Everywhere you go, you can never escape numbers. I have this close friend in high school that went on to study psychology at Uni. She’s always been interested in the field but part of the reason why she did it is because she’s had enough of math. She went on to eat her words however as it turns out that statistics make up a portion of her psychological studies. Statistics and data is actually very important to psychology, so much so that the field of quantitative psychology is now a recognized branch of psychology in general. As I’ve said before, you can never escape numbers.

Raw numbers and data are important but they’re only useful if you can figure out the exact implication of those raw numbers for your business and how they can help you. In statistics, there’s a saying that goes ‘statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do’, which underscores the importance of proper analytics and how the same set of data could be misinterpreted if you don’t exactly know what to do with them. This is true in psychology and true in marketing as well and SEO services and marketers need to have a proper understanding in analytics if they want to get ahead with their SEO and marketing efforts.

Making use of data for the purpose of SEO and marketing

The fundamental purpose of marketing is to get people interested in your business. The big picture’s simple but it’s once you start going into the details that things get a little murky. To begin with, what kind of people should you target your marketing efforts at? And where exactly can they be found? And do you know how to get them interested at your business? Marketing isn’t far removed from psychology as they both require a proper understanding of people’s behavior and interest and in the case of marketing, using these behavior and interest to grab their attention.

In this particular case, data and proper analytics is essential in planning your marketing and SEO strategy. They act as the source of your content ideas and knowing which channel you should use to market those contents. As a crude example, the demographic of active Facebook users now skews older as younger members of the population has migrated en masse to Instagram and Snapchat and this one simple data alone is enough to guide you on your content marketing’s platform of choice.

One important purpose of data and analytics is that they could act as a benchmark for your marketing efforts. By collecting data on your website and its contents, you can measure how well or, God forbid, badly your marketing efforts are doing and what could be improved. Data and analytics help you figure out which one of your contents resonate the most and whether the resource you’ve dedicated to your marketing efforts has paid off. It’s important to get a handle on these metrics to help you figure out if your money’s being funneled in the right direction or if there’s anything that needs changing.

Data as a foundation of your marketing strategy

The first few phases of a new business is the hardest to manage. I’ve seen a number of businesses that have managed to make a splash in the first few months thanks to hype only to find themselves unable to sustain the same level of interest with the public after a couple of months. A number of other businesses are even worse, trying to enter an on-the-rise industry only to find them entering a hugely crowded market and without something to set them apart from their competitors, they folded in the first few months.

I’ve seen this happen even with business that I would personally recommend, further reinforcing the fact that you have to be smart when it comes to your marketing efforts. By making intelligent use of data, you could gain a handle on the latest trends in society and what are being talked about at the moment. With some proper analytics, data could also help you anticipate future trends so that you won’t be left out in the cold when the public moves in a direction you weren’t properly equipped to deal with. Websites like Statista can be particularly useful and I’m almost certain there are similar websites available for specific industries.

Data as tools to measure your success

We might hate exams and quizzes when we’re still in school but those things and GPAs are quite useful as they serve as a benchmark for how well our studies are going. Without the help of these standardized tests and grades, it’s impossible to properly measure how our studies are progressing. You could end up with this idea that you’re highly qualified only to find out that you’ve just been using a much lower benchmark than others and that could have disastrous results.

This relates to my point about how statistics do not lie. By using analytical tools such as Google Analytics to look under the hood of your website, you get an objective idea of how well your website is doing without any bias involved. By placing your website under this objective evaluation, you are giving yourself the proper information on how you should process with your SEO and marketing efforts. If you’re really in the mood, you could try the dozens of other analytical tools out there to gather the most comprehensive data available from your website to give you the complete picture on your website and marketing efforts.