SEO intelligence refers to the practice of gathering and analyzing data, insights, and metrics to inform and improve SEO strategies. When optimizing website content, we’re used to focusing on keywords, keyword placement, proper heading hierarchy, and delivering quality and useful content. But not many people understand there’s a strong SEO intelligence behind the whole process. SEO is more than finding relevant keywords and placing them strategically through the website content.
This approach surely worked a decade ago, but now, SEO is quality content, targeting the audience, positioning the brand, increasing the revenue, and contributing to company growth. The intelligence and logic we use let us execute SEO strategies primarily for SaaS companies but also for various industries that need better positioning. The whole process involves the use of tools and analytics to better understand search engine behavior, user intent, competitor actions, and keyword performance.
SEO intelligence lets SmartClick’s SEO team make data-driven decisions to enhance client’s website visibility, rankings, and traffic.
What Are the Key Components of SEO Intelligence
Our motto is that a website must contain and provide all the answers a potentially interested client may have. It usually includes sharing the company values, explaining the service for all awareness stages, pointing to the pain points, and offering solutions that ease people’s lives. So, here’s a breakdown of the basic approach when starting an SEO strategy:
1. Keyword Research and Analysis
The goal is to identify high-potential keywords based on search volume, competition, and user intent. Surely, that’s not enough because each keyword we find must make sense for the business we optimize for. That’s why we analyze the keywords to determine their intent, but also how search engines perceive it. It gives us an idea of whether it’s smart to target a particular keyword on the page or whether it won’t make any difference since it’s typical for another niche.
For example, the phrase performance management process seems like it fits in many industries, from marketing to line production. But if we type it into Google, we’ll see that the sense around it is related to HR topics, i.e., meetings, work processes, operating procedures, and other human resource department tasks. So, if our product matches it, it’s good to target our content. If not, we must find a more fitting keyword that makes sense in our industry.
2. Competitor Analysis
The goal is to understand how competitors are ranking for target keywords, what strategies they are using, and identify gaps we can fill up. Many underestimate this step, as it’s time-consuming and requires hours of work until we find some patterns to take advantage of. The competitors who successfully rank for given keywords are an example of how to do the optimization further. We can use them as inspiration on how to structure the landing pages, what topics to cover in the blog section, and what content gaps to fill up to give us a nice start.
Competitor analysis is not spying and copying on your competitors (as many may suppose). Just the opposite, it’s a learning process that lets us understand how a specific industry works and how to match it with the provided business goals and SEO strategy outcomes.
3. Industry Knowledge
SEO experts are not familiar with all industries on the market, but SEO intelligence helps us understand what’s happening in the particular industry we’re targeting. The industry knowledge we gain during the keyword research and competitor analysis phases will help us understand what makes sense to implement on websites. Also, we learn how external factors like backlinks, social media presence, and traditional marketing help us boost online performance.
For example, a small business selling handmade cosmetic products needs a different approach than a huge SaaS company offering a business solution for high-profile clients. They have different target audiences, different messaging channels, and surely, different purposes to serve. As we get familiar with these details, both keyword research and content creation get easier to execute, bringing the wanted results.
4. On-Page Optimization
Sometimes, SEO clients come with an existing website that doesn’t perform as expected. So, we’re performing an SEO audit to spot the reasons why it doesn’t rank, bring traffic, or convert. Analyzing content, meta tags, and technical aspects of a website are just the basic processes we go through when optimizing for search engines.
There are two possible scenarios: The one when the client has a website and the other when building from scratch.
The first scenario requires a deep understanding of the industry and the client’s goals, as well as figuring out why the current website doesn’t work as needed. During this phase, we try to find the most suitable keywords but also to check if the website answers all the concerns and customer pain points and offers useful content. We also check whether the loading speed is optimized, does the website work well on mobile, and if the media is too heavy to load.
The second scenario requires a more strategic approach because we must propose the website structure, navigation, and user experience design. Planning the website from scratch lets us optimize it properly, page by page, delivering the best possible SEO potential.
5. Backlink SEO Intelligence
Monitoring backlinks is essential to understand the quality, quantity, and sources of links pointing to our or client’s website. While link building is a common process in SEO, gaining natural backlinks gives more authority to the site we’re working on. That’s why we focus on creating knowledge resources, sharing value, and positioning the brand as a leader in the industry.
