What Is Data Visualization And How To Use It For SEO

Planning and executing an excellent SEO strategy is critical for any digital marketing campaign.

However, the effort requires data to tell the story in a way that resonates with our clients.

But poring through pools of numbers can be tedious and mentally exhausting. This is where data visualization comes in.

Data visualization takes your data (numbers) and places it in a visual context, such as a chart, graph, or map. It also helps create data stories that communicate insights with clarity.

Without visualizing data to extract insights, trends, and patterns, the chances of getting support from other departments plummet. The best data visualizations break down complicated datasets to present a concise and clear message.

Read on for more on data visualizing, its importance, and how to use it for your SEO campaign.

Types Of Data Visualizations

For years, the easiest way to build data visualization was through adding information to an Excel spreadsheet and transforming it into a chart, graph, or table.

While still effective, the method has undergone a few updates in the last few decades.

The options today allow users to create elaborate data visualizations, including:

• Bullet graphs.
• Animated charts.
• Radial trees.
• Interactive charts.
• Bubble clouds.
• Data art.
• Heatmaps.
• Dashboards.
• Infographics.

And many more.

Screenshot from screamingfrog.co.uk, August 2022

The above is an example of data visualization to see a website’s crawl hierarchy.

How To Choose The Right Visualization Type

Choose the right visualization type to communicate your message effectively.

Before getting started:

1. Identify the key message you want to communicate and summarize it in a short sentence.
2. Find the data you require to communicate your message and also consider simplifying it to make this message clearer.
3. Consider the type of data you have, such as comparisons, trends, patterns, distribution, and geographical data.
4. Consider what display type is simple and will capture the audience’s attention.
5. Like all web content, your visualization should be accessible to all users.
6. Consider the information to include with the visualization, and readers can understand and interpret the data.

Importance Of Data Visualization

Modern companies are generating massive amounts of data through machine learning.

While excellent, we must sort, filter, and explain the information; so it makes sense for stakeholders and business owners.

It’s easy to identify patterns and trends in your SEO strategy quickly using data visualization. Visualization makes it easy and fast to convey insights. Making data visualization a habit in your business offers several benefits.

Create Robust Value Propositions

It’s easy to express to stakeholders or clients how and why your products are good, but not as easy for the same people to understand what you are saying.

Visualizing your data is an excellent strategy that can increase buy-ins into ideas. The strategy can also transform site traffic into sales, contributing to a business’s success.

Enable Faster, Easier Communication

All businesses are looking to advertise their products to the public. But few people take the time to read tons of words.

Instead, simplify the message into visual content that’s easy to present.

More people will focus on visual data than on text. The visuals help capture the attention of and persuade potential customers, clients, and investors.

As a result, this helps drive traffic into your venture, which leads to success.

Analyze Patterns And Trends

Business industries depend on specific patterns and trends. It’s your role to make decisions based on market patterns and trends.

Visualizing data summarizes the entire process of identifying current and future opportunities.

The data also helps make business owners prudent decision-makers aligned with the market situation.

Motivate Team Members

Business success depends on the effort team members put into the process. Each member of your organization is happy when the business makes development strides.

Data visualization can help identify the business’ initial position and the direction it’s heading.

The process can motivate the team members to work harder and elevate your business to greater heights.

Improve Customer Experience

Visualizing data plays a critical role in improving your customer’s experience. The data makes it easy to ensure customers are happy and their requirements are included.

Data visualization makes shaping, filtering, and desegregating data on-demand easy.

Data Visualization And SEO

SEO data significantly affects the keyword search volume contributing to a site’s ranking.

Keyword search volume is the number of times visitors search for a specific keyword in a particular time frame. The term also refers to the number of people interested in a keyword.

SEO data is also critical for organic traffic in different online marketing aspects. The latter is the number of people visiting your site.

Page speed is another critical SEO practice that determines your website’s reliability.

Your online visitors don’t have the time to wait for a page to load. Further, page speed also affects your position on the search engine.

Using Data Visualization To Improve SEO

Visualizing your data has a significant impact on interpretation. Visualization can help represent search volume for different keyword sets you want to use in your next campaign.

Visualization tools can also present a detailed analysis of your site from the SEO point of view.

Presenting your content in charts and graphs helps the audience grasp every aspect of an SEO campaign.

Elevate SEO Capabilities

Data visualization can help elevate your SEO strategies in several ways. Here are the most effective areas in that visualization will help boost SEO.

Competitive Analysis

Working on your SEO strategy also means evaluating what competitors are doing. The analysis helps you understand what requires doing and areas to improve.

Visualization can help you:

• Determine the social media strength of competitors.
• Find top competitors for a keyword.
• Analyze competitor backlink profiles.

Screenshot by author, August 2022

The above is an example of using a bar chart to visualize the keyword difficulty distribution of current keyword rankings.

Backlink Analysis

Visualization also aids you in creating an effective link-building campaign.

Some items to analyze include:

• Backlink geographic locations.
• Quality of backlinks.
• The distribution of backlink anchor text.

Wrapping It Up

Data visualization is a vital contribution to the success of any business practice.

What makes visualization critical is its ability to convey complicated data sets visually.

Anything that can condense large amounts of data into infographics, charts, and graphs is a successful recipe.

It’s clear incorporating visualization in your digital marketing operations elevates SEO capabilities too.

Further, visualizing your data plays a major role in business development and SEO decisions.

More Resources:

• 8 Tips to Make Your Data Visualization More Engaging & Effective
• 14 Essential Data Studio Visualizations For Paid Search Marketers
• Content Marketing: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Featured Image: ra2 studio/Shutterstock