Who wouldn’t want more cus­tomers, clients or sales? In order to do this, we need to bet­ter under­stand our tar­get mar­ket. What is their intent? What ques­tions are they ask­ing? Are there sea­son­al changes in the way they are search­ing for our product(s) or ser­vices? Who are the indus­try influ­encers? These insights give way to an expand­ed dig­i­tal reach, a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence and an over­all increase in con­ver­sion rates.

Big data can be daunt­ing, but progress resides in momen­tum! Here are six quick momen­tum-build­ing hacks for mar­keters.

1. RegEx Gold

b(adding|does|do|who|what|where|when|why|how|are|will|can|?|am|is|was|were|be|being|been|versus|vs|vs.|best)b Plug in this string of pearls into your GA’s Advanced Seg­ments and sit back while mag­ic rolls into your inbox. Any time some­one types a ques­tion into Google and then clicks on your web­site in the search results; you’ll get an email noti­fi­ca­tion as to what that ques­tion was! Incor­po­rate these new­ly dis­cov­ered ques­tions into your website’s FAQ to see an increase in qual­i­fied leads. If some­one is ask­ing a ques­tion, there are like­ly oth­er peo­ple ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions. Help and engage them, too! First, plug the RegEx string into your Google Ana­lyt­ics View > Seg­ments > Traf­fic Sources > Key­words (match­es regex): Next, go to the Audi­ence Overview and select that seg­ment to view. Then, click email in the top left cor­ner and sched­ule the fre­quen­cy and the per­son you want to receive the reports.

2. Find Content Gaps

Explore fre­quent­ly searched queries with­in your indus­try by putting in one or two key­words and pause! Now do a casu­al A‑Z sus­pend­ed search and record any new dis­cov­er­ies in a spread­sheet. Next, plug in your key­word query finds into Google Key­word Plan­ner for addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion regard­ing the search vol­ume, com­pe­ti­tion, etc. Pro tip: Fil­ter results by spe­cif­ic loca­tions if tar­get­ing a hyper-local demo­graph­ic. Now, piv­ot your results by look­ing at the high­est search vol­ume queries and high­light­ing the queries that have a com­pe­ti­tion of .20 or below for quick wins! Pro tip: Orga­nize key­word results into dif­fer­ent “intent” tabs: “How to” search­es make for great blog posts: What are peo­ple find­ing when they per­form these queries? Let’s find the con­tent gaps with­in those quick wins! Google answers this one instant­ly: This one too! Bin­go! These results are ter­ri­ble! Build some­thing 10X for this oppor­tu­ni­ty gap and kick ass!

3. Google Advanced Operators For Search

Quick­ly eval­u­ate a site’s indexed pages by search­ing site:www.example.com In this exam­ple www.northlandtackle.com has 1,310 indexed pages and you can quick­ly eval­u­ate the top author­i­ta­tive page’s title tags and meta descrip­tions: Search for some­thing spe­cif­ic (in this case, ‘Bass’) with­in a web­site: Bass site:northlandtackle.com Find page titles with spe­cif­ic words: allintitle:MN Fish­ing Tips Tip: Add “” to find words in exact match­es; for exam­ple, allintitle:”MN Fish­ing Tips” will find pages with that exact phrase: Explore ‘Fish­ing’ Guest Post Oppor­tu­ni­ties by using the search: “guest post” Blog:Fishing Shop Smarter with this advanced search: fish­ing rod $50..$100. This lets you view all fish­ing rods that are only for sale between $50 to $100.

