You are an SEO with the best intentions of generating traffic and awareness for your brand (or client). After work, you make a trip to the grocery store and pay a few dollars more than you expected.
On your way home, you stop to fill up your gas tank and notice that the price per gallon is higher than the last time you filled up.
He shrugs and starts mentally planning for the next day: researching your favorite keyword research tool, checking site speed metrics after some asset optimizations, and prioritizing a few pages to review after analyze traffic month by month.
I’m here to tell you that you’re missing something.
If the past 12 months have taught me anything, it’s that macroeconomic trends significantly affect the way users interact with online content.
SEO may not be the first initiative that comes to mind when figuring out how to incorporate macro angles into their marketing campaigns, but if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out.
This article examines:
Macroeconomic signals to watch and why. Reference sources for measuring user reaction. How to assess the evolving needs and emotions of users. How to address these needs and emotions in your SEO campaigns.
Macroeconomic signals to watch and why
I’m not saying you should use daily gas prices as a barometer. I’m saying they could be a good reminder to keep your finger on the pulse of the bigger picture.
Signs to watch for include:
Consumer confidence ratings. Venture capital and private capital financing trends. The stock exchange. inflation The monthly jobs report.
If you are B2C, consumer confidence, inflation and jobs are key.
If you’re B2B (especially working with high-growth companies, like me), it’s essential to assess how easy (and/or expensive) it is to raise funds.
And for marketing agencies, you know that the macro economy heavily influences the economics of how businesses spend on marketing and spend to acquire users.
If you work in an industry closely related to finance, such as lending, real estate, or insurance, you likely have a second layer of important metrics to look at (e.g., mortgage rates).
Either way, knowing the economic landscape can alert you to peak times to look for more information to help you effectively engage users.
Reference sources for measuring user reaction
The SEO space is not about staying in a reporting bubble; it’s about introducing audience behavior, which means you have to know your audiences. This goes far beyond monthly search volume and search volume over time.
Many of the top keyword tools are aggregated monthly over time and won’t give you the agility you need to measure impact in real time.
Google Trends, on the other hand, has become an incredible real-time source for changing behavior.
Check out the geographic (and time) breakdown of the query “air conditioners filter wildfire smoke” during the disturbing period in June, when Canadian wildfires were turning New York’s metro skies orange:
Twitter and Reddit are other good sources of up-to-date information.
Depending on who you follow, Twitter can give you insight into people like journalists and politicians, who help shape the broader discourse.
Reddit can take you into the weeds to show you what the people closest to the ground are saying.
If you want to measure impact in your specific industry and see the most popular approaches and angles:
Choose two or three trusted industry sites. Rate (non-sponsored) articles in top positions. These properties have almost always been earned with a lot of commitment.
Qualitative data about your customers, clients and prospects is always good to collect. Your own reports, from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, will show you in real time if you already have any assets that are generating renewed interest.
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How to assess the evolving needs and emotions of users
If the sources I just referenced touch on common themes, opportunities, or challenges more than once, you have another level of analysis to do.
What fears, ambitions, or questions do these point to that you can address with UX and content? And what modifiers could you add to broader queries that can make them timely and relevant?
For example, a few years ago, when mortgage interest rates were between 2 and 3%, a simple “mortgage agent” would suffice.
With interest rates rising today, something like “mortgage broker comparison tool” or “mortgage broker price match” would likely attract tons of high-intent engagement.
For B2B, less available funding means a big reduction in budget, which in turn means a reduction in transactional intent and a shift towards the funnel towards research and education, which you can address with content that discuss industry challenges and your unique solutions. .
How to address these needs and emotions in your SEO campaigns
I’ve already mentioned a couple of ways to address them: changing the nature of your content and keywords to align with changing intent.
Other ways to use your analytics include new site hubs to address discrete challenges, updated UX to emphasize relevant topics and messages, and even new content initiatives.
(For example, I once had a client in the manufacturing space; we built a content strategy around the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment report in which we received real-time analysis of the client’s CEO every time the report came out, and we’d publish the analysis immediately and get a lot of incremental traffic.)
The other step is to provide information to your paid media teammates. Let’s say we’ve created content for a relevant term that gets a lot of traffic and conversions (which is directional data but still indicates that the page is valuable). In this case, your paid media team will want to know that bidding within this timeframe, while expensive, is highly likely to be successful.
And from a keyword perspective, remember that keyword planners aren’t exactly up-to-date with traffic data, so if you see spikes in real time, you can help your paid colleagues out ‘n profit before the costs of the keyword come to increase the volume.
Looking at the bigger picture
You’ll notice that none of the above contained (extremely amateurish) predictions about the economy itself.
Whether the economy stays in motion, changes for the better, or collapses, the same principles remain: macro trends should be reflected in SEO strategy.
And it’s not just the economy. As COVID taught us, anything that has a transformative effect on society at large introduces new needs that SEOs can help address.
So consider this a reminder to broaden your perspective beyond your usual contributions. Even in SEO, a little bit of inquisitiveness and real-time analysis can pay off that you won’t see growing in Keyword Planner.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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