Take advantage of Microsoft’s Power BI (Business Intelligence) rollout in 2016 to collect and analyze more data than ever before and find the SEO performance gaps you didn’t even know about.
If you’re not familiar with Microsoft’s Business Intelligence paradigm, then I heartily recommend you take a walk through their promotional material. The most pertinent part for SEOs is the ability to embed Queries in the latest Office 360 suite natively (without requiring Power Query extensions in Excel, for example), allowing advanced capabilities baked into Excel since 2013 to be accessed easily by anyone in your corporation (or client side) on the 360 platform.
Queries are fantastic because they allow you to parse serious quantities of data relatively easily and extend desktop tools to operate more like servers using SQL-like statements. If code is not your bag, the BI suite is designed to be largely WYSIWYG using 360 natively or their desktop BI interface.
Imagine running INDEX MATCH or VLOOKUPs on five million rows of data instantly, and you’ll get a feel for the, well, power of Power Queries. In the screen grab above, a dataset of +20GB is transformed into a manageable table made available for analysis as a Pivot Table by an SEO for performance gaps. Calculations that would not be possible within Excel due to data size are easily handled by being transformed into data restrictions within the final SQL statements underpinning the data generation process.
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