The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Data Privacy and Regulatory Trends

The data privacy landscape is shifting rapidly, and as an SEO professional it’s important to understand what’s happening and how it will affect your work. In the future, the nature of the data that we’ll be able to get about users who visit our sites will change, and to some degree this will make our work harder. Those who are able to anticipate and adapt to change quickly will be in a good position to outperform those who are slow to learn and react.

The Consumer Data Privacy Revolution

As we have shown throughout this book, digital marketers rely on various types of data to effectively measure their efforts to create, optimize, and surface web content for users. In recent years, the long-overdue push toward increased consumer data and privacy protections has affected our ability to collect, store, and leverage user-specific data for marketing purposes, as consumers demand more privacy protections—ranging from basic safeguards against misuse and improper collection of personally identifiable information (PII) to the reduction and restriction of tracking online and offline activity. As the general public becomes increasingly aware of the real-world implications of how trackable our digital lives have become and push back, we as search and digital marketers will need to stay informed to effectively perform our roles and to provide the right guidance to our employers and clients on how best to navigate the new, privacy-oriented ...