Simone says: “Tip number one: you are a marketer and not just an SEO.

You're doing marketing in 2025. This is true now more than ever.

So, you have to tie all your SEO tactics or efforts to your overall strategy. You should start by identifying your ultimate business goal first, such as leads, bids, or signups – everything that we call lagging indicators or KPIs – and then you work backwards to determine all the leading indicators such as impressions, clicks, brand visibility, or mentions. We should talk about mentions in 2025, more than clicks.

This of course applies to any business model that actually markets a product or service, so I'm referring to D2C, B2B, and B2C brands. How you do it is pretty elementary, to be fair.

Basically, it's more of a handwriting exercise, so to speak. You just grab a piece of paper and map out what the main goal is: the ultimate goal that your business wants to achieve or that you want to achieve. Then, identify the key KPIs.

From there, you just trace back to all the potential leading indicators that you might want to use. The choice of what indicator you should be using is very much dependent on how you will be able to track them and, of course, do you know which indicators you could be using? Do you know how to measure sessions, for example, or clicks? Can you do it by using certain tools such as GA4, GSC, and Looker Studio?

This last point is very much critical because, without a proper tracking strategy in place, your overall SEO strategy lacks direction. Many strategies can fall due to just not having goals, having no tracking plan, or having poor strategic framing.

What you should do, in my opinion, is ask yourself some questions. First and foremost, ask yourself if you have a clear strategic framework in place, and then, do you have a set of predefined KPIs and metrics that you know you can measure? Do you even know what these metrics mean, how they can get tracked, and where this data actually lives?

This is an important point, actually, that kind of leads me to wrap up the very first tip. Please have data governance documentation in place. What I mean by that is just having a spreadsheet. It could be as easy as having a spreadsheet that outlines all the metrics that you're going to measure and describes them in depth.

You describe, for example, what is a session? How is it being counted? How can it be calculated using the Google guidelines, and how is it calculated using BigQuery, for example? Because we know that BigQuery is very, very useful as a database of data that you can use to retrieve all the basic information with regards to tracking.

This can come in quite handy when you work agency-wise, because perhaps a client may just pop over to you and ask you to break down the difference between, I don't know, clicks and sessions. It's very basic, but sometimes it happens, and if you really know where you store this information, it can save your life.”

You're sharing three distinct tips today as part of what you're contributing. You talked about business goals, you talked about KPIs, and you talked about asking yourself whether or not you've got the strategy in place, but I didn't hear you talk about asking stakeholders and business leaders in the business if they had goals and objectives set up, and if they had targets set up, that the SEO should be following.

Do you think it's the business leaders outside the SEO department's responsibility to set these goals and targets, do you think the SEO should be setting them, or do you think it's a mix between both?

“That’s a very good point. Primarily, you should always follow the main strategy that is being drawn up at the business level. Obviously, it can be dependent on whether you work agency-wise or if you are in-house. If you're working in-house, I guess you would be much more tied to how the marketing team itself works, so it goes without saying that you should definitely follow what the main strategy being devised by them looks like.

It's more true that, perhaps if you work in an agency, you should be asking questions or clarifications – especially if you are an executive working in an agency to the client itself. Just ping them and ask them questions directly about what their main goal is. It's always a matter of collating with the overall business, and with the other people that actually work at a higher level in the business. It's a very good point, of course.

If you instead work as a freelancer, well, you've got more freedom to go about and juggle more with the overall strategy that you want to devise.

But yeah, you should connect the dots. You should always make sure you've got a clear path to the strategy so that you can effectively devise a more strategic way to put all the dots together, using the right lever/tactics, and using the right optimization lever that you have at your disposal.”

That was ‘thinking like a marketer’, which is the first tip you were sharing, and I gather the second tip is ‘acting like an analyst?

“Yeah, it's ‘acting like an analyst’ because this is actually the part that most SEOs are imbued with in their daily workflow. Because of course, there's a lot of strategy going on, top of mind, but the crucial SEO roles are literally to work in the weeds – doing operational stuff, doing lots of VLOOKUP on spreadsheets, and things like that.

That could be leveraged if you embrace an analytical mindset, if you are able to read the data through all the data sets that you can collect, but you also need to be able not only to elaborate the data that you collect, but to have some notions about sampling and how the various tools that you can use may collect this data so that you have an overview of what you are actually collecting. Then parsing and breaking it down in terms of insights is really critical.

