Use your first-party data to your advantage

Debbie says: “Tap into your first-party data and use it to your advantage.

You want to approach everything with a data-hungry mindset and ask yourself questions like, what types of data are available to me and how can I potentially use that for SEO? Also, how can I leverage data from other teams outside of SEO to help reach goals for SEO and beyond?”

What are the most common forms of first-party data?

“There are three buckets we can put everything in. The first is website data. Website data would be Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

Another bucket would be product usage data. What products resonate the most with certain segments or personas within your overall audience? Are there specific keywords that you notice? If small businesses enjoy your product, can you take some of your target keywords and add ‘small business’ to it and see if that drives people to sign up for your product?

The third bucket is data from other teams. Ideally, you want to avoid having SEO work in a silo. You can always tap into the paid team, the sales team, the support team, and the content team. There are a lot of ways that you can tap into other teams to get their data and their knowledge of your customers, and integrate that into the overall SEO strategy.”

Is there a data bucket that tends to be the most important for SEOs?

“We already go to Google Analytics and Search Console. If your team is doing paid ads, that’s the next bucket to work together and home in on. If you’re doing paid search ads, they’re also buying ads that show up on the Google search results page above the organic results.

If you can get any data like which campaigns are doing well for them that you can also create SEO pages for, that’s really helpful. If you are bidding on specific terms that have done well but don’t have an SEO page, you should definitely do that. That way, you can reduce spend on the paid side.

Of the other teams out there, that would be the major one to tap into. Another one to add in there would be the sales team. They’re the ones who directly talk to potential customers, so they know what their pain points are. That leads to a lot of content that you can create on the SEO side.”

What questions should SEOs be asking sales teams to get the right data?

“For a sales team, if they are on calls with customers, hopefully, you can get some sort of transcript. They might already be using an AI tool to transcribe what’s going on as their notes from the call.

Analysis of that data could be something as simple as a word cloud. That is a very basic thing that you could do. Then, you can see what is commonly said in those calls. Of course, you can really go into the weeds of the data and pull out their pain points or the specific competitors your customers tend to talk about.

In some sales calls, they might mention another solution that they are considering, and ask why your product is better. Therefore, the competitor’s name might pop up in those conversations. If not, you can look at your SERP competitors and your product competitors, then do keyword research that way. Ideally, you can get that through sales calls. If not, you can always go with the keyword research route.

Then, you can create pages for your product versus that competitor, and try to grab traffic that way. Are there any areas where those competitors stand out, that your product also wins in, that you could tap into as well?”

Is there any software that you use for creating visual representations of what is being said in sales conversations?

“We’ve previously used Qualtrics, which is a survey platform. There are free tools online if you just search for world cloud generators.

Before putting your transcripts into one of these tools, you can use something like ChatGPT to pull out the pain points that appear in those transcripts or how people are describing your product and your features. Pull that insight first, and then do the word cloud. That will help you visualise, otherwise, you can have too much content to create a nice cloud from.

In terms of which AI to choose, you really have to test it out. I’ve seen Claude and Gemini do really cool things. I’m still trying to figure out which is the best, so I can’t recommend one at the moment. Try the same prompt with different models and see which one comes back with the best output.

It has to be the same prompt, otherwise, you’re potentially getting different outputs from different prompts. Test it out and figure out what is best for you.”

What do you do if you don’t have enough first-party data to work with?

“There are essentially two ways that you can start getting data if you don’t have much to work with.

One is to survey your customers. You can use tools like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey – and there are a bunch of other tools for doing surveys as well. What you’re trying to understand is how people are thinking about your product and searching around your product.

You can also use surveys to do really cool content things such as research reports. You can survey specific features about the product that resonate with customers, which can help you prioritise what you should work on. There are a lot of different ways to play around with the data.

Think about what would be helpful for you right now. Maybe you don’t know who your key competitors are yet. Include that as a question in the survey. Then, you have real data on which are mentioned the most, so you can create comparison pages for those competitors based on the survey feedback that you’ve received.

The other way to get data is through A/B testing. There are a lot of different types of tests that you can do. You can do really simple ones, like changing up your meta tags. That might be something that you don’t need a separate tool for, as long as you have a page with a decent amount of traffic that you can test on, and a B version that’s similar.

You can do a lot of different types of A/B tests. For example, the paid team can help you do some A/B testing on potential headlines that they use for their search ads. When you find out which version works best and has the highest click-through rate, you can consider changing the title on some of your SEO pages to match that.

We previously tested to see whether including numbers in our titles would help with click-through rates. We tested two versions of a paid search ad, and the data showed that the one with numbers was more attractive and more people were clicking on it. So, we used that data and changed the titles for a subgroup of pages, and we saw a lift in click-through rates for those pages.”

Do you have a favourite open-ended question that you like to incorporate in a survey?

“Off the top of my head, it would be something like, ‘How would you describe our product?’, or ‘What would you search for if you didn’t know our product existed?’”

What are some creative ways to use first-party data in content?

“Earlier, we talked about research reports. With research reports, the goal is to create interesting data – and it could be through a survey or through your product data. Essentially, you want to figure out what interesting data and/or statistics you can find about a specific topic.

That type of content can be beneficial to a bunch of teams outside of SEO. For example, your PR team can pitch it to journalists. Your paid team can promote the report on social media; LinkedIn has been a great channel for that type of content. Also, your sales team can use this content when they’re talking to prospective customers. They can say that your company has found this interesting information about the specific pain point that the person might have, which can be a good conversation starter.

With one piece of content that pulls in a lot of first-party data, you can use it in a bunch of different ways across many different channels. In the end, it’s not just beneficial for SEO, it’s also beneficial for the marketing team at large – and the company.

If you are working on programmatic SEO pages, you can use data that does not necessarily exist for other competitors. At Dialpad, we had area code pages. If someone is searching for an area code, they are either searching for the location for a specific area code or they are interested in purchasing a phone number with that area code. The idea was to target people who were doing the latter. One of Dialpad’s products is a business phone system, and a business might want to have a custom phone number for a specific area.

Instead of approaching this programmatic SEO task by creating pages for every area code, and just pushing that out there, we wanted to have a more curated approach. We tapped the data team and asked them to look at our product data and, of all the area codes in the United States, which ones were most popular for our customers so that we could prioritise based on that.

By differentiating ourselves through that strategy, we were able to focus on the area codes that we knew our customers were currently using, so other businesses were also likely to be interested in them as well. We wanted to target and prioritise those pages, and also create more custom content on those pages as opposed to all the other area code pages out there.

Overall, that became a really successful project, and one of the reasons was because we were able to tap into that first-party data.”

Should SEOs be comfortable sharing first-party data with AI?

“I would be careful about sharing first-party data with AI. You definitely need to understand your company’s stance on using AI tools in general, and then decide whether or not it is acceptable.

Decide whether it’s appropriate based on the AI policy at your company.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“As an industry, we need to stop focusing on cookie-cutter SEO. You don’t want to just look at the search results, see what competitors A, B, and C are doing, and do the same. Instead, really think about the hypothesis that you have for why this might be doing well and whether there is another way to do it.

Then, you want to test that out through A/B testing, get your first-party data, and use that to make an informed decision on what you should do.

Don’t just follow what your competitors are doing, really figure out what works best for you and your company.”

Debbie Chew is SEO Manager at Stripe, and you can find her at DebbieyChew.com.