Leverage Social and Forum Data for Advanced SEO Strategies.

Boost the SEO efforts by tapping into unconventional data sources such as YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest to gain real-time audience insights and valuable market intelligence.

The most useful data for crafting SEO-friendly content often doesn’t come from Google, Bing, or standard third-party SEO tools.

Instead, platforms like Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit serve as powerful search engines, brimming with insights about audiences, markets, and engagement.

In a landscape where effective SEO content must prioritize user needs, this type of data is invaluable.

It provides rapid consumer intelligence from readily available resources.

Breaking Down the Data Silos

When discussing SEO insights and research, it’s common to focus solely on essential SEO metrics such as keywords, SERP positions, and domain authority.

However, these represent just a fraction of the overall picture.

In a model centered on market intelligence, SEO-relevant data can be categorized into three distinct types:

Search Data
Social Data
Forum Data

Each category provides unique insights into target markets and audiences.

Demand Data

When a user conducts an online search, they express an active need for products, services, or information.

This “active demand” perspective allows us to leverage search data to assess demand across various industries, specific niches, unique topics, and individual brands.

Search activity extends beyond Google, as it occurs on any public website where users input queries to find relevant content from a range of sources.

Key Data Points:
Competitive Analysis: Compare brand demand on an apples-to-apples basis to understand how much demand each brand captures in the market.
Hashtag Volume: Measure content saturation around specific topics or brands.
Historical Trends: Analyze demand fluctuations over time for specific topics.
Keyword Intent: Identify user behavior and language at different stages of the customer journey.
Keyword Volume: Quantify how frequently users seek information or products.

Sources for Demand Data:
Google Ads
Google Search Console
Google Trends
YouTube API
Third-party tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush

Engagement Data

Likes and follows matter; They indicate that content or a brand has successfully engaged users.

By evaluating data from social media platforms, measure engagement at scale, helping brands identify trends and tactics that resonate with their audience.

Key Data Points:
Audience Insights: Gather demographic information based on interests and motivators.
Follower Count: Measure organic growth and loyalty.
Hashtag Volume: Track how much content is generated around particular topics.
Likes and Views:  Evaluate user engagement with content.

Sources for Engagement Data:
Facebook and Instagram
LinkedIn
Pinterest Trends and API
YouTube and API
X (formerly Twitter)

Sentiment Data

Forums, reviews, and comments are rich repositories of unbiased qualitative feedback.

I refer to this category as “sentiment data” because it provides a nuanced view of how people feel and communicate their passions.

Collecting sentiment data is akin to gathering qualitative insights that would typically take extensive consumer research. However, we can achieve this in just days.

Key Data Points:
Questions: Reveal real problems that users want to solve, indicating the prevalence of those issues.
Answers: Highlight which types of information and authors effectively address these questions.
Comments and Reviews: Offer uncensored consumer sentiment on products and trends.
Language Patterns: Analyze the terms and phrases audiences use to express opinions and resolve problems.

Sources for Sentiment Data:
First-party data
Forum sites like Reddit
Marketplaces like Amazon
Q&A platforms like Quora
Review aggregators

From Everyday Data to Digital Market Intelligence

Digital Market Intelligence (DMI) involves analyzing demand, engagement, and sentiment data to derive insights about markets and audiences.

DMI gathers and assesses millions of digital data points from publicly available, ethically sourced information, providing insights that traditional qualitative surveys often require.

This method is frequently more accurate because:
The data reflects genuine behavior from real people, free from survey biases.
Large data sets can be compiled within days, ensuring relevance and timeliness.

DMI analyzes data from a broad population instead of relying on small survey samples.

Sourcing Data for DMI

The primary methods for collecting DMI data include four key tactics:
APIs and Platform Tools: Utilize APIs or platform-specific reporting to extract anonymized interest and behavior data.
Web Crawling: Deploy tools to crawl public web content at scale, uncovering meaningful patterns and insights.
Third-party Tools: Leverage tools like SEMrush, Apify, or GummySearch to aggregate and analyze substantial data sets.
First-party Data: Integrate first-party data to connect market insights with actionable implications for the business.

Leveraging Digital Market Intelligence for SEO

Understanding the target audience and market is fundamental to successful SEO.

DMI helps brands create the right content to engage the right audience by illuminating their interests and preferences.

It enhances traditional SEO research by adding contextual depth, helping to refine and differentiate content strategies.

Utilizing demand data for SEO is straightforward, as this aligns with core SEO activities.

Let’s explore the insights gained from engagement and sentiment data and how to harness them effectively.

Utilize Reddit to Identify Current Topics

Google’s effectiveness depends on presenting helpful results aligned with user search intent, a challenge in recent years.

With more users turning to alternatives like user-generated content (UGC), Google has prioritized UGC in search results—making Reddit a key player.

To gain an edge in creating innovative content, brands should find relevant conversations early.

Tools like Gummy Search can help track trending discussions across essential subreddits, revealing valuable insights before competitors respond.

Transform Amazon Reviews into Use Cases

Use cases illustrate how products fit into users’ lives, but brands often overlook various applications.

Consumers deeply understand their problems and needs, making them valuable resources for discovering new use cases.

For instance, a kitchen supply brand might promote a rolling pin for baking.

However, if a user purchased it for pottery, that use case could present an untapped opportunity.

By employing tools like Apify to crawl Amazon reviews, brands can categorize and quantify use cases effectively, revealing new avenues for keyword research and content creation.

Explore Trends and Demographics on Pinterest

Social media platforms like Pinterest and TikTok often set trends before they hit Google.

Traditional search data alone cannot highlight current trends, making Pinterest Trends a valuable resource.

For example, if managing a lifestyle blog for millennial parents, leverage Pinterest Trends to identify the most relevant

Halloween costumes for families.

By analyzing engagement data, tailor content that resonates with the audience, focusing on timely, relevant topics rather than merely optimizing for keywords.

Dots Will DMI Connect for

Employing social and forum data in the SEO content strategy is just the beginning.

By dismantling data silos with the DMI framework, uncover a wealth of insights beyond traditional SEO metrics.

As start applying this approach to the SEO research, consider what the data reveals about the market and its implications for other channels or the overall business.

Connecting these insights requires a fundamental shift in perspective, recognizing the value of the data surrounding us.

That’s the essence of Digital Market Intelligence!