Additionally, this approach lets us spot eventual harmful backlinks and take actions, i.e., blocking them, to prevent further damage. If you need to analyze the backlink profile on your website, you can use the CheckMyBacklink tracker, and gain complete control over your backlink profile.
Another way to incorporate backlink SEO intelligence is tracking how many backlinks the top results on SERP have. If we spot a competitor with a low number of backlinks but a strong SERP position, we should see what they do right on-page before dedicating resources to off-page strategies.
6. Rank Tracking
Tracking the website ranks is another step in having an SEO strategy that works. When leveraging SEO intelligence, we actually track the ranking positions of targeted keywords to measure SEO performance and adjust strategies as needed. But what does rank tracking mean? Do we only value the number 1 positions, considering everything else as a failure? This is where SEO intelligence is mostly used.
While many value the number 1 ranking for any keyword, we know that it’s the top 10 position for highly relevant phrases that matters. Accidental top 3 ranks for random phrases that aren’t related to the service bring zero value, i.e., they aren’t relevant to the audience we target. That’s why we track all positions, from 1-10, to 11-20 and beyond, just to ensure we’re on the right path among the real competitors. Rank tracking is more than celebrating the number 1 position – it’s an ongoing effort to keep the results that way before a competitor performs a competition analysis on us and fills the gaps we miss in the meantime.
7. Content Performance
Content performance is directly tied to rank tracking, but there are many other metrics to consider. Using data to see how content is performing in terms of engagement, conversions, and SEO, and optimizing accordingly is the most important step in content performance. But how does SEO intelligence help us here?
Imagine you have an important page on your site that will potentially convert the leads to customers, but it never happens. By means of traffic, you get many visitors, and your page appears in the top search engine results. Tracking data and SEO intelligence will help you decide whether it’s better to add more calls-to-action or edit the page copy to be more persuasive. Or maybe, it sounds too salesy, and doesn’t offer more value.
For example, a low click-through rate (CTR) tells us that the page ranks for relevant keywords, but the meta title and meta description should be more valuable to attract clicks. On the other hand, large traffic volume but low conversion rates mean we’re missing on value and sales points, so the visitor simply takes their business somewhere else. The content performance gives us a clear idea of what to do to make significant changes and improve the overall performance.
8. Technical SEO Insights
Identifying and resolving technical issues like page speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability may improve search engine performance. Sometimes, the only obstacle that prevents the perfectly optimized content from ranking is the technical issues. From sitemaps to URL structures and website loading speed, technical issues can be fixed after an extensive audit and action plan.
The SEO intelligence helps us find the connection between the technical challenges, SEO practices, and on-page optimizations. The result is an optimized website that ranks properly and converts while positioning the client company as a leader in the industry.
9. Local SEO Intelligence
Local SEO is another aspect of search engine optimization. It’s not only targeting keywords that contain location information like city, state, or country. The content also should be relevant for the location we’re targeting, considering traditions and culture when crafting the copy.
Optimizing the Google My Business profile with address, location, phone number, and company name makes the businesses more discoverable, especially for those looking for a particular solution close to them.
10. Leveraging the Right Tools
While there are too many SEO tools available on the market, the critical thinking behind SEO intelligence lets us choose the best ones. Just because their marketing says they’re the best, it doesn’t mean we need to use every tool possible to track, measure, and execute SEO strategies.
Starting with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, we have enough information to begin. But as the business grows and our expertise extends, we leverage more tools to help us be more efficient. Some of them are SERanking and Ahrefs for keyword research and rank tracking, Grammarly and QueText to ensure content quality, ClickUp for productivity, and Slack for ongoing communication between team members.
Why SEO Intelligence Matters?
SEO intelligence helps marketers make informed decisions, fine-tune their SEO campaigns, and stay ahead of competitors by constantly monitoring and adapting to changes in search engine algorithms and user behavior. Can one person handle these tasks? Sure, if they work for one brand only, becoming an integral part of the growth and progress.
But if you want to receive the complete benefit of SEO intelligence, an SEO agency can be the perfect solution. Why? The team of experienced SEO strategists, content creators, and web developers guarantees quality products, i.e., a completely optimized website that wins the SEO game. Further, the agency will track the progress and adapt the strategy to new search engine updates and quality guidelines, ensuring the website never drops in ranking.
