So let’s prioritize first because this is the most important.
Canons
First, we’ll get a few things out of the canon. Suppose we have some canonical issues on our website. Let’s say we run a large e-commerce site and we have some canonical issues on our category pages, on our product pages.
How do we decide the priority with which they should be resolved? We can increase them as individual tickets. We certainly shouldn’t collect them all at once.
How do we segment them? The simplest answer to many traffic-related technical problems is to merge it with traffic data. By attending, for example, organic sessions or the conversion data you will get from the analysis, you can immediately weigh them. You can’t necessarily gauge the likelihood that Google will fix your canon, but since you don’t know, weighting by the traffic those pages and templates receive will be a good way to put some priority data into the tickets you’re making.
So this is the first one. We combine our technical stuff and combine it with some traffic source to get some priority.
Choose your content
The second one is probably the one that people are most familiar with, which is when you’re sitting there and writing content, you have to choose what content to do next, and often the way we do that is by combining third-party metrics. We go and join and we get things like search volume and we get things like difficulty that you might find in Moz. This kind of thing you’ll find yourself in here and it will help you prioritize.
But you can also put other parts in when you’re sitting there and going through. You can easily get a ranking where, for example, you could see how featured snippets appear; how the search features appear on those particular keywords and that may cause you to change the priority for what you are looking for.
You could put in AdWords and that, again, will give you another different feel, basically, if your company spends a huge amount of money on a keyword, you might be more inclined to write content for it.
Technical Problems
Moving on to the third example, let’s say we have another technical problem. This time, we have a drop-down menu on our website, a language drop-down menu, and we’re pretty certain from crawling the website that it’s creating an infinite loop screen with an infinite number of pages.
But how important is this? Obviously, an infinite number of pages sounds very bad, and we would certainly give it a big A in a technical audit.
But if we combine other data, such as logs, we can see what Google is actually doing. And at that point we might find that yes, this is an immediate problem. Google has already found and crawled and is currently crawling many of these pages.
Or we might find that no, in fact none were visited, and that’s a problem, but maybe it’s not a problem we need to solve right now. We have a small window. You don’t need to enter this sprint or the immediate next.
As you can see, all of these things change order as we add these other data sources.
Removing pages
Let’s look briefly at a couple more. So let’s say we remove pages from our website. We’re trying to decide which pages should be removed.
Again, we join in on the analytics, but we don’t just pull in organic sessions, for example, because if you’re trying to decide which pages to remove, it’s kind of a workload when it comes to paring down and thinning out a website. Removing could mean no index. It could mean 404. It could mean redirect to another page.
Whether or not and how you should behave about these things partly matters for organic traffic, but it also matters for all traffic. I’ve absolutely seen people say, “Yeah, this page should be 404 because it’s not getting organic sessions.” It doesn’t get any organic sessions, but the email team still sends traffic to it, so they absolutely shouldn’t 404 it. There shouldn’t be any index or equivalent.
Combining multiple different metrics that you’ll get from one source will, again, give you some insight into prioritization and how quickly you should do it.
Ranking fluctuations
Tackle one in the center. The most important thing you get with Google Search Console (Search Console) is that you get all your keywords. The most important thing that you get with ranking is that you get a much richer SERP model than you would get from just Search Console, which gives us a very small SERP model.
However, you have to pay for ranking data and you don’t have to pay for Search Console data. This typically means that most people track a subset of their rankings and track all of their keyword data or what Search Console will provide to you in Search Console.
Where this all fails is when you try to look at things, maybe you’re looking in your Search Console and you say, “Okay, great, I know we’ve lost traffic, but I’m not sure why and I’m having a hard time understanding how.” ranking in Search Console is assigned.”
If we join our ranking tracking data here, we will immediately get all that SERP functionality information, for example, that is emerging. And since all of these are naturally lumped together in ranking and Search Console, it is extremely enlightening to have combined ranking tracking data with Search Console data.
And you won’t have tracked them all, but you will have tracked a representative sample. And you might say, “Okay, maybe the whole product section went down, but we can see at least 100 of these examples.” This is because Google changed the product snippet layout as it did relatively recently in the US, and this caused this one to occur.
Paid vs. biological
Moving on to our last example here, merging your AdWords with the Search Console can also be very valuable, and merging your AdWords, your Search Console and your ranking, these are all things that play into the world of keywords, but you they give several pieces of data.
So, again, your ranking gives us rich SERP data and we can get much better things and things that we can use to better model click-through rate. We could get the ranking, but we could also get the pixel height.
And then we have AdWords, which tells us how much our company spends. At a really basic level, we can just say, “Okay, great, we don’t rank very well for this keyword, but we’re spending a lot of money on it. So let’s refocus our efforts. Let’s sit down a bit – let’s compare ourselves with the team and let’s figure out how to increase the number of keywords.” Once again, our priority is changing.
But we can do even more. Once we have all this data, we can start to change the situation in other ways. We can say, “Okay, great, we have our AdWords data and our Search Console data. We can find the difference where we’re doing very well organically.” But maybe we’re still spending a lot of AdWords money and saying, “Okay, we can reduce the amount of ads we run and instead just spend the advertising money elsewhere on other keywords that we don’t organically rank for” also because probably will we collect more than other keywords?”
So that’s the priority.