4. Custom Google Analytic Dashboard For Easy Data Visualization

Install Google Ana­lyt­ics Add-On: Now cre­ate a new report. Pro tip: Make this a smart sheet by adding some extra for­mu­las to always aggre­gate This Week vs. Last Week data! Do this by titling the first col­umn “This Week” and delet­ing the 7 in Last N Days and adding: Start Date (which will always pull the Sun­day of the cur­rent week!): =today() — (weekday(today()) — 1) End Date (which will always pull the cur­rent date!) by enter­ing: =today() Now title the sec­ond col­umn “Last Week” and copy over the first col­umn data, you will only need to change the Start & End Dates to: Start Date: =B5 ‑7 (because we sim­ply need to minus 7 days to get the pre­vi­ous Sunday’s date) End Date: =B5 — 1 (because we sim­ply need to minus 1 from Sun­day to get last Saturday’s date) This will now pop­u­late three new tabs: ‘This Week’, ‘Last Week’ & Sheet 1. These reports are pret­ty dull (don’t wor­ry we will spice them up!): To cre­ate a sim­ple area line graph go into ‘Sheet 1’ and add these cells: Now pop­u­late these cells with the fol­low­ing for­mu­las to always pull in up-to-date data: Now you should see some­thing like this: Select all of the above cells and click the ‘Insert Chart’ but­ton: Select your graph of choice. I like the area graph for this one and always tend to move the guide to the bot­tom, cus­tomize the col­or, add the prop­er title, and WABAM! The best part? You can embed these inter­ac­tive graphs on a live web­page! After you embed your graph some­where (maybe a live Google Ana­lyt­ic Dash­board Page just for your clients?) you need to make sure it’s always fetch­ing updat­ed data. To do this sim­ply go back to your spread­sheet > Add-ons > Google Ana­lyt­ics > Sched­ule Reports > And set this to run every hour.

5. Screaming Frog

Scream­ing Frog is a pow­er­ful free tool. Crawl an entire website’s pages to eval­u­ate title tags, meta descrip­tions, pho­to size, sitemap audits, canon­i­cal errors, redi­rects, and more! You can also go full “spi­der” mode and crawl up to 500 URIs by pur­chas­ing their pre­mi­um ver­sion. Here are just a few things you can quick­ly crawl with Scream­ing Frog:

• Bro­ken links
• Errors (no respons­es, 404s, etc.)
• File sizes
• Word count
• Head­er tags
• Canon­i­cal ele­ments
• AJAX
• Anchor link text
• Images
• Nofollow/follow
• Redi­rects
• Source code search
• Load time
• Meta descrip­tions
• URI issues
• Exter­nal links
• Cus­tom extrac­tion of data sets
• XML sitemap gen­er­a­tor tool

6. Google Trends

It’s one thing to think you know every­thing about a par­tic­u­lar niche, and anoth­er to visu­al­ize the data dri­ven requests behind it. This sim­ple tool allows you to visu­al­ize big data quick­ly! Can­cer I’ve always loved how the Google Trends graph for “can­cer” looks like an arrhyth­mic heart beat. Call me crazy, but I think it’s beau­ti­ful and appro­pri­ate. I’ll nev­er for­get the first time I dis­cov­ered this. I sat there, mouth open, amazed at how this could tru­ly look like a beat­ing heart. But, after tak­ing a clos­er look, you’ll notice the search­es peak dur­ing Octo­ber, which is Breast Can­cer Aware­ness Month. Bey­once The geo­graph­i­cal­ly dense areas for “Bey­once” have always made me smile: They are con­sis­tent­ly small South African towns. Sowe­to, an urban sub­urb of Johan­nes­burg, South Africa, loves Bey­once! Hav­ing seen this trend for years now (yes, I check up on my favorite trends because what’s more fun than that!?) my heart broke when I delved deep­er:

• Bey­once ‘too expen­sive’ For SA
• Fans Fall For Fake Bey­once Tour
• Bring Beyonce’s Mrs. Carter World Tour To SA Face­book Page

I digress, but go to South Africa, Bey­once! They love you! Den­ver Bron­cos vs. Seat­tle Sea­hawks We will con­tin­ue to see big data like this in new and inter­ac­tive con­tent. For exam­ple: most pop­u­lar Hal­loween cos­tumes by loca­tion. Google is using SVG 1.1, XML Name­spaces and Local IP address­es to cre­ate this gem.