Use Data Or Be Used By Data!

The September 28 issue of Seotistics is here for you!

As said in the previous issue, small websites can win against big players.

Now we have access to better tools like agents and I am here to show exactly how.

Needless to say, you need real skills and AI alone is pointless.

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📣📣 Important Announcements 📣📣

As for conferences/events, the next ones are:

• ​SEO On Stage (Athens) - 24 October 2026 (contact me first for 70% off)
• ​MeasureSummit October 2026
• MeasureCamp Zurich - 21 November 2026

But there is much more planned:

As usual my latest course is here:

I'm very excited for what's going to come, a lot of jucy stuff from October onward :3

Small Team, Big Guns

With the new technologies, being small isn't that bad anymore.

Apart from being faster, you have less technical debt and a lot of flexibility in terms of what you can use.

My goal for 2027 (and onward) is to grow the Seotistics website to show you that you can outcompete bigger players.

I already did that in the past but you know... it's always nice to do it again for yourself!

Right now it's doing well but there is a LOT of potential for organic growth.

I will show you some examples with my usual stack: Hermes Agent.

You may check my previous content for more information.

Otherwise, you may have a hard time following the entire agent discussion.

Your Research Agent

One of the things that are disappearing the most quickly is content research.

Well, not proper research, but the lazy one built on keywords and recycled ideas.

If you consider Seotistics, most keyword data would be pointless.

When doing research, it's mostly banale and simple topics for tutorials... which I don't really like.

You'd have another GA4/GTM tutorial website, not my thing 💀

So... coherently with modern practices, you need to expand your research with platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit.

I was a little bit scared the first time for LinkedIn (you can get banned for scraping) but this service from Apify is safe.

For Reddit, something like this works but now Hermes Agent also supports minor native Reddit scaping.

Then, as always, you can use a service like DataForSEO to scrape Google results and Shopping (register here, I am a partner now).

This is what I've also shown in Belgrade (slides here) and what I am actively working on.

The future of websites is curating knowledge bases (well even today) but many don't see this coming.

A full setup like this can range in price between $15-25/month, which is peanuts.

The New Content Economy

Until August 2023, you could pretty much dump a lot of content in Google and get relatively easy rankings.

After one "helpful" Google update and some help from AI, content isn't what it used to be.

So forget about writing content cheaply with AI and hitting publish... it doesn't work.

In B2B context it's even hard and you have to provide a LOT of original research.

I use Google data with moderation too, for me a lot of articles are still too generic compared to good LinkedIn and Reddit content.

A Small Note On Scraping

As mentioned earlier, it's about retrieving information from the web

My agent did me the favor to summarize how I structured it for this sort of activities, you gotta love it.

Scraping should be your last resort because it's not efficient and not necessarily easy.

For more complex scrapes, I've found Apify quite reliable!

All of this is cheap, quick and can be used by every small player. The only issue is... some websites are hard to crack.

In those cases you need to play smarter and create your own solution!

Brainstorming

Another very underrated use case of AI agents is helping you with decisions by simulating multiple outcomes.

This is needed a lot if you have to plan something and want to hear different opinions.

You can have separate agents with radically different personalities to explore POVs.

It's also true most LLMs amplify your biases and tend to be too nice with you 👀

Ecommerce Catalog

Most of the Ecommerce tasks are quite boring and should be automated.

For example, some great improvements come from optimizing Title Tags or even creating new category pages.

If you provide your GSC data and some common sense, you can automate a big chunk of it.

Smaller players have a smaller catalog and don't have that much technical complexity.

You can have a very simple system to tell you when to update products, much like this one:

What you see in the picture above can be formalized to AI:

• Get data and define metrics
• Assess them
• Evaluate scenarions
• Propose solution

Even before AI this was possible BUT now you have much more room for interpretation, classification and summarization.

I will talk about Jev soon, a classifier that is cheap and quick and is currently making the headlines.

Years ago, you could have a nice script but get no actual insight into planning or what to do next.

Something like this doesn't usually cost that much, if you consider the benefits of managing your catalog.

The New Reporting

Many analysts are growing disaffectionate of Business Intelligence... which is partly too slow for modern needs.

In the past the cycle was annoying: data -> nice dashboard -> it breaks you fix it -> repeat -> people use it -> fix it -> etc.

Now it's clear that legacy BI tools can't compete against AI.

AI per se doesn't replace or substitute a proper dashboard and I scarcely believe in Conversational Analytics.

Talking to your data is overrated because many lack the analytical skills to ask questions.

For Seotistics, I was using Data Studio myself but I feel it's too clunky for my needs.

So I will pivot into a custom app for my own needs, I find it easier to work with.

Smaller players don't need to hassle with complex setups, even though I find Data Studio quite easy.

And more of this when I have more time in my next issue! We will get back to topics like Jev and new models 😎

👥 Join Our Community

Our Discord community offers a small place where we can talk business and web data.

If you hate all the noise of social media, then this place is for you.

I will start posting more there as we have a forum channel now.

This is the best way to stay updated in real time on Seotistics:

🔎 Analytics For SEO Ebook - Course / Ebook

You will:

✅ Use GSC and GA4 Data to their fullest potential

✅ Learn Python/SQL for your needs

✅ Get a complete blueprint for auditing websites

✅ Learn how to 10x your productivity

✅ Learn BigQuery to work on large websites

I teach you what's needed to go from 0 to a professional Data Analyst.

Even if you leave SEO, the foundations are the same for other jobs!

Also in ebook:

Think Like A Web Analyst

This course teaches you to:

✅ frame Analytics problems

✅ understand which metrics matter

✅ managing Web Analytics projects successfully

📚 Recommended Reads - Peak Content 🗻

Read these peaks:

• ​Ultimate Content System: Scaling Seotistics​
• ​Orchestrating Systems & Automations​
• ​The Evolution Of The Web Analyst​
• ​Setting Up n8n On A VPS: A Practical Guide (Hetzner + Docker)​
• ​Hermes Agent On A VPS: The Complete Setup ​​Hermes Agent On A VPS: The Complete Setup​

You will see new stuff next week 👀

As usual, my most recent LinkedIn content is here.

❗️ Feedback and Recommendations

If you have ideas/recommendations for the next issues of Seotistics, you can simply reply to this email.

Marco Giordano
​Data/Web Analyst

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Bernerstrasse Süd 167, Zurich, Switzerland
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