impossible to see everything of interest, so here’s my star steal from the day. Thanks to Dara Fitzgerald for a great advanced analytical eye-opening.
Google Analytics reporting API
One of the greatest benefits or merits of digital marketing is the ability to gain insights into the effectiveness of your ads, website and other digital media to driving your site to higher and higher conversion rates.
With the abundance of data at your fingertips, one of the key struggles is to use this knowledge for maximum benefit.
So you do a report.
If you use one of the many SEO/Page Analytics focussed tools, then you’ll likely have a helping hand in creating customised reports and recommended charts displaying key information. But what if you want to go further than the preset features? What if you need to incorporate your custom metrics that define your determinations of success, mediocrity or failure?
That’s where the Google Sheets Google Analytics Reporting API comes in.
By linking your GA with Google Sheets via the API, you can pull data from any account you have access to after setting a few quick rules and metrics to pick out.
After retrieving the data, you are free to use the power of Google Sheets to analyse until your heart’s content.
Since getting to work with the Google Analytics Reporting API, I’ve realised you can have a much more tangible and deeper understanding of the metrics and dimensions Google Analytics offers you, and you can also work with the data to create metrics and data visualisations that can be tailored to display the most important information for your clients.
To mitigate the time invested in setting it up – it’s time well spent! Once you’re happy you’re collecting the data you need it’s much quicker than trawling through the various sections of Google Analytics and downloading report after report, collating the data and finally getting to the focus of any report – critically analysing the effectiveness your activities for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in an actionable manner.
To top it all off, you can embed interactive real-time updates onto web pages, so digital reports are a fantastic way of taking your reporting to the clients, or just keeping an easy reference for you and your colleagues.
Local SEO
It’s the next big area of focus for SEO as Google and other search providers look to use the array of technology at our fingertips.
Google often asks permission to use your location when you search via mobile, when you consider it – it’s a very obvious trait that a lot of searches are inherently local. If you’re looking to go to a cinema, you want ones within reaching distance – otherwise you’d search for cinemas in {{wherever you’re going}} rather than the ones that have someone working day and night to push their cinema miles away from you to the top of the rankings.
Don’t make people think
Bas van den Beld held a talk on the psychology behind the content.
He put across the importance of communicating the basics of value within your content to engage and encouraging users/customers towards a desired outcome.
Until users/customers understand where a product/service/article holds its value – be it in great customer service, unique features or perks like free delivery – it’s harder to make decisions without this understanding.
If you can communicate your value quickly and in a way that’s better than your competitors, you give yourself the best chance of making headway towards your goals.
All in all a great experience, the other members of the team that attended learned tons too – so we’ll keep looking forward to the next one in April!
