Use Data Or Be Used By Data!

The October 13 issue of Seotistics is here for you!

People talk about LLMs and visibility... but is it really new?

No, it's the usual stuff that many ignored for years but now they can't anymore.

Same for branding... too many marketers claim it can't be measured, which is false.

I will outline the very basics as the full topic would require a masterclass 💀

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The MeasureSummit was great and probably the only event where I learned a lot!

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I am in Vienna for Serp Conf, be sure to come and say hi!

The Basics of Branding

How come many players in the market keep their market share despite having subpar products?

Do you think Salesforce and GA4 are the best in the market? Not really but they have invicible brand awareness and distribution.

Things that their competitors can't exactly match.

This is part of branding and how to stick around... the art of getting remembered.

After all, how can you buy something that you barely think of?

In the SEO world, many have revamped concepts from branding like they were new.

The Ecommerce Scenario

If you want to unlearn common sense, go read some Ecommerce (SEO) content.

Branding is super underestimated in the name of quick conversions.

You notice it when most claim content is optional and doesn't serve any purpose apart from ranking.

Once you understand certain dynamics, it's clear that you can't survive in the long term with hacks and ads.

I often happen to read the typical advice and it's extremely tactical and focused on short-term gains...

completely disregarding traffic and what happens AFTER you sell (or retention).

I've talked about ignoring traffic previously:

Yes, you need Acquisition to grow and survive, ranking on Google with products and categories isn't a solid long-term strategy.

Category Entry Points (CEPs)

What's the point of memory if people don't recall you at the right moment?

These triggers are also known as CEPs.

You want to be there at the right time and moment... and this is what many completely ignore.

Running some generic ads won't help you make people more aware of your brand.

I mean, yes it "will" but not as you imagine.

Say I am selling a B2B SaaS, I'd need to be sure to tie my product to specific use cases and problems.

How many tools out there are positioned for the wrong use cases?

Defining the right triggers is a hard exercise and most of us were never taught like that.

Metrics of Visibility

It's cool talking about concepts but how do we even show progress or measure success?

There are many ways and metrics like:

• Impressions (GSC) - Google traffic but highly skewed by bots. Mostly branded search here.
• Mentions - to understand who mentions you on LLMs
• Share of Search (Google, aka DataForSEO or Semrush) - your overall "position"
• Share of Voice - More complete and broader than Share of Search. Includes pretty much everything else too.

These metrics have always existed!

Social media listening software did track mentions, for example.

Now you see many vendors bragging about mentions in ChatGPT and so on...

while these metrics make absolute sense to me, the tools are expensive.

Share of Search you can calculate yourself with an API like DataForSEO, as I often do.

This is an example by my friend Elias Dabbas and I still use it after years as my baseline because it's quite effective!

While I never covered share of search on my website, there is some code on it in one of my GitHub projects along other nice functions.

However, the metrics I described are purely web related, they lack the offline side.

This is where you may consider asking them via surveys or customer panels.

They have their share of issues but I think this is a great exercise for many in SEO (and everyone else).

Understanding how people search and how they get to know your brand is a must.

LLMs & AI

Do we really need data to show their impact is minimal as of now?

Go check on your website what is the % of AI traffic you get:

• for starters, check the page referrer in GA4 and filter it
• for real professionals, do the same but from the BigQuery export

Chances are you get less than 5% in most cases.

There are studies that claim AI traffic converts better on suspicious foundations.

What we know is that AI could be the last click people do before reaching our website.

That is, if we assume AI traffic actually converts better.

While you see vendors and influencers obsessing over AI, there are countless people we don't know who get the rankings.

If we want to be empirical and evidence-based, we must accept reality 👀

How Data Can Help You

As usual, data is the raw material, a digital representation of your business operations and/or events.

There are infinite things you can do with data today, prioritize the following as we said before:

• measure your Share of Search on Google (or any social media variant)
• check your branded vs non-branded performance. Apart from the clear CTR gap, is there anything interesting in your branded queries?
• measure mentions across different platforms to see if your brand is there
• build a unified data view, aka all of your data in one place. This also helps you calculate your Share of Voice
• understand how your business actually makes money

Most people I talked to don't do this at all!

This is already a great thing!

Speaking of branded performance, I recently noticed that Bing Webmasters Tools shows queries that Google often anonymizes:

I am not going to show my query profile but you can find great insights, especially on larger websites!

Needless to say that you can also use 3rd-party tools for estimating brand awareness...

although this is mostly useful for your competitors and not your website.

Impressions in GSC is only related to what you rank for, whereas Search Volume by 3rd-parties is a general approximation of a topic/keyword.

Google Trends offers another view again... this will be covered in the future.

What Many Don't Know

When people say that web/marketing data is inaccurate or "this can't be measured!", it means they ignore how Statistics work.

The vast majority of daily life stats we know are approximations of approximations...

and what about social sciences?

Turns out that a lot of numbers we often mention aren't backed up by evidence like:

• It's 5x more expensive to get a new customer than retain one
• 80/20 (Pareto Law) -> true but the split is not always 80/20
• the (in)famous SMOTE method in Machine Learning, turned out it was supported by imaginary evidence
• a good chunk of sociology/psychology stuff you read is based on hyper biased data samples

Coming back to our specific situation, the important is that data helps us make better decisions.

These better decisions should ideally lead to more net profit.

So I don't care about 100% accurate numbers, good enough will make the trick.

And if you want to think properly and avoid all those pitfalls, you must check out my dedicated course:

Become a Top Data Analyst Now!

United Against Hype

If you think that GEO/AEO or whatever are a thing... you may want to review how you work.

Really, stuff like:

• Digital PR/curating your image online
• "Semantic" SEO, if that's a thing in 2025 and not basic common sense
• Schema markup (not proven to affect LLMs whatsoever)

This is what every good professional has been doing over the years.

I know that more technical people often lose themselves in details but this is not a good scenario.

Many companies are falling for the GEO promises for a simple fact: specialists don't have political power in companies.

It's the stakeholders who hold the reins.

What You Can Do In 2025

First of all, don't sacrifice your battle-tested practices just because uneducated stakeholders tell you so.

Hold your ground, YOU are the expert.

Second, actually measure or try doing so rather than saying "we don't know branding can't be measured".

This is what too many people tell me all the time and it's blatantly false.

Dale W. Harrison and others showed that you can indeed measure branding:

The other thing that I advocate for is... Analytics! What did you expect!?

Too many think it's coding and nerdy stuff, far from truth.

It can help you excel where others only see limits.

The focus of Seotistics is Analytics and my next issue will cover some nice data topics 👀

Don't worry though, I will convert this newsletter into a more detailed article in the next months.

And yes, I will cover ever more detailed and complete ways to measure branding, this was only a starter.

👥 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:

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🔎 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!

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Also in ebook:

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📚 Recommended Reads - Peak Content 🗻

Read this peak:

• ​Interpreting GSC Data (& Metrics Relationships)​
• How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know
• Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (and their content)
• Everything posted by Dale W. Harrison
• Everything posted by Julia Kinner
• How to Build a Workflow for AI Overview Tracking & SEO Reporting​

Some of these I still need to fully read or finish but it's essential in 2025.

Understanding what brings growth and what doesn't will save your face (and time) in many cases!

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 169, Zurich, Switzerland
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