Site migration does not have to translate into significant traffic losses. A site migration, or move, happens for a few reasons: some of the most common include when a business moves domains entirely, changes their content management system and/or redesigns their site.
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THE PROBLEM
Rackspace’s SEO campaign has been active since 2011 and is driving a significant percentage of visitors to the company’s website. Rackspace’s overall goal is to increase revenue through lead generation and customer education. It can attain that goal by constantly improving search rankings on a large scale and continually increasing organic traffic to its website. Despite having hundreds of thousands of clients and an international reach, Rackspace still faces formidable competitors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoDaddy, Terremark, SOFTLAYER and Microsoft. These real-world competitors often translate to online competitors and can outrank Rackspace in the sheer volume of specific and targeted keywords. These heavy-hitters also can earn a greater share of voice for several targeted keywords. Using competitive analysis, Rackspace revealed a content gap with its largest competitor. The on-site content gaps are most acute with white papers, guides, videos, catalogs and FAQs.
THE SOLUTION
Increasing on-site production and launching an earned media campaign are necessary for Rackspace to realize movement on its chosen keywords. The earned media campaign leverages both syndicated and non-syndicated methods to place content across a wide variety of relevant online domains. Through targeted and persistent outreach, the PR team earns the placement of feature articles on blogs and other digital media outlets. This earned media is always relevant to the website’s content as well as its readership. The article usually features a link to Rackspace’s site and may include a brand mention. Other types of earned media can potentially include static or interactive infographics, social media mentions and shares, as well as traditional digital PR. PR specialists stay up to date on industry news in order to produce the most relevant content for both Rackspace and the audience of the site it is placed on. Specialists maintain regular correspondence with niche influencers in addition to identifying new opportunities; personalized outreach is done primarily through email and social networks. BrightEdge is used to help track the relationships established. It serves as an indicator that highlights specific sites where industry-specific audiences gather. Using BrightEdge, Rackspace is able to track more than 1,000 targeted keywords and determine share of voice for each keyword, receive recommendations for landing pages, and identify link-building opportunities.
THE RESULTS
Rackspace is an organization that already had a known brand, vast reach, and clientele, so moving keyword rankings to top 6 takes the right resources and expertise. Rackspace’s SEO and content campaign aims to rank for a wide range of keywords. Rackspace increased rank for 6 non-branded keywords an average of 61 positions, moved all onto the first page to average position 5.6, and increased traffic to their site by 212%.
We’re shifting from being very keyword-centric to focusing more holistically around the user experience and how the user interacts.
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THE PROBLEM
Mining data can be nebulous, overwhelming, confusing, and geared toward paid media. It can also be difficult to figure out where to start. Once you pick a place to start, mining for scale can be difficult among the team. Internally, SEO teams need to figure out a way to find a balance between the right tools and the right training to drive scalability.
THE SOLUTION
Matt Saunders, Director, SEO Strategist at Rosetta agency, faced this issue with his global team. He decided to leverage BrightEdge’s Data Cube to mine big data for all facets of content marketing research, including blog content, rich media, and local search. His first step was finding colleagues across the teams to determine who could benefit from the platform and who would be a good advocate for it. Creating that core group of people, training them daily, and getting them all BrightEdge certified allowed valuable knowledge transfer to all of the other SEOs in the company instead of Saunders being the single point of contact for mining big data.
THE RESULTS
Matt successfully got several members of his team ramped up to scale data mining and found multiple ways to gain valuable insights each within 60 seconds. Using BrightEdge’s Share of Voice report, the team was able to find content expansion ideas by taking competitor URLs, putting them in Data Cube, and finding new keyword and page opportunities, which resulted in 6 new target keyword representing 37k monthly searches. Aligning rich media with the SERP landscape, Data Cube revealed how large an opportunity can be with rich media based on competitive insights and SERP landscape. For Local SEO optimization knowing which queries trigger local listings is half the battle. Saunders quickly saw in the data that local points of interest were a substantial untapped opportunity. The Google SERP carousel has ramped up the urgency for local optimization as prominent competitors become more visible across a substantial number of carousel results. Putting 
competitor names into Data Cube yields keywords that trigger local listings which in turn can substantially increase your local footprint.
