What Does an SEO Analyst Do for You?

SEO analysts are experts at presenting your website to major search engines. They prepare your website for indexing and improve its rankings by poring over the wealth of data available through analytical tools. Then they draw conclusions, brainstorm ideas for improvement, and implement those ideas.

The process sounds simple, but once you start breaking down the individual tasks that an SEO performs on a daily basis, you’ll find that the big picture for search engine optimization is actually made up of thousands of tiny little pictures. Each task that an SEO performs is part of a smooth-moving engine, and those tasks require analysts to pull skills from wildly differing fields, such as:

HTML and CSS
Web Design
Content Creation & Curation
Statistics
Data Analysis
Business Administration
Management
Information Technology

Want to appreciate the lengths that SEO analysts go to when working on your website and business? Take a closer look at what technical skills they are using and deep analyses they are performing nearly every day.

Data Analysis

Using tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, SpyFu, and ahrefs, SEO analysts watch and organize countless charts and tables rich with data about your website. On a daily basis, they monitor such dimensions as:

Unique entrances to your website
Time spent by visitors on specific pages
Rises and falls in organic traffic
Demographics of website visitors
Traffic acquisition types and sources
Marketing campaign successes and failures

Using the data they collect, SEO analysts develop a picture, over time, of what kind of people are visiting your website, how they are interacting with it, and why. Watching and building an understanding of what types of web content bring in traffic and keep it there helps augment the success of your website and the knowledge of your brand.

Technical SEO (Making Sure Googlebot Can Read Your Site Efficiently)

You may have heard the term technical SEO if you’ve worked with a digital marketing agency before. We use the term because the technical part of search engine optimization comprises so many tasks that an umbrella term for those tasks has become necessary.

Technical is a fitting term because SEO analysts have to use a breadth of technology-related knowledge to accomplish tasks under the category of technical SEO. The goal of technical SEO is to prepare and maintain a website that can be read efficiently by web crawlers such as Googlebot.

Sitemapping and Hierarchy

Reorganizing and mapping out your site allows web crawlers to extract information from your website that helps index the site properly.

For businesses who already have a website, SEO analysts take a look at what pages are important to your site and how they are organized, then come up with a plan to restructure the site so users and web crawlers can enjoy simple navigation in a logical hierarchy.

For businesses who are just getting started, SEO analysts gather information about your most important products

and services, then plan a website structure based on a seamless user experience. The plan is made with bots and users in mind.

Activity Moderation

As users engage with your website, you’ll have to provide feedback to those users to keep them engaged. SEO analysts help by moderating comments on websites, ensuring smooth interaction with ecommerce integrations, and refining email marketing campaigns and outreach campaigns.

Whitelisting & Blacklisting

The realm of moderation goes even deeper into whitelisting & blacklisting.

Blacklisting is the creation of or addition to a list of users or websites that have been disavowed by your business. A disavow is a denial of responsibility or support for entities that interact with your website, such as other websites who link externally to your website.

More simply, blacklisting is the same as severing ties with people and websites who are destructive to the success of your business. Similarly, whitelisting ensures that entities that have been incorrectly identified as disavowed are allowed to access and interact with your business.

Content Planning

The content of your website is one of the first things major search engines such as Google look at when deciding how and where to rank your website. Optimizing your site for search engines relies heavily on the creation and curation of quality content that helps your visitors make that vital decision whether to purchase your product or service.

Content Additions and Changes

Creating that content starts with the content plan of a seasoned search engine optimization expert. After reading and analyzing your data, SEOs decide what kind of new articles, service pages, product pages, graphics, and videos your website needs to help your potential customers interact with your business. They can then offer solutions to you for improving website rankings and customer interaction through new or repurposed content.

Keyword Research

SEOs dive deeply into researching trending keywords (words used by searchers to find web content) and their value in major search engines. They spend time and effort deciding what keywords are most relevant to your business, how users are searching for those keywords, and what kind of content will help draw visitors to your website according to those keywords.

Implementation

Once the content is created by an online content specialist, your SEO takes care of implementing the content into your website. Analysts help minimize code so the content is crawlable, integrate it into your web design, and optimize it for user interaction.

Business Expansion

The goal of search engine optimization is to bring in organic traffic. Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your website free of charge

through the use of a search engine. Doing so naturally helps your business grow by increasing the number of available and potential customers. But a quality SEO analyst is aware of more than just organic traffic increases and is invested in helping your business grow in whatever ways with which he or she can help.

New Content

Analysts don’t just plan for content that’s already relevant to your site; they can also help you discover new avenues of reaching larger audiences through new content. SEOs may bring potential new audiences or products and services to your attention, and sometimes have ideas about how to create content that markets to and for them.

Implementation of Your New Services and Products

Similarly, when you have a new idea for a product or service, SEOs will help you integrate that new product or service into your website in a way that is search engine and user friendly. Using their specialized set of skills, they will analyze how customers are already interacting with your website and find the best way to ensure that your new products and services see as many eyes as possible through today’s search engines.

Reporting

Often, your SEO analyst will prepare a report for you that lets you take a look at the most important data regarding the performance of your website. He or she will observe relationships between page visits and interactions, pair that data with engagements, and explain to you how all the pieces fit together.

Reporting helps you understand how the SEO work that you don’t see is helping to improve the performance of your website. It also helps you understand how and why your SEO is making essential decisions regarding the future of your website and your business. The opinion of your SEO analyst is well-informed, and we encourage all digital marketing customers to pay careful attention to his or her reports.

Search Engine Optimization Directs the Future of Your Website

It’s difficult to trust, initially, that an SEO has your best interests in mind. It takes sustained effort over long periods to see results, and you rarely get to see what’s happening in the back end of your website. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of an SEO and a content team, major search engines such as Google may even drop rankings for websites. Part of the reason the digital marketing industry exists is the closely guarded secrecy of search engine algorithms, and legitimate, white-hat SEO teams have to contend with the whims of an automatic indexing system.

Still, it is the efforts of search engine optimization analysts that are shaping a better future for the internet – in conjunction with the ever-improving indexing of search engines, of course. The goals of SEOs and search engines align to create ever-improving web content that is easy to find instantly. SEO shapes the future of the internet, and we encourage you to find an SEO analyst you can trust to put forth his or her best effort.

You guessed it – we’re experts in SEO at Leverage Marketing. Our agency is built on trust, and we’ve got client success to back it up. Talk with us today about what SEO can do to improve your business.