Unlock the power of Search Data: A Guide for Enterprise Businesses

Search data can be one of your most powerful tools to align decision makers, strategies and actions across the entire organization.

Understanding what data to collect, how to collect and analyze it, and what to do with the powerful insights are key. SEO rockstars are at the heart of unlocking the power of search data.

In today's fast-paced and complex business landscape, every decision maker from every part of the business is faced with multiple challenges on a daily basis. Adding to the complexity is that each decision-making group typically has very distinct, sometimes conflicting, priorities and concerns.

How do we help them to align their strategies and make informed decisions that collectively work towards the same business goals?

It’s a question that we often get from our clients, and I was recently asked to discuss the topic at one of BrightonSEO’s events. My answer? Unlock the immense potential of data-driven insights and use it to empower every decision-maker across your entire organization.

Here are some key insights that I shared with the audience.

Different decision makers have different decisions to make

The first step is to understand what keeps your decision makers awake at night. What are their pressure points and where do they intersect with other business areas? From an enterprise perspective, you can typically create two broad groups:

• CEO, CMO, and marketing & web team: This group typically focuses on revenue, growth, attracting new customers, and marketing efficiency.
• Head of Communications, Head of Brand, CFO, Head of Sustainability, and Investor Relations: Examples of this group’s main areas of concern are brand transformation, messaging consistency, corporate reporting, share of voice, talent attraction, legal compliance, and more.

Each group often operates in silos and on very different scales, a scenario that makes true collaboration and long-term strategic alignment near impossible. To bridge this gap, a comprehensive approach that integrates search data becomes essential.

The challenges faced by enterprise businesses

Let's consider a large multinational automotive brand as an example. It has a diverse audience with varying needs and behaviors. From wanting to know about autonomous vehicles or how the company is performing to questions about sustainability, the brand needs to cater to a wide range of audiences, interests and expectations.

This often translates into multiple websites and domains, each targeting specific topics or services. Owning and managing these topics becomes an intricate dance, especially when determining which site should rank for specific search terms.

Collecting and analyzing data at scale

Fortunately, search engines like Google provide fresh, absolute, and an ever-expanding body of data for free, enabling businesses to easily access, export, and analyze vast amounts of information. This data serves as a valuable resource for drawing meaningful insights, especially when segmented to cater to a particular decision making group’s needs.

For example, by dissecting search terms, patterns can be identified and categorized into dimensions (a set of data attributes) and tags (different keywords or terms that are relevant to the dimension). Nowadays, this process can easily be automated using AI and auto-tagging tools, making it even more efficient for large datasets.

Understanding market demand and search behaviors

This data segmentation process further helps decision makers understand market demand and search behaviors related to specific topics. By selecting tens of thousands of distinct search terms and estimating their monthly search volume, we can determine the total reach of brand impressions and get an idea of the traffic potential. This can be done for any dimension and every decision maker, making powerful, relevant and accurate insights readily available and accessible to the entire organization.

Over time, these analyses become even more powerful as trends and shifts in search behavior start to emerge. Combining different dimensions and tags also becomes possible, a process that almost always uncovers valuable insights such as the relationship between certain search terms and user intent.

Benchmarking and competitor analysis

Rankings and direct competitor insights will add an additional layer of data richness to the analysis mix. By benchmarking a brand’s performance against its competitors, and examining the coverage of keywords, search volumes and impressions, we can start to assess our position in the market. This analysis can be further expanded into different dimensions to reveal which brand is leading within a specific business area or topic.

Empowering decision makers with data-driven insights

Armed with these insights, decision makers can now make exceptionally well-informed assessments. They can reallocate resources, adjust strategies, and develop content plans tailored to different dimensions, target audiences and competitive vantage points.

However, with great data comes great responsibility and all efforts can be in vain if the different decision makers are not perfectly aligned. Enter the SEO rockstars who have the necessary skills and experience to guide and lead the process, expertly guiding questions like: which site should own which topic, which sites should be merged, what is the best intent and content to successfully engage a specific group of searchers?

The transformative power of search data

Ultimately, search data is a powerful compass that guides enterprise businesses. It can inform service and product portfolios, target audience understanding, marketing plans, channel strategies, and content and communication planning. Moreover, it empowers decision makers to make informed business decisions, both for the present and the future.

Want to find out more about the value of search data and how SEO superpowers can help align every decision maker, strategy and action across your entire organization? Get in touch with our team of experts.