For many years we (Search Johnston, 3Sixty's SEO partner) have been using the data Experian Hitwise provides to improve the relevance of our clients’ websites to search demand, and recently Hitwise asked us to partner with them because of the value they see in our treatment of their data.
Steve Johnston: "20% of everything typed into Google on a daily basis has never been typed in before."
Hitwise data is unique in our industry, in that it is a very large sample — some 8 million UK internet users — of real online behaviours, from which we can learn some critical things about how the consumers in the marketplaces of our clients look for the products they want to buy. When we know from Google that 20% of everything typed in on a daily basis has never been typed in before — and most of that will never be typed in again — any sort of sampling of the search goals of consumers that neglects to include the diversity and scale of the long tail can’t hope to be representative, and will always fall short of providing really valuable insights.
Hitwise comes the closest to delivering a representative sample of that tail that there is anywhere in the world, and we pull very large selections of it when working for our clients. This data is also unique because it is behavioural and can therefore be qualified by intent; we can select data that represents visits into a selection of websites only, thereby ensuring that the demand is associated with, for example, an intent to buy, rather than an intent to inform — the difference between a visit to a retail site and a visit to Wikipedia.
When pulling data from Hitwise, we often end up dealing with datasets that have millions of unique search expressions in them, to which we apply our analysis methodology to arrive at clearly defined clusters of demand for the things people want, along with their associated volumes and values to the client in question.
This clear valuation of search demand is prized by our clients as it enables them to make investment decisions appropriate to the potential rewards of search success. We also make it really easy for our clients to act on and measure the optimisation recommendations that we make, by providing really good looking visualisations of the data which make it a pleasure to work with. From our years of SEO experience, we know that achieving change is usually much harder than knowing what to do, so we invest heavily in making these changes to a site’s relevance as easy to adopt as possible.