Obviously, being analytical is a bit of a catchphrase, so it could be just leaving it in the air. It really depends on how you want to define the concept. What I was going to talk about today was applying this analytical mindset in the e-commerce space.

When I'm talking about the e-commerce space, it's obviously really important to have lots of attention, lots of focus, on structured data implementation, because you can really get a lot of visibility, with a lot of new features, that you can get across from your products in Google.

To collate with a structured data deep dive, you should take a closer look at the Google Merchant Center. Because, if you've got an analytical mindset, I do think that looking at things in the Google Merchant Center provides you with so much data, and so much information as well, around how you decide – maybe not you, but the clients or the e-commerce team or whoever it was from your brand, how they decide to provide some structured data all around your products.

It's really interesting to see, then, how Google responds to that because there could be so many issues that could basically not allow all your product to show up properly in the SERPs and in the shopping carousel, and that could be because of some unreal information, or some piece of information that you didn't really provide that actually reflected what was written on the page.

If you actually know how all the data flow works – by applying, by implementing, by having a Merchant Center set up, and also by inputting the right data via an Excel file in the Merchant Center – then, if you know how to do this well, you might just increase the chances of having lots of your products being indexed, being showcased, and being exposed to higher visibility in the SERP (we're obviously talking about in the e-commerce sphere). So, yeah, you should really get access to the Merchant Center.

Something I actually see in this regard, that is quite ineffective, is that some site owners are still ignoring the real potential of the Merchant Center for SEO. I say for SEO because it's actually being used quite a lot by the PPC team and the e-commerce teams as well. But the thing that I have noticed first-hand is that it's still a grey area as to who actually has the right to act upon it: the right to go down and audit.

You could just go to the client and ask him about having access, of course, but also having the opportunity to cooperate with the PPC team and the e-commerce team. It's still quite nuanced, the way that this tool is being treated, but you shouldn’t just get rid of it. You should really make sure that you can cooperate proactively with the PPC team and the e-commerce team, or whoever really looks after it.

If you just go ask the e-commerce team that looks after that, and you ask him about, I don't know, giving you a head start as to how to deal with this data, or just to look around how the entire tool works, they will be happy to do that. It's just an extra hand that you're lending to them. It's just good.”

You mentioned that there's so much data available inside the Google Merchant Center. I think one thing that SEOs really struggle with is prioritisation.

How do you, based upon the data inside Google Merchant Center, prioritise what needs to be done, and what will have the biggest immediate impact?

“Yeah, that's another good point. Actually, it really depends on the capacity of issues that might pop up from the Merchant Center. Maybe you might just have so many products that are out of stock. Of course, it then depends on what the underlying issue is. Once you figure out the underlying issue, you probably can set up your priorities.

That's actually when it becomes a little bit complex, because you clearly have some other priorities to put together when you are talking about structured data itself.

Maybe you know what kind of page templates may deserve some more attention, to get more structured data being implemented. Obviously, if you look at all the issues coming from the Merchant Center, then the workload can bloat. It can increase in the blink of an eye. It really depends on what sort of issues there are. There are so many types of issues in the Merchant Center that could affect your product listings.

One thing I would like to say – just to keep it very short here, because I understand this could really open a can of worms – is that sometimes (not always, but sometimes, and it has happened to me), some issues in the Merchant Center are not really related to how you provided your input file – how you basically uploaded the file with all the product details in the Merchant Center itself.

So, it's not a problem of data. It's more of a problem of how your product pages are structured back in the CMS. For example, you might just have your product pages hosting multiple prices for multiple product variants and Google struggles a lot to disambiguate and figure out what the main price that you want to showcase to users in the SERP is. Because of that, it might just reject your call to have them implemented.

The list of priorities can actually backfire. It can backfire to pure, core SEO – which is why I really stress the point that site owners should stop ignoring this tool for SEO, because it has an impact.”

Your third tip was around doubling down on structured data implementation.

It sounds like one of the key issues for SEO tends to be lack of clarity, from Google's perspective, in terms of what the information on your web page is really about and giving Google the confidence to actually include the information that it needs to in different areas.

