Optimum Intelligence – a new service to help marketers understand ‘Big Data’ for SEO

An interview with James Collins

As part of our briefings on Big Data and new software services to help marketers, this interview with James Collins at Stickyeyes, introduces their new software and analytics tool called ‘Optimum Inteligence’. The service arises from a need for online marketers (Search specialists, Specialists and Executives) needed help in analysing and understanding their data, the market they operate in and access to technology from Paid and Natural Search Software.

James shares his views on ‘Big data’ related to SEO, the benefits for companies and how Optimum Intelligence has evolved and where they are with it’s release.

Q Why do you think Big Data is such a buzz word this Year?

‘Big Data’ is no doubt the marketing buzz word of 2013, and understandably so, given the importance of accountability and report ability of marketing activity. This is even more so important within the online arena, where granular data can be captured throughout the user journey to generate a true customer and market understanding.

However, big data will inevitably lead to big problems in terms of analysis and understanding of these rich and powerful insights, with the simplicity required being clouded by complex, almost mathematician-like analysis required to get to anything valuable.

Q Why did you decide to develop this new software?

Here at Optimum Labs, we’ve been trying to address this very problem along with addressing the fragmented online marketing tools market, to produce a definitive source for both strategic and tactical insights, and also auditing tools.

We’re in the process of creating and defining a software suite that boasts big data and strategic insight that has user experience and simplicity at its core, and this is what Optimum Intelligence is designed to deliver - a single source for everything search.

Q. How does Optimum Intelligence help Online Marketers?

What is Optimum Intelligence? Still in its Beta stage, Optimum Intelligence is being built with Online Marketers in mind and will offer strategic, tactical and competitive landscape insights without the painful method of having to use multiple systems, multiple platforms and multiple data sources along with offering simplified insights and strategic guidance along the way.

This is essentially the ‘big data’ for search marketing we’re hearing so much about, except we combine, crunch and analyse it with our systems to simplify historically intensive, time consuming and specialist tasks.

Our data is a collation of metric analysis, SERPs and more through a blend of proprietary systems and recognised industry sources (such as SEOMoz). We gather and hold data for the top 100 ranking URLs against high volume search terms for various sectors.

By combining these powerful data sources, we’ve managed to shape a ‘real life’ view of the competitive search environment, provided at a sector, vertical market and keyword level, and present the outputs in a number of different ways to provide online marketers with the information they need to make informed strategic and tactical decisions.

Q Can you tell me more about how it provides insight for Marketers?

There are currently 5 key insight areas to Optimum Intelligence, driving both macro and micro views of sectors, vertical markets and keyword insight: SEO Market Overview, Search Volality, SERP league tables, ClickShare index and SEO Makeup.

To give you an idea of these, here is a brief explanation:

• 1. Our SEO Market Overview provides a snapshot of 5 ranking ‘signals’ and their overall relationship with high rankings over time. This information is extracted from Roadmap, our proprietary strategic SEO insights software, which aggregates over 38m pieces of data to dissect on a signal by signal basis, and indicates the relationship between certain signals and ranking positions within Google.

This insight is designed to help Marketers to define the focus of their search marketing efforts to the areas which should provide maximum return; whether it be their backlink profile, on-site performance or social media exposure.

We also trend this data over time, meaning we have a view of the impact of algorithm updates and emerging areas, offering the ability to efficiently and effectively react to changes and plan ahead effectively to maximise return.

So, what does this mean in real terms? To give you a flavour of how this works on a market level from this data; we have found that Google+ exposure levels have been consistently increasing in relevancy to high search rankings across all markets, over the last 6 months; so essentially this means that sites have seen a ranking benefit from increased Google + exposure vs. other Social channels.

This analysis also provides a discussion point around Google favouring sites utilising its own social platform by rewarding engaged sites with higher ranking benefit than say, Facebook or Twitter exposure…food for thought…

• 2. Search Volatility. Because we track so much data across many markets, we have the ability to map out the volatility of SERPs caused by Google Algorithm updates. This analysis looks at the degree of position movement across thousands of keywords, allowing us to view the impact that changes to Google’s algorithms have over time.

Where SEO Moz gives a daily view in their Moz Cast application, we provide a wider, longer term view of the climate, and also map out key published updates to help you realise the impact of this constantly changing landscape – we hope this’ll become a useful reference point for online marketers to explain the climate they are operating in.

We’re working on making this insight available on a market-by-market and user defined keyword group basis, so watch this space!

• 3. SERP League tables. Want to know who dominates the top spots for specific keywords? Or who’s climbed highest within the top 100 each day and which URLs have taken a nose dive? We track this and it’s available to view for some of our Hollywood keywords within our SERP League Tables.

• 4. Clickshare Index. Our Clickshare index provides a view of the top 10 most visible sites in certain sectors, split by organic and paid, and also aggregated to give a wider ‘visibility’ view of the top 10 results per market.

This is a great tool to identify the big players within online markets and also get a view of what’s driving their paid or organic search visibility.

We’re developing a tool whereby online marketers will be able to benchmark their clickshare against key competition to evaluate their share of the organic and paid search markets and help to set achievable targets.

•  5. Typical SEO Make up. Ever wanted to know where to benchmark your performance for areas such as average linking page authority, link volume and social media exposure? Extracted from our Roadmap system, our Typical SEO Make-Up tool provides the median averages per-sector from the top 100 results, giving you an effective, sector led benchmark of 5 key signals.

We hope this’ll help strategic search marketers in setting realistic KPIs based on real data, and help uncover what the competition looks like quickly and easily.

Q. OK, so why is Optimum Intelligence different from some of the other insight and analysis platforms?

Unlike some of our contemporaries, we believe that reality is the best view of the marketplace, so we always track and trend actual results, not only the URLs the user specifies. This means we’ll always provide an honest view of the marketplace and tell you who the key competition really is.
We want to provide easy access to ‘big data’ and tools that will help devise strategy to deliver optimal return on investment, and help online marketers make informed decisions when shaping their strategy and reacting to market conditions, so we’re excited about Optimum Intelligence. and what value it can bring to online marketers in the future.

Q What’s next for Optimum Intelligence development?

We’ve got a number of exciting tools and analytics developments in the pipeline to help online Marketers, including:

• SERP tracking for your keywords
• Find out the ‘movers and shakers’ within the top 100 for your terms every day
• See the overall volatility of SERPs for your keywords and how your position has changed with algorithm updates
• Track and analyse your SEO progression and the distance to milestones you set
• Daily position alerts of ranking fluctuations, directly into your inbox
• Strategic Overview: your performance tracked against all your keywords, or by a user defined keyword group to give you an overview of your SEO performance

We’re still at Beta stage with the site, but if you want to keep up to date with new developments you can follow us on Twitter or submit your details on our site. We’ll keep you up to speed with how things are going and you’ll be the first to hear about new features and tools from our labs!

Thanks to James Collins for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. James is Head of Optimum Labs, the technology division of Stickyeyes, a leading Digital Marketing Agency. You can follow Optimum Intelligence on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.