August 12, 2021
Adam Audette, SVP SEO
Today, we're proud to announce the official launch of our new SEO capability! When we set out on this adventure, we wanted to create an SEO service offering that does things better: a sophisticated capability combining the principles of data science and business intelligence (BI). We know what works in SEO, and we know what doesn’t. It’s continually changing, but the core methods remain consistent, and our approach has always been built on sustainability, quality and transparency.
Throughout a long career in digital marketing (that started before Google existed), I’ve seen the industry develop from the wild west into what it is today. In a small way, perhaps the teams I've been on have contributed to that evolution. But I still see gaps to be filled. Agencies can do so much better to help fill these gaps for brands, areas like more efficiency and speed to results, lower cost and overhead, more of a ruthless focus on performance, less distractions on time-consuming busywork, and less widely used poor quality data. A philosophy that considers automating any technical SEO function as much as possible, while leaving important analysis and recommendations to smart humans.
The combination of data science and SEO is unique. While data analysis is a core part of any successful SEO work, much of the industry isn't very deep in analytics. Most agencies separate analytics and search marketing functions into separate teams and departments. At Blend360, our analytics and our SEO live under the same roof. Additionally, most agencies don't complement their SEO services with data science and business intelligence (BI) expertise. At Blend360, these are combined into an integrated offering that is totally unique in the industry. But then again, we're not an agency either. We're a services company!
Our focus is on the convergence of data science and SEO. What this means is more powerful user behavior research (going beyond keywords, to focus on entities and other behavioral data not confined to search), more compelling competitive analysis, more insightful content strategy for SEO teams, and more applications of search data to tell business stories in product research, market forecasting, and more. It also means a high focus on accountability and performance reporting, from sizing opportunity investments, to reporting back on results in the SEO channel and cross-channel.
In effort to best describe this new SEO offering, we prepared this Q&A style piece:
Data science is the application of scientific principles such as statistics to big data sets. It includes data engineering, the technical work of consolidating, cleaning and categorizing large and disparate data sets into useful frameworks; and business intelligence, the strategic analysis designed to derive actionable and insightful outcomes from the data.
Remember the famous quip, “content is king”? Well turns out in the 21st century, data is king (and by the way, also queen). As the evolution of technology has enabled companies to gather more data from multiple sources, the challenge is presented how these data are to be useful. That's where data science comes in. Without data science capabilities, large data sets are cumbersome and devoid of actionable insights. Now, just imagine what this means when it's applied to SEO. That's where Blend360 SEO lives.
Because SEO at its core is about leveraging data to figure everything out: what the strengths and weaknesses of competitors are, what the problems and opportunities on a site are, and where the issues and strengths in a link graph are, too. (We can’t totally ignore links, unfortunately. But we try.) With robust data science capabilities, we get to the answers that much faster. And more importantly, we get to answers that you simply can’t discover without using data science. We also have the ability to layer different data sources on top of each other, such as log file data layered on analytics and ranking data, or regional local data on query data on top of product preferences.
Imagine any SEO data source: crawl data, log files, Google Search Console data, Adobe Experience Manager, and keyword data from a third-party platform, too. Now, imagine taking from each of those the key inputs that matter to you, combining them into an organized format, and then outputting them into a visualization such as Tableau. Doing this we can create a nearly endless stream of data visualizations that will help SEO teams go harder, faster. We won’t be confined by only using SEO data, either. But we'll always have on our SEO hats to identify where opportunity exists, and to better inform roadmaps and SEO strategies.
We’re pricing engagements as projects, retainers, and hybrid models. Being Blend360, we also do talent placement, which means we can place teams on-site and badged if you prefer that approach. We also price our services with performance-based models to align incentives and minimize the risk of a big investment without a clear return. We don’t like fuzzy returns.
Watch this space, because much is planned. In the meantime, please check out our data science and SEO capabilities page. And our blog. Because, we're gonna blog again. If you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear it. Hit me up on Twitter @audette or hit our contact page. We'd love to hear from you.
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