Using Data to Optimize Content at Scale with Botify

As technology accelerates in the realm of organic search, brands face an ongoing pain point: how their content teams can optimize site content at scale, through the lens of SEO.

As a content marketer, you know the struggle. Your team is tasked with a huge amount of responsibility:

• Creating, maintaining, and distributing content
• Making sure it’s fresh, engaging, high-quality, and meets business needs
• Maintaining a brand narrative that resonates with your audience
• Competing with high-volume AI-generated content in search results
• Understanding content visibility and whether top content is being found
• Finding, analyzing, and actioning data from a number of sources to drive decision-making

That’s just the day job. Content is intrinsically tied to organic search. It’s how content is discovered and served to the right audience at the right time. As a result, you also need to stay on top of constantly changing SEO trends, such as Search Generative Experience (SGE) and other recent shakeups in organic search.

On top of all that, you face an ongoing challenge to show ROI from efforts that often have no clear, straight line to business outcomes.

Using the platform your SEO team already relies on, we’ll go through how content marketers can use Botify to succeed in the face of change with the help of good data and smart analysis.

Use data-driven insights to better understand what resonates

Google has stated over and over again that “creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” is table stakes for competing in search — bygone tactics like keyword stuffing haven’t been effective in years. As we enter a reality where AI generates answers in search via Google’s SGE and Microsoft’s Copilot, it’s more important than ever to future-proof your content by making it as helpful and relevant as possible. As search evolves, your content will continue to be the crux of your website storytelling. It should encourage answer discovery and satisfy the consumer’s needs across their full customer journey.

But without data to underpin your content strategy, it’s impossible to understand what’s driving consumers to your content or reverse-engineer what they need from you.

Combine metrics from different sources to fully inform your content strategy

The data that powers a strategic, future-proof content strategy is made up of many inputs: the competitive landscape, historical trends, consumer intent signals, and of course mission-critical business metrics like revenue and conversions.

The obstacle for content marketers has always been gathering important data that’s scattered across disparate marketing tools. Platform access and familiarity, aligning timeframes and filters for different metrics, and pulling everything into a cohesive narrative is time-consuming — and more concerningly, it invites human error. Manually combining metrics from different sources is a chore at best, and at worst it affects the integrity of your decision-making and the direction of your content strategy as a whole.

Botify’s unified data model presents information from all your sources in one place:

• Keywords, rankings, and more first-party data for SEO intelligence from your connected Google Search Console
• Competitor rankings to see how your content is faring against top players and identifying content gaps, powered by Semrush
• Paid search data to both give you a holistic view of your search strategy, reduce cannibalization, and offer insight into consumer intent, powered by GA4
• Revenue and conversions data to measure impact and success, via integrations with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and more

With critical site data compiled in one place, you’ll be better able to pinpoint trends as they shift and change, keeping you in lock-step with organic search as algorithms and strategies evolve.

As a bonus, using the same business-critical data as your SEO team means you’ll be aligned in making your informed decisions, across both content strategy and organic search.

Take advantage of comprehensive search query data

Robust query and engagement data is your key to crafting content that both fulfills user intent and is strategically positioned to attract organic traffic. You may know that Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that offers data and insights into any website that has it enabled. It has a wealth of information that can help you understand how effective your content is and provide clues on how to improve it, but its user interface is limited — much of the information provided there is sampled, meaning it shares a representative portion of your data, but not the full picture.

Botify enables content teams to make data-driven decisions by offering comprehensive, unsampled data from GSC, pulling in hundreds of thousands to millions of search queries monthly per customer domain. 

More query data means a clearer picture of your audience’s intent — and we know that intent optimization is core to content strategy as Google and other search engines shift to AI-powered search experiences. 

This depth of data from Google Search Console will vibrantly illustrate which queries are driving organic visits and what content is ranking. You can then dig in, uncovering insights that will power an intent-first content strategy:

Look at the ranking URLs. Is your top content there?

Your freshest, most important pages deserve organic traffic. If they aren’t showing up, it’s time to examine your content from the lens of consumer intent.

• Does it answer the main question they’re searching for? 
• Does it anticipate and answer follow-up questions? 

A robust page that understands and speaks to consumer needs comprehensively is your best bet for earning traffic now and as generative search tech becomes the norm.

Analyze the keywords sending the most traffic. 

• What patterns emerge? 
• Where do these keywords fall in the funnel? 

Examine the gulf between these keywords and your content and business goals. What’s missing from your site’s storytelling that will move them further along the customer journey?

Identify valuable opportunities across content and keywords

Get curious and explore your query data with an intent-first mindset. Here are a few ideas on the opportunities that can be found hidden within your data:

Which keywords result in impressions but no clicks?

Examine the pages that appear in the SERPs but aren’t getting visits. Do any themes or trends stand out? In particular, look for signs of mismatched intent. Is broad top-of-funnel content appearing for a closer-to-purchase search? Could your title tags be optimized to improve CTR, or does the content itself need to be changed?

How is your consumers’ behavior changing?

Identify new keywords that have never been searched before. Do any patterns emerge? What do you notice? Thoughtful analysis will keep you ahead of customer trends and changing habits as AI-generated answers encourage more conversational search interactions.

Which keywords perform worse on mobile?

Intent plays a strong role here as well. What could make a difference between desktop and mobile searches? Is the content too long to consume on a small screen? Could there be technical issues impacting success? This may be a good opportunity to collaborate with your SEO team on an answer.

What can last year’s keyword performance signal about this year’s peak season?

Seasonal content strategies are almost impossible without good data that illuminates trends and opportunities. Analyze what worked — and what didn’t — and let it be the springboard for your peak season success.

Which content is in need of a refresh?

It’s simpler and much more resource-efficient to update existing content than to create it net-new. Uncover your site’s content that has potential for increased traffic to work smarter, not harder.

What keywords are within striking distance?

Identify the keywords within your reach with potential to drive even more traffic to your website. These can be your areas of focus as you hone your content to-do list. A keyword gap analysis can also reveal areas where your competitors are doing well to further narrow your focus.

How have pages fared since the most recent Google algorithm update?

Understanding which pages and keywords have improved (and which have dropped) is key to a smart strategy. Combat the latest fluctuations by keeping your finger on the pulse in the wake of algorithm shake-ups.

Prove progress and value with regular reporting

Don’t forget the power of reporting as you address these issues and make content optimizations. Though it’s an effective way to reinforce the value you’re driving, manual content reporting is tedious, especially when it involves pulling data from multiple tools and trying to build a story around it. Share progress with your colleagues and stakeholders with easy-to-create keyword performance trend reports in Botify that aggregate data from discrete sources to prove your impact and help you earn buy-in for future initiatives.

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Content creation has changed, but content marketers have always been at the forefront of search changes, adapting tactics and evolving strategies with every major algorithm update. The world of AI-powered search is new, but good data and actionable insights will help content marketers come out on top.

Ready for a closer look at how these features can level-up your content marketing and SEO strategy? We’d love to talk —  book a demo with us here.