The work of an analyst can also be fascinating

The reason for writing this post is a conversation I had recently during a social event.
Most of the people I have had contact with think that my work is probably very boring and exhausting because they associate working with data with the work of an accountant who writes columns in the tables of revenues and expenses and then recalculates sums or other variants of statistical data.

Being an analyst myself, I must strongly oppose this and express my disapproval of such labeling of our profession.

Due to the fact that he likes to use real-life examples I will tell you the situation with the latest project in which I participate.

Well, as I mentioned on the occasion of the last post, my old friend from college contacted me with a rather specific task regarding the SEO industry and the Google Search Index.

In short, the idea was to develop and propose a method of calculating performance indicators for data containing information about user activity within the website.

The main goal of my mission was to find a way to compare the different phrases typed by users and choose the ones that have the greatest potential
Already at this point, this work turns out to be a very creative work, as defining the concept of the greatest potential is very complex and, contrary to appearances, it is trivial.

Of course, people positioning for the site want their pages to be in the highest positions, which should translate into a greater number of views.

However, which phrases to choose is not so obvious, especially since Google lists about 1000 different phrases that are associated with our site at different levels of interest.

Another thing is the selection of only the best 20 phrases that should be subject to our attention while ensuring the greatest increase in users.
The very methodology of selecting these phrases is very interesting because there are many doubts and questions.

The first one is, for example, is it better to choose phrases with a large total number of pageviews in which we are in low positions and the competition is high, or is it better to focus on niche queries in which it will be much easier for us due to less competition?

The second question concerns the development of the website or online store, what phrases are attractive to our users, or are we able to identify those that cause greater visitor involvement.

This job is completely different than that of an accountant, I would even say it resembles that of a detective or an artist.

We often write down hypotheses, define models and then check how they relate to reality.
In many cases, we are pioneers because we are doing certain things for the first time, and it was no different in this case.

Currently, I have already formulated the basic assumptions and outline of the algorithm, and the first calculations are already presented, which are very promising.

From among 1000 search consoles included in Google, we are able to choose the best 20 based on our super secret indicator, for which we took into account all possible data.
The project that participates has a chance to achieve great commercial success because it significantly facilitates the work of SEO specialists and provides them with ready-made tips on which words they should focus on to achieve the best results.

So to sum up: our work was extremely interesting and creative, and at the same time the way it cannot be compared to the tedious rewriting of tables in Excel or other accounting software

That is why I appeal to all those who seem to think that the analyst is not the job of the future or that it is a very boring job: Sometimes it is worth looking around and looking at the world with an open mind.

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