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September 23^rd, 2013 – A day the SEO world won’t soon forget. Although Google has been weaning us off our keyword referring data since October 2011, earlier this month we learned that SSL encryption would be extended to all users regardless of whether or not they were signed in to any Google property.

In the new era of (not provided), we are forced to reexamine how we utilize analytics data to craft our marketing strategies. This change not only impacts SEO practitioners, but brand strategists, digital PR professionals, and any business owner who has a presence online; in other words: everyone.

Let’s face it: we just got dumped. Google gave us the “It’s not you. It’s me” and left us feeling cold and alone. Rather than sending melodramatic text messages at 3 a.m. and looking to adopt a cat to fill this void left by our beloved keyword data, it’s time for us to move on. Digital marketers are resilient and not unfamiliar with needing to pivot as times change and search engines evolve.

As marketers, we are constantly inundated with data and analytics that are supposed to help us better perform our jobs. These reports, so we’re told, are designed to help us draw better insights from our campaigns and develop actionable strategies based on our performance metrics. The reports are supposed to make us more efficient, more tactical and more knowledgeable of our industry.

The problem with much of the information we receive from these data dumps is that it is often overwhelming, unwieldy or simply too difficult to understand. We’re forced to perform countless repetitive tasks just to get to a point where we understand what the data represents – before we can even attempt to draw any legitimate insights.

Excel, at its core, is a problem-solving tool. When used correctly, Excel can eliminate many of these tedious and repetitive steps from our analytic process and allow us to concentrate our efforts on what truly matters: drawing useful insights that affect strategy moving forward. This week I had the pleasure of speaking on the Extreme Excel Excellence panel at SMX Advanced in Seattle, with the overarching theme of embracing the opportunity that Excel presents for marketers to better analyze their data.

Whether you’re playing poker, on the field of war or even practicing SEO, there are generally two types of ways people make decisions: reactively or proactively. Reactive people tend to make a series of one-off decisions determined in large part by the impulses and whims of their opponents.  They look for success only in what others are willing to give them and confine themselves to fixing problems rather than building authentic value through sustainable growth.

Proactive people, on the other hand, base their decisions and tactics on a clearly-defined strategy aimed at accomplishing their goals regardless of how their opponent acts. They are the people who understand their strategies must be influenced by their opponents but not dictated by them.  These people view their efforts as more than a sum of their parts, recognizing that true victory comes from long-term, sustainable success and that winning the war is far more important than losing the battle.

Proactive decision-makers are in it for the long haul.  They understand that every decision will have positive and negative consequences but that each of these decisions should bring us closer to our overall goals.  In short, they understand game theory.

While we love our SEO specialists, and they really don’t think like this (at least we hope they don’t), we wanted to have some fun and help non-SEO people understand the SEO mind.

From humble beginnings on the campus of Stanford University, Google has evolved and left its mark on almost every facet of our daily lives, influencing everything from the language we use to the systems by which we communicate and share information.  But how well do you really know this company that has had such an impact on our personal and professional lives?

Since Google has removed the page on their site that highlights some of its fun facts (previously here), Nebo wanted to pull together some of our favorite facts about the search engine we all know and love!