Last updated on December 15th, 2022
As a digital marketer, SEO is something I have to know like the back of my hand – but it’s also something that a lot of business owners need to know and understand.
As a result, I get a lot of questions and emails around SEO.
Here, I am going to be taking a look at SEO intelligence (see also, ‘What is Cloaking in SEO‘) including what it is and how it can help benefit your business.
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So, if you’ve seen this term used a lot during your research but you are not 100% sure what it actually means, then I hope my explanation below will clear things up for you.
What Is SEO?
First, I have to explain what SEO is (see also ‘Does Responding To Reviews Help SEO?‘).
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is a method used by businesses and marketers to help improve a website’s visibility online. It works by improving your business’ website search engine rankings.
This can help more potential customers visit your website for your products and services, as 67% of clicks go to the top five websites on search engine results pages, and 95% of web traffic goes to the websites that appear on the first page of search engine results.
So, getting high up in SERP rankings is important for boosting your businesses revenue. As a result, 75% of marketers agree that SEO tactics are either extremely or very effective and 70% even prefer SEO marketing methods over others like PPC.
How SEO works involves meeting the factors that search engines use to rank their results.
Search engines like Google or Yahoo only want to offer the best and most relevant website to their users so they use bots known as crawlers to scan websites to see what kind of content it offers, how fast its pages can load, and how trustworthy the website is based on the amount of backlinks it has.
Google actually has over 200 ranking factors it uses to evaluate websites – so optimizing your website for search engines can take a lot of work and research.
With all this in mind, it’s now time to move on and see what SEO intelligence actually means.
What Is SEO Intelligence?
In marketing, the word ‘intelligence’ is often used to describe the data and information a company gathers to support its strategies and give the business an edge.
Basically, your intelligence is the results of the analysis you conduct from the results of your research in various fields.
This means that SEO intelligence is just the term used to describe the data and information you and your business gathers from the analysis of your SEO research results.
Because SEO is so complex and covers so many different areas, SEO intelligence overlaps with other aspects of ‘intelligence’ that businesses use to inform their marketing and business decisions.
Some examples of SEO intelligence include keyword intelligence, audience intelligence, content intelligence, and competitive intelligence.
Here they are in greater detail.
Keyword Intelligence
Keyword research is a core part of SEO as it has multiple uses. It helps you find the keywords you need to target and include in your website’s tags and content.
This is because these keywords are the ones your target audience is using in their search queries, and so search engine crawlers are actively looking for websites to recommend that use these keywords.
94.74% of keywords get 10 monthly searches (or fewer), while around 15% of Google searches are completely new, which means that businesses need to constantly be carrying out keyword research to ensure their keywords are still relevant.
So, you can argue that the keyword intelligence you gain from your research are the keywords your audience are using and what other keywords they may potentially use in the future based on their past keywords.
Audience Intelligence
Audience intelligence refers to the knowledge you have about the audiences which reach your website and the ones you are actively targeting.
By analyzing research and data, you can gain insights into their behavior, preferences, and more. Basically, you find out what your audience wants and how they want your business to deliver it.
This kind of intelligence can actively influence not just your marketing and SEO, but also other aspects of your business like your product research and development, your competitive research, and more.
However, 65% of marketers say that they rarely or never do any audience research – so their limited audience intelligence could lead to bad marketing decisions.
Content Intelligence
This type of intelligence allows businesses to find the type of content their audience wants and prefers.
According to the CMI, 67% of marketers agree that content marketing generates leads and demand, and a further 63% agree that content marketing builds loyalty with existing customers, so it’s easy to see why 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.
Content intelligence allows marketers to generate and upload the right kind of content of a good quality which audiences are expecting.
Competitive Intelligence
Finally, competitive (or corporate) intelligence is the insights you gain from researching your competitors.
For SEO, this includes everything from how they have designed their website, to what content they post on their social media accounts and how frequently, where they get their backlinks from, and more.
56% of executives use competitive intelligence to monitor their competitors, and this can help them gain an advantage over their competitors.
57% of companies believe that gaining an advantage over their competitors is one of top priorities in their industry so this shows just how important competitive intelligence is.
Final Thoughts
So, SEO intelligence is a very broad term used to describe the information and insights gathered from your SEO research and analysis. Due to the broadness of this term, it bleeds over into other types of intelligence such as content intelligence and competitive intelligence.
All of these insights can influence your SEO strategies and decisions including what type of social media platforms you choose to where you get your website’s backlinks from.
All of this can then help your website climb the SERP rankings and new potential customers can find your business.