Wisdom vs. data: this is an SEO tenet that is all-too-often ignored in the industry at a disservice to clients. Many an SEO report has been sent to clients that are just data outputs of raw data from a tool without any input from the SEO professional on what the data means and why this data is important.
In Ask an SEO Episode 8, Brian talks about wisdom vs. data and why these present challenges and issues to the SEO industry as a whole.
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Wisdom vs. Data: Why We Need to Care Transcript
The transcript is below.
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Today’s question comes from Brad.
I’ve heard of the tenet “Wisdom vs. Data” in SEO.
How true is it and why should we follow it?
OK, so let’s take a look at a couple of things.
When it comes to data- you can run a tool and get data on many hundreds of thousands of different types of errors.
That’s exactly what a tool does.
It spits out errors.
What it doesn’t do is, it does not actually analyze and interpret specific issues for you.
That’s up to you as the SEO professional.
So, say, for example, if I have a few pages that are noindexed on my website, but they are flagged by a tool as being noindexed, this could actually be a false positive.
Here’s why: say that the noindex page was actually created before as a valid page.
But because of no content or whatever, you are forced to physically noindex the page and it’s being flagged by a tool.
It could be that that page is supposed to be noindexed and therefore you don’t really have to do anything.
And another example: say that you’re a brand-new website or something and you have maybe five hundred pages that have blank title tags and blank meta descriptions.
That would be a priority to fix ASAP.
So you would want to make sure that that gets taken care of as quickly as possible so that Google can crawl and index your site properly.
So those are just a couple of examples where data vs. wisdom comes into play in SEO.
You don’t ever want to send to a client an output from a tool. That’s just data.
And say “here you go!” That’s really not how it works to do this.
When it comes to data vs. wisdom we’re supposed to explain to the client why we chose what to fix on the site and where that fits into their overall site strategy right now.
That is the most important part of data vs. wisdom.
That’s it for today’s Ask an SEO Episode 8.
Please be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel for a brand new episode every week!
This is Brian Harnish signing off. Have a great day!!
