TL;DR

Good SEO analysis is the connective tissue between collecting data and better decision making. At MMC Digital, we go beyond automated tool exports (even of the tools we love – which there are many of) to uncover the commercially important insights hidden within your first party data. This helps our clients to prioritise the work that will have the greatest impact on visibility, revenue and long-term growth. 

Whether you’re diagnosing algorithm declines, identifying untapped opportunities, or building reporting that makes sense at every level of the chain of command, our analysis services provide the clarity needed to help brands make confident strategic decisions.

Pain points

Though search remains heavily weighted to traditional, Google powered search results, search and discovery is becoming gradually more fragmented, and in addition to traditional SERPs, brands are looking to track a hugely complex and sometimes AI-mediated customer journey. 

Knowing that a lack of precise analysis will often lead to even the best efforts going unrewarded, resulting in stagnant or declining visibility and inefficient resource allocation, we will always encourage brands to make sure that the data is right, and that the tools and processes to make good use of it are in place before they start to worry about strategy.

If you are struggling with any of the following, your business may have a data-insight gap:

• Reliance on vanity metrics: you are reporting on things like improving traffic and clicks, but your MQLs, SQLs, and revenue remain flat.
• Cannibalisation and ambiguity: your site has multiple pages competing for the same intent, keyword or product, causing search engines to fluctuate, rank the wrong URLs or fail to rank your site at all.
• Regular algorithmic decline: you are seeing drops in visibility and performance following almost every core update, but lack the data to properly identify what the problem is, or why specific entities, pages or content was devalued.
• Uncertain ROI: You are spending heavily on SEO or content, but you’d struggle to definitively attribute specific conversions or revenue numbers to your organic efforts.

What we mean by SEO analysis

There is a common industry bugbear of industry veterans that you’ll see crop up every few weeks in a post on social media. Newcomers to SEO, delighted with their new understanding, have a habit of branding up a generic export from a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, and they’ll call it an audit.

This is partly an own goal on behalf of the industry. We’ve spent the last thirty years documenting every trick and tactic, every experiment and every failure – there are very few professions that have published quite as much content about how to do a job as those in SEO. 

Partially that’s because we know about things like topical authority, and we know that regular publishing helps us to get clients – but it’s also because the industry is filled with genuinely clever and curious people. However, what that means is that it can take the average beginner no time at all to develop a ‘data-led’ vocabulary and, with a quick tool subscription, begin pitching SEO services to anyone with an inbox.

That has led to a dilution of the very concept of SEO analysis – it’s become almost synonymous with tool exports – but here at MMC Digital (and, in fairness, most good SEO agencies), we consider such a generic approach to be a disservice. One size fits all, to coin a Terry Pratchett line, fits nobody very well.

To us, SEO analysis is a considered and thorough examination of available data that uses tools for data collection, but relies on experience for interpretation and, as such, “data-driven” is more than just a buzzword – it’s what helps us to make good decisions.

MMC Digital’s SEO analysis services

Our team is made up of highly experienced practitioners – people who decided that they wanted to improve their earning potential while staying close to the skills that they worked hard to earn, rather than shifting into people management. As such, MMC Digital’s SEO analysis services are planned and executed by experts that have worked with some of the UK and Europe’s most recognisable brands, and have analysed data for longer than many SEO agencies have been around.

We don’t offer a cookie-cutter package of analysis, we provide a flexible and, yes, “data-driven” approach to insight to make sure what we’re delivering is what’s required to move the needle for our clients. Our analysis services include:

• Reporting dashboards and data visualisation: we’ve been building custom Data Studio reports since the first time it was called Data Studio, and have delivered live reporting that links GA4, Search Console, social, paid and full channel reporting that provides clear visibility on the KPIs that matter, and allow decision-makers clear, full-picture insights to help determine the right choices to make at any given time.
• Data mining projects: we take deep-dives (another term that is becoming almost meaningless through gen-AI overuse, but which we’ll continue to use until legally forbidden) into your first-party data to uncover hidden trends, identify bottlenecks, and help your brand to optimise not just for the present state of search, but for the future of search and discovery.
• Algorithm and penalty recovery analysis and tracking: for brands that have suffered during several core updates, we provide granular analysis and tracking of both the problems that may be leading to such deprioritisation of your brand, but also your performance – so that you can clearly see exactly which fixes are helping to restore authority.
• Content performance analysis: we evaluate every page on your site for intent-alignment, making sure that your informational content is serving to support awareness, improve visibility and help your commercial pages to drive revenue.
• Opportunity identification and analysis: we conduct research to identify the actual brands you are competing with in the SERPs (not just your “spiritual” competitors – or those you may have had in mind when starting the business) and dissect their strategy to find exploitable gaps.

What can SEO analysis services do for your business?

A thorough and expert and experience led approach to data analysis can help to change your search and digital strategy from a best guess into a defendable commercial roadmap. In our many years of conducting analysis projects for brands of all sizes, we’ve seen them deliver:

• More efficient spend: identifying high-impact, low-effort tasks (and, to be fair, high-impact high-effort tasks and everything in between), good data analysis prevents budget from being wasted on tactics and projects that aren’t contributing to the success of the business.
• Lower customer acquisition costs (CAC): improving a brand’s analysis inevitably leads to better decision making, and this leads to search projects that are better aligned with real customer behaviour – this, in turn, helps to reduce reliance on expensive paid media, and improves site-wide conversion rates (even for that same paid media traffic).
• Better decision making: although we may only provide the “lay of the land”, we also try to implement processes as well as reports that will help to make better analysis an institutional habit and allow you to more easily understand exactly where you are and what you need to do to get where you want to go.