What are the key areas of structured data that SEOs, or other digital marketers, tend to get wrong? What are the biggest mistakes that you tend to see?

“That's a very good question. I'll be very straightforward with the answer because, in my experience, what they are still sleeping on (and probably not just site owners, but also SEOs working on pages ignoring the underlying potential of structured data within the e-commerce space) is that the organisation schema property is something that is still often missing. The same is true with property. It might sound very much banal, what I'm saying, but believe me, it's not.

For example, if you work in the automotive industry, it really is massive. There is a big hole of these missing properties, and they are foundational. Organisation is absolutely foundational for providing clear structured information to the search engine, to include in the knowledge graphs and disambiguate your entity from others.

It can be a game changer. I've seen it in my career – outside of the automotive industry, but I can tell you that there are really some major holes there – and it's not that difficult.

It's not that difficult, first and foremost, to identify this gap. Just go on a page, do Ctrl-C with the dev tool, and just type in ‘schema’. You can also just use a Chrome extension. We've got so many resources now, at our disposal. Search for ‘schema’, and you will see that it's just not there – especially in an organisation. If it's not there, you just go to the client and tell them.

What you can also do is perhaps look at using the Knowledge Graph API. Now that I'm thinking about it, you can use it within your spreadsheet. Get the API into your spreadsheet and just build yourself a little tool that basically tells you, with regards to a certain brand or a certain search on a website, whether this has the any chance or probability of being included/factored into the knowledge graph. That will give you an indicator of whether Google has basically befriended your entities or your brand or not. That could be important.

Now, if you allow me just to go on a little bit further as to how to track the implementation of schema markup, I would actually think in terms of page templates.

Let's say, for example, you want to mark up blog pages on your website, and you want to mark them up with the article schema for that group. I would suggest you, ideally, just go out with this rollout. Roll out these page templates with this one implementation and then, after a couple of weeks (maybe even three weeks but not less than two weeks), you can test the impact of this rollout using a causal inference model.

I know one is called CausalImpact by Google. Actually, this is an algorithm designed by Google. It can be quite reliable, but it actually works because it's a predictive analysis that you can run, basically, and it will give you a notion of something that is called, in statistics, the counterfactual.

The counterfactual is basically what would have happened to, for example, metrics like clicks and impressions if you hadn't rolled out that schema markup presentation at all, across that batch of pages. The difference will tell you whether there was a positive impact. Maybe there was an increase in clicks or an increase in impressions. Otherwise, maybe not. Otherwise, there was a decrease, and that might be relatable. Still, we are very much in the realm of talking about correlation.

The reason why I am stressing testing by just rolling out one page template with one schema implementation is for the sake of removing noise, and removing potential outliers that might come in with the rollout. An increase in clicks and impressions could just be due to whatever. There are so many factors at play.

Obviously, this is ideas. It's not always practical because sometimes you have to deliver, and you have to roll out batches of URLs/page templates. You have to deliver much more schema markup. If you cannot roll out one page template batch with one schema markup implementation, just make sure to use a causal inference model, like CausalImpact.

I've actually got a guide on my website, and there are some other guides out there that I can really vouch for, with some examples on how to do that. You could do it in R, which is a programming language for stats especially.

Giulia Panozzo is a great figure in the industry. She's got many resources on how to properly implement it. Like I said, I wrote a blog post about it, providing an example.”

Simone, you shared a lot of thoughts today, but can you drill down all your advice into one key takeaway? What's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Well, the key takeaway would be to always, always tie your SEO efforts and tactics to the overall strategy.

Like you said, truthfully, it's really important to make sure you get in touch, you speak up, and you direct any doubts you might have to the site owner, to the account manager, to the e-commerce team – to whomever could have some more answer as to what the final, ultimate goal is for your business to achieve.

Goals can change. They can change quarter by quarter. It has never happened to me yet, but I know that some businesses may change the KPIs.

Make sure you stay up to date about that and make sure you do your homework within the e-commerce space, get into the weeds, and explore the Merchant Center. See if you can get something out of it for SEO, and have a deep dive into structured data.

Don't sleep on the organisation schema, not at all – and make sure you use the sameAs properties to connect the dots with all the entities so that your website is disambiguated in the SERP.”

Simone De Palma is a Technical SEO Specialist at Omnicom Group, and you can find him over at SEODepths.com.