For many people in India marketing still means a sales job. Further many people wrongly believe that intelligence and analytical skills are not required for marketers.
Intelligence and analysis are essential for SEO marketing analysts
SEO analyst is a job role in digital marketing. This article provides insight into the similarities between the medical diagnosis process and the SEO analysis process. This would help understand the importance of intelligence and analytical skills for marketers.
The most critical job in the SEO process is that of the project’s SEO analyst. This may be one of the interesting or challenging aspects of the search engine optimization project.
SEO is no longer about tricks and techniques, it is hard analytical work now
The common perception of SEO is that you need to trick the search engine algorithm by some techniques and methods in order to rank well. To be fair, about a decade back the algorithms were primitive and they could be rather easily manipulated to get better rankings. Over the years, the search engines have got better and better at refining the algorithm that ranks the websites.
Complexity of the current search engine ranking algorithms
Today, there are over 200 parameters that determine the rankings of a website on search engines. That means, an increase or drop in rankings are caused by one of these factors or by a combination of them. Also, some factors could be acting in opposite directions. The sum result of the impact of all the factors becomes the rankings of the site.
Multi-parameter and multi-system thinking is essential for SEO now
The number of parameters are so large that it could paralyze an average person’s thinking ability. Or, confuse a person – who may just not know where to start reviewing the site.
When the sites are large, the amount of verification to be done to check which of the 200 factors needs to be addressed to improve the rankings is a herculean task without some short cut, logic or method to figure out what could be wrong. In such situation the field of medical diagnosis gives a better model of ascertaining how to improve a site’s rankings quickly.
Similarities between medical diagnosis and SEO analysts work
The concept of clinical history is used by a physician to establish the history of the symptoms or progress of the diseases while examining and questioning a patient. Similarly, the SEO analyst asks questions, analyzes the trends of rankings and SEO credentials to establish what could be causing the negative effects on rankings. This history is especially helpful when a site with healthy rankings has seen a drop in rankings.
Another key skill that is common between a doctor and a SEO analyst is the concept of doing examinations, evaluations and simultaneously thinking about the cause of the problem. Many times a SEO project does not improve rankings despite building credentials and promoting the site aggressively. At such stages especially, the SEO analyst’s ability to do evaluations while simultaneously think may be very helpful for diagnosis.
More and more similarities – it does not seem to end
Pattern recognition and maintaining objectivity in thinking are other things that are common between a SEO analyst and a physician.
Client feedback on ranking changes, monitoring of rankings or changes to a key SEO credential enables smart SEO analyst to drill down into that specific area like a doctor does a pertinent system review. A competent SEO analyst will examine specific areas with respect to a site when a specific issue is noticed or reported. A not so smart SEO person will take considerably longer (if at all) to find the issue, because they will examine non-pertinent things on seeing some rankings or SEO symptoms.
Other common medical diagnostic methodologies that are used in SEO are chronology and case building. Without these two methods, it is difficult to identify what is preventing the improvement in rankings.
Even more similarities between medical diagnostic methods and SEO analysis
Other common characteristics are test ordering strategies. Each test or analysis consumes a certain cost in terms of time consumed by the analyst or other team members in doing the work, the blocking of time on the SEO tools for running time of the reports and overall time consumed that could be used for another project. So a good analyst will choose a strategy so that the issue is diagnosed quickly with least number of tests or analysis done. This is not a straight forward work and requires intelligence, experience and knowledge of SEO.
SEO diagnosis is an uncertain art just like medical diagnosis. Both require taking some risks in identifying the root cause. Once the decision is taken, then there is a public review of whether the diagnosis was accurate. Some people are troubled by such decisions / risks while a good SEO analyst and physician thrives on such experiences, especially their ability to correctly make the diagnosis. The ability to make a call and see that it is proven correctly is something that makes the job very interesting.
Digital marketing jobs are for analytical, intelligent, hardworking people
Hope this article provides some perspective on skills required to succeed in the job of SEO analyst and the key role of the SEO analyst in the success of a SEO project that is solid rankings on SERPs (search engine results pages).
In conclusion, the key thing to understand is that unlike many other professional areas, the field of marketing requires multi-dimensional analytical abilities to succeed.
