Modern digital marketing companies rely on a mixture of technology and talent. How can spreadsheets help combine them both?
Data-driven SEO is the core of digital marketing
Most people involved in marketing for business today at least vaguely understand the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO). At the same time however, it’s a dynamic and complex subject, and most businesses could ultimately stand to improve the ways in which they practice SEO and use it to drive digital marketing efforts. One way they can do so is through the use of Excel, which can be an extremely helpful tool in structuring SEO efforts. But first — what exactly do modern digital marketing firms do, and why is SEO so important?
Modern SEO balances tech and talent
The fundamental purposes of digital marketing are to expand brand awareness and drive consumer traffic for businesses. And while in the past this was largely a human effort built on diligence and creativity, it is now a process that involves strategic, tech-based practices as well. Leading SEO company Ayima describe the process of modern digital outreach as a “blend of technology and talent” built to achieve results. And chief among the actual methods for achieving those results that they mention is SEO. That’s a strategic, data-driven, yet cost-effective way of expanding visibility, generating traffic, and ultimately bringing in revenue.
SEO generates traffic but also business intelligence
As to why SEO is such an essential part of modern digital marketing, there are many reasons to consider. Entrepreneur’s rundown of SEO benefits did an excellent job of highlighting some of the key factors, such as the ability to generate traffic and conversions or the fact that effective SEO can build trust with a long-term audience.
The same piece also points out that SEO can feed “customer behaviour data” to businesses, influencing more informed decisions. These benefits relate to the back end of SEO, wherein measurable consumer interactions with online content yield data that can be used to adjust and fortify strategies.
Excel connects talent with tech
Understanding what modern digital marketing firms do and why SEO matters then, how can Excel help? As mentioned, the best digital marketing efforts today involve a blend of technology and talent. And in a variety of ways, Excel can serve as one of the underlying technologies that give the talent what it needs to act.
Excel, in its versatility, allows executing customised strategies without technological barriers. Basic computer skills let marketing professionals quickly learn spreadsheet functionalities to perform their search engine optimisation tasks efficiently.
Sorting voluminous data
It’s a simple yet critical perk of using spreadsheets for SEO: Unless a firm manages troves of data for a particularly large company, it is difficult to exhaust Excel with raw input. Companies can gather a great deal of data on conversions, website traffic for different posts, and performance for various keywords. Excel provides the means to organise and collate such data.
The specific spreadsheet design and data organisation can vary between companies, matching their analytical goals. Still, Excel is an accessible tool that can turn stupefying logs of numbers and information into neatly ordered information. This allows marketers to draw insights and use them to inform strategies.
Organising and curating keyword lists
Keyword statistics are among crucial inputs to marketing analytics. Spreadsheets provide a viable way to select relevant keywords without high-end analytical skills. Excel allows sorting information alphabetically and based on the search volume or cost per click.
Any company can originate a vast array of different keywords in its online content efforts. However, when they’re all jumbled together, it can be challenging to pinpoint the most lucrative ones. Keeping a log of keywords (and their performance) in Excel can highlight areas of focus and make things quicker and easier for marketing experts.
Providing Useful Features For SEO
It is also important to note that Excel provides a number of unique features that can be very useful in SEO efforts. A list of tricks on Business-2-Community includes an overview of Excel functionalities useful to marketing experts. Formulas such as XLOOKUP, SUMIF and COUNTIF make it easier to manage large amounts of data, helping to combine tables and selectively extract information. Specifically, XLOOKUP is essentially a comprehensive search mechanism that lets you look data up across tabs, even including partial matches. And COUNTIF is a means of efficiently spotting and eliminating duplicate data, while SUMIF allows conditionally aggregating values such as search volumes.
On top of that, Excel offers a galore of text-focused functions which allow organising and processing text input at scale. Whether checking the length of headlines, changing lower case to upper case or extracting specific words, spreadsheets can be immensely helpful.
These are only a few examples, but they demonstrate that Excel has tools and formulas particularly helpful to SEO and digital marketing experts.
Excel remains a popular tool in marketing
Considering these benefits, the overall usefulness of Excel in digital marketing and SEO is apparent. We have noted before that Excel’s democratisation of data has kept it popular for so many years, which comes into play in digital marketing efforts. Spreadsheets offer a cheap, intuitive, wholly manageable way for businesses and external marketing firms to manage enormous amounts of data without advanced programming skills. Furthermore, there is always something new to learn! Excel can be used in virtually limitless ways, and its capabilities constantly expand. We would encourage digital marketing and SEO professionals to explore our content for additional spreadsheet ideas for marketing.
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