Nick Brogden, the founder of Earned Media was recently invited to be involved in a fantastic project for Kochie’s Business Builder and Monday.com called Kochie’s Business Booster. This offers a free course that can help people you a bit of extra information that may help you scale your sales, boost your brand and learn more about marketing.

Supercharge your sales and marketing

The below video is my lesson on data and analytics. If you would like to check out the complete course head on over to the Kochie’s Business Booster page, sign up and get into it.

Video transcript

Google Analytics is a data tracking software for your website which allows you to accurately see how people interact with your site. 

The reason why this data is so important is that it allows you to see the amount of traffic your site has and importantly understand the value of the traffic. 

Via some simple-to-use filters, you’re able to see information such as if the user is viewing your site via a mobile phone or desktop computer, 

you also get data on how they entered your site which could be things like Google Ads, organic search or a referral from another site such as Yellow Pages. 

It also lets you see how long they spent on each page and importantly which ones converted into leads and sales.

Correctly understanding this data helps solve the age-old problem which is summed up by the famous quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

In digital marketing, this statement is no longer valid. 

That’s because via programs like Google Analytics we know exactly which visitors enter your site and convert into sales and which ones don’t. 

This information allows you to invest in marketing channels that prove their ROI and of equal importance stop spending on channels that don’t.

Google Search Console (GSC)

Another must-have data tool by Google is called Search Console. 

Search Console is a tool mostly used for search engine optimisation as it provides you with data that is more related to how your site is performing in Google’s search results. 

So basically information on what’s happening before they enter your site is tracked in Google Analytics.

This data is valuable for search engine optimisation as it allows you to see important metrics such as:

• Keywords that were discovered by Google. 

• Keywords that your site lost in Google.

• Information on keyword ranking over a specified period of time and the number of people that clicked through to your site.

This information is vital to SEO planning as you can see how your search engine optimisation efforts are performing and estimate future traffic volumes via combining metrics such as average click-through rate to average position and total impression volume.

So if you know that if position 1 spot with 10,000 impressions gets a click-through rate of 13% you can expect around 1,300 clicks. 

So if you have another keyword with the same metrics but your site is ranked in position 5  which obtains a 2% click-through rate will only get 200 clicks 

If you can focus more SEO effort on this keyword and move it to position 1 you will likely increase the traffic for that term by over 500%

When used correctly Google Search Console will become one of your major reporting and forecasting tools for SEO-related data. 

Keyword research

Keyword research is another area absolutely driven by search data made available by Google. 

Google provides detailed information on the number of people who search a specific query each month and data on what people are willing to pay for them. 

This information makes up a large part of planning out which keywords will drive the most traffic to your site and even more importantly which ones are likely to drive the most commercial value.

A simple example of how this data can be used to establish the best keyword would be, say a person searched the query ‘plumber Chatswood’ (which is a well-known suburb in Sydney) vs just ‘plumber.’

Now in Australia the term ‘plumber’ is searched over 30,000 times a month and the term ‘plumber Chatswood’ is searched only 170 times a month. So focusing on ranking for ‘plumber’ would be the way to go, right?  

Well not necessarily as if we review the cost per click data it tells a very different story as it shows that plumbers are willing to pay upwards of $40 – $50 a click for ‘plumber Chatswood’  but less than half that for the term ‘plumber’.

This is due to the fact that when the suburb is included in the query the person searching is perhaps much more likely to actually hire a plumber right away yet the more broad term they are more likely to be doing research on hiring a plumber.

So, without the search volume and cost per click data, it would be very difficult to determine which keywords are going to achieve the most commercial value.

Using data for content creation

When planning your blog content it is important to incorporate Google’s search data into your ideation. 

Creating content is hard work so you want to ensure that the content will target a term that has regular search volume, these are called ‘evergreen topics.’

If you check the search data for queries around your topic and then optimise for the best search terms your article will have a much better chance to get traffic from search engines.

An easy and cost-effective way to access this data is via a Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere. 

Once set up you will start to see estimated monthly search volumes and the cost per click data.

The best part is on the right side of the page it shows some related topics which may be of higher value.

As an example, say you’re a bookkeeping business and you target small businesses. 

Perhaps you might want to write something like ‘bookkeeping tips for small business.’ This has around 10 searches a month with a near-zero CPC. 

But after reviewing some related keywords we can see the term ‘bookkeeping for small business’ has 590 searches a month for over $16 a click.

So you would be better off focusing the article on the query ‘bookkeeping for small business’ and keeping ‘bookkeeping tips for small business’ as a sub-section of the article. 

If you use this data-driven approach when creating blog content your chances of profiting from the content are much higher.