Data mining in Search Engine Optimization is a new concept and has gained importance in the digital marketing field. It can be understood as a process that can be used for extracting useful information from a large amount of data. In other words, data mining is a process that can be used by companies for converting raw data into useful data with the help of a software.
In this article, we would be diving into the details of data mining, its role in business decisions, the importance of SEO as well as how it is changing SEO in today’s digital world.
What is Data Mining?
Data Miningcan be understood as a set of methodologies that are used in analyzing data from different perspectives and dimensions for finding out previously unknown hidden patterns. This helps in classifying and grouping the data to create a summary of the identified relationships. Data mining tasks are divided into two parts:
- Creating predictive power: It involves using the features of the software to predict any unknown or future values of a similar feature.
- Creating a descriptive power: This step helps in finding interesting and human-interpretable patterns that are used for describing the data.
Data Mining and Its Role in Business Decisions
Data mining and Big Data have become umbrella words that sum up the modern reality. Data mining focuses on evaluating the vast amount of data for discovering interesting trends and values that can be further used for improving efficiencies within an enterprise. The applications of data mining in a firm can be:
- Identifying waste habits that contribute to cost-cutting steps
- Anticipating the purchasing trends and accordingly driving sales
- Finding out slower timescales for planning downtime properly
- Uncovering new opportunities in a specific consumer segment
Data mining is being applied in different sectors and occupations. Today, customers are comfortable with organizations recording their online behavior and expect them to automate their communication experiences with the help of data mining. Rather, for many consumer-facing organizations, the ability to correctly predict a customer’s behavior is turning out to be a competitive edge in the industry. Today, organizations need to make use of the enhanced consumer understanding for driving customer service, successful marketing, product satisfaction, and ultimately growth.
How Data Mining is Changing SEO?
There are several big data organizations and companies out there. However, Google is widely considered as a major one and thus, it is easy to expect that it would have a major influence on the search. There are four ways in which Big Data is changing SEO. These can be understood through the below points:
1. Content is Transforming into Data at an Exponential Rate
Generally, content is nothing more than a published piece of information. However, with Google emerging as one of the major curators of big data, content is continuously being thought of as a quantifiable entity by Google data mining tools. Thus, by converting content into data, search engines are easily able to analyze the data and deliver more relevant answers to the users.
This way, the results from Google are becoming more structured. The detailed analysis of semantic information has helped Google in developing rich snippets, local search packs as well as other unique results that provide more valuable results to the searchers.
2. Big Data gives Deeper Insight to SEO
Google and other search engines are apprehensive about reassembling content into quantifiable data. This is making it easier for marketers to gain insight into the type of data that the users search for. With the help of big data, digital marketers can easily keep a track as well as analyze the keyword, backlinks, on-page optimization, as well as other important search areas for optimizing their efforts.
3. Custom Analytics are Turning More Precise
The ultimate goal of an SEO or an online marketer is to increase conversions. This makes it important for them to find a correlation between the elements and other analytics, such as conversions, traffic, and page views for the business as well as the competitors.
With the help of Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, as well as other analytics systems, digital marketers can check how their web content is placed in the large network of content data. This helps in making suitable adjustments to the content based on its performance. Google Analytics data makes it easier for digital marketers to keep a track of the clicks, conversions, time on page, backlinks, as well as other important search factors.
4. Data from Social Media is Becoming an Important Search Factor
Social media is another major source of getting insights into big data. Facebook has around 1 billion users whereas Twitter has more than 500 million users. Also, the web hosts around 156 million public blogs that are seeking to network on such platforms. Since Google is a big data company that is processing more than 20 PB of data every year, it cannot afford to ignore such information. Thus, signals from social media are an important factor for search and cannot be ignored by search engines.
Importance of Data Mining in SEO
Data mining is of paramount importance in SEO as with the help of data mining, a business can easily understand the behavior pattern of its customers and target them accordingly. Below are some points that show the level of importance of data mining for a business:
1. Helps in better understanding the customer
By leveraging the benefits of data mining, a business can easily understand its customers. This can be done by collecting useful information about the customers based on their previous search history and shopping preferences. This gives a good idea about the needs and wants of your customers. After understanding the customer better, you can apply the right efforts to entice the customers into buying your products or services.
2. Gives more information about the target audience
A business can easily target the target audience with the help of data mining. Data mining gives a fair idea about your relevant and target customers. By knowing and understanding the likes and dislikes of the customers, a business can target them better with the help of customized techniques. This also enhances user experience and level of customer satisfaction.
3. Helps in boosting sales
The process of data mining helps a business in identifying customers who are attracted to a specific product and whether they can susceptible to purchasing the product or not. After gaining knowledge about the who and what of customer loyalty, one can use data mining for extracting the data and increasing the level of customer involvement. This also improves marketing actions and helps in acquiring new customers.
Search engines such as Google are keeping most of their analyses well hidden from the general public, which is the main reason why many marketers do not realize the real importance of big data on SEO. The use of data mining in web search engine helps in analyzing the content and at the same time delivering results that are relevant for the users. As a result, digital marketers who are focused on creating valuable content for users sure to benefit from the impact of data mining on SEO.