How does Big Data Boost International SEO? In Practice

The most common SEO methods have a blind spot: they don’t draw on an extensive amount of big data to gain a competitive advantage. So how can you actually hack Google algorithms and turn data into real value? How can you use them to gain and maintain a high position in search – among growing competitors? And finally, how can you overcome obstacles in international markets using big data analysis? We share all the answers.

Why Do We Analyze Big Data when Creating International SEO Strategies?

When planning digital actions, we cannot do it in a vacuum. Regardless of whether we want to reach or strengthen relationships with companies’ customers internationally, or launch a product or service in a foreign market, we must take into account that the rules of the game depend on many factors. And analyzing large data resources can help us answer the awaiting challenges like…

1. Standing Out from the Crowds of Online Competition

The number of sellers is growing faster than that of consumers – especially during the pandemic. Giving an example, the number of users on the Polish Internet at the beginning of the pandemic increased by 2-3 percent from month to month, which means 600-800 thousand new internet users per month. This is incomparably lower than the number of new online stores, which increased by 21.4%.

Example: Number of online stores in Poland (in thousands)
Source: bisnode.pl, Bisnode A Dun and Bradstreet Company, 2021

This causes a fierce fight for customers – especially if you sell products/services internationally. Companies are looking for a competitive advantage, and at the same time, in search of savings, they want to optimize only the most key elements, often not knowing which are the most important or cost effective growth opportunities. They need real recommendations and useful hints.

How Big Data Analysis can Help: 

Search engine is the primary channel for brand research (54.9% of internet users aged 16 to 64 worldwide) and the number 1 source of new brand discovery (34.2% of internet users aged 16 to 64)*. Organic search is one of the cheapest and the best ways to gain new customers. So, if you are in the business landscape with a large number of competitors in search, you have to carefully choose which factors to focus on – you’d better not have to guess or try to optimize all of them. Big data allows us to analyze and choose only those factors that will ensure category leading high positions on search engines

Knowing what matters most when working on search engine optimization for your brand or product, can keep you ahead of your competition. Reverse engineering supported by big data solutions prevents you from spending too much time and money on SEO. Why use big data when you can simply ask an SEO specialist? Because search engines use data and AI algorithms to build ranking pages, the best tactic is to use the corresponding method yourself.

*  source: report Digital 2021: Hootsuite & WeAreSocial

2. Making (Practical) Use of Data

It is estimated that most companies are only analyzing 1% of data*

Many companies collect, search and have access to a comprehensive volume of data. But in fact, few of them can use this information to find real value and to translate it into concrete actions. 

Research, without subsequent implementation, costs a lot of time and work, and brings too few benefits. Too much data often leads to indecision. This is where the right AI and machine-learning tools can really help.

How Big Data Analysis can Help:

Apart from determining the most important ranking factors in search engine, big Data Analysis help us, for example, in analyzing big streams of traffic to the website and making optimization decisions:

  • Is the traffic valuable or generated by bots?
  • Are the apparent fluctuations of visitors normal?
  • What is the trend? Will the traffic increase or decrease?
  • What user patterns / areas can we improve?

* “The big data challenge of transformation for the manufacturing industry”. (IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub)

3. Understanding Users’ Intent – Deeply

To be the TOP of mind and create results-oriented SEO strategies, it’s best to get into users’ shoes – start with the intentions that accompany the use of services / products.

The specifics of the industry, different needs, cultural factors – all these affect the way users search for information about a company or topic. And this leads to specific optimization activities.

How Big Data Analysis can Help: 

Simple competitive analysis is not enough to create an effective online visibility strategy. You would have to manually analyze a lot of competitors’ data. 

Therefore when conducting analyses for a given market – or markets, we construct a set of thousands of keywords. For the keywords that cover the given industry, we download the TOP search results. We then verify and clean this obtained data – the output is precisely verified by our R&D experts. And only then do we transform this into precise implementation recommendations that fit user/recipients needs and intentions.

 

How did we Use Big Data in Practice?

Case 1: What Fashion Industry Businesses Should Know to Be on the TOP of Search?
Big Data Analysis – Clothing Market New Zealand

Specific markets and industries have specific organic ranking factors that influence their position in search. That’s why Whites Agency and Pure SEO analyzed the search results of a specific vertical – fashion industry – in New Zealand, based on a reverse engineering approach. 

In SEO, a reverse engineering approach enables analysis of an extensive, too comprehensive for people, amount of search results and makes it possible to distinguish the features of the leaders, which translates into building precise strategies.

Case 2: Which SEO Factors are CRUCIAL depending on the Website Category – eCommerce or News?
Big Data Analysis British Market in eCommerce vs. “news”

Top-performing domains in different categories should optimize particular onsite and offsite components – depending, among other things, on the user’s intended phrases in search. How do we know? Empirically. With big data analysis of the industry benchmarks in SERPs.

“Why make a website load faster if the users need it to be optimized for mobile more?“

Our R&D team of experts carried out a big data analysis of the online market in the United Kingdom. We’ve found results for 10,000 users’ intended phrases from eCommerce “Electronics” stores and “News” websites (5000 each) and compared the data from each domain in terms of Lighthouse ranking factors.

The effects of big data Analysis confirmed that particular ranking factors of websites differ depending on the users’ intended phrases in search. This also lets us optimize clients’ websites for key ranking factors in Google. 

Successful International SEO Strategies Start with Big Data

Online promotional actions in the face of this enormous increase of online competitors, an overwhelming amount of data and struggles to understand user behaviour in search – call for extraordinary measures

To understand which factors ensure that you will become a search leader in your specific Industry, our R&D team leverages in-house technology based on machine learning and reverse engineering methodology, as well as research on users’ search activity. 

That makes it possible for us to produce the best SEO recommendations and strategies for those who want to be on the TOP of users’ search and mind.
If you want to find out how big data can grow your business – feel free to talk to us!