Much of SEO science is analyzing your strategies to determine success. To help professionals learn the SEO analytics skills they need, Shepard recommends taking University of Virginia’s Marketing Analytics class on Coursera. This course focuses on analyzing data from search engine rankings.
The analysis of search engine ranking data helps marketers and publishers make decisions about what types of stories to cover and which marketing strategies work best. Google Analytics (GA) is a leader in this area and provides key business intelligence (BI).
“There’s almost no skill more valuable than being able to report on results,” Shepard said. “All of the SEO work doesn’t matter if you can’t convince your boss that you’re actually doing something; [you’ll have difficulty] if you can’t identify problems on your website and understand your audience and where they come from.”
A key part of analytics involves conversions, which involves tying your business goals into analytics, Shepard said. “The idea is, you want to be able to connect your actual business revenue to your content performance,” Shepard said. “You can do that through analytics.”
Shepard gave the example of someone who wants to sell solar tiles and who can measure how many people sign up for a webinar on solar tiles rather than collecting data on actual purchases of solar tiles. Some people make the mistake of just measuring the bottom line rather than measuring the traffic of content, he said.
“All of these can be goals in the conversion funnel you’re measuring or tracking,” Shepard said. “And you can measure the performance of these goals against the content to see how each piece of content is contributing to your bottom dollar. Sometimes links are an important metric that people ignore because they think it’s not selling what people want to sell.”
While you can measure in an hour how much profit your site has earned, it could take weeks to a month to analyze how SEO helped you earn a profit for the quarter, according to May. This is where tools such as GA come in to help you analyze the data on a deeper level. Analytics training, which is offered by most online learning services, including Coursera, LinkedIn, and Udemy, can provide the critical foundation skills you’ll need to help you get the role you’re looking for in SEO.
After you complete your online SEO courses, the best way to keep learning SEO is to practice it on the job once you get there. On-the-job training is the best way to further learn, noted Chris Rodgers, founder and CEO of Colorado SEO Pros.
“It is a science and an art that require years of learning, practicing, and constant education to truly know what you are doing and eventually become an expert,” Rodgers said.
Have any questions about SEO and e-learning programs? Join the PCMag@Work discussion group on LinkedIn and you can ask vendors, other professionals like yourself, and PCMag’s editors.