That’s really what Data Cube is built on... Doing all of this complex gathering of information and making it super easy for you to get actionable insights out of it.
THE PROBLEM
Understanding what traffic came from what channel is easier in digital marketing than it ever was in offline marketing. Digital marketers make rational decisions on the success and failure of campaigns and what to do with the budget based on reliable information from their web analytics tools. But what if the reporting in two of the largest online channels is less reliable than everyone thought? What if 60% of direct traffic which is usually attributed to PR, social, offline, and brand, is actually traffic from search engines with the domain referrer stripped off? That would mean that search’s contribution would be undercounted.
THE SOLUTION
Gene McKenna, director of search at Groupon, set out to answer this question and was willing to take drastic action. His hypothesis was this: If referrers are 100% accurate for direct traffic, then turning off the search traffic by setting a de-indexing command for the whole site would have no impact on direct traffic.
THE RESULTS
What McKenna found was that direct traffic on interior pages dipped in a highly correlated way with the search engine traffic dip. If direct and search traffic were equal, for every 10 search visitors that were lost after de-indexing, 6 direct visitors were lost also. He found that the effect was more pronounced on interior pages with longer URLs and up to 75% of some Internet Explorer browser search traffic was reported as direct. That means that surveys like BrightEdge’s Channel Performance white paper, which found 51% of visitors coming from search (excluding direct as a channel), is still understating the proportion that comes from search engines. Both research studies confirm the significant opportunity most companies have to increase the business value they derive from search traffic. The decreased reliability of query and referrer information makes having an SEO platform more important than ever.
The referrer is a weak link in SEO reporting.
THE PROBLEM
In June of 2013 Epicor Software found that their site had been deindexed and that their organic traffic from Google had dropped over 90%. Most sites get over 53% of their traffic from organic search and over 80% of that traffic is from Google. A significant source of Epicor’s traffic and revenue had been impacted.
THE SOLUTION
Dawna Olsen, Sr. Director of Corporate Marketing at Epicor started researching the problem. First she looked at her BrightEdge dashboards and pinpointed the day the traffic dropped. After considering possibilities, including a black hat link attack on their China site, Dawna concluded that she had been hit and hit hard with a Google Penguin penalty. She also accessed the backlink database and started reviewing her external link quantity and quality and saw that she had a very high number of links from certain affiliate partners. She examined the links and could see that the quantity per partner was too high and that her affiliates looked like the kind of link farms that Google was punishing with Penguin. She also found problematic footer links that needed to be no-followed. She disavowed unwanted links. She also contacted her affiliate partners and instructed them to take down most of the links and increase the diversity of anchor text they were using. They did so, and one month later she submitted a reconsideration appeal to Google and her penalty was lifted.
THE RESULTS
BrightEdge reports showed rapid organic traffic improvements. Organic traffic jumped 23% and Epicor commanded a 3X increase in share of voice with its competitors. Critical keywords moved from not ranked to Position #8. Within specific key geographies, top keywords went from Rank #43 to Position #3. In this case, having the right tools translated into recovering substantial lost traffic and revenue.
Get the right tools in place... it makes a difference and helps you make informed decisions
THE PROBLEM
In 2010, 3M needed to figure out how to effectively manage SEO across 5 major businesses each with multiple divisions (60 in all) in 100 countries and totaling 6000 websites. 45% of 3M’s traffic came from organic sources, so this was a huge undertaking which was not as simple as replicating what worked in the United States across all of the other countries.
THE SOLUTION
Craig Berdie, Global Search Marketing Manager at 3M, was up to the challenge of solving this problem. He knew there were a few things that were already going to be an uphill battle: inconsistency between countries, existing websites were created without SEO consideration, the product set evolves at 35% per year, and a lot of content was locked up in PDFs. To figure out how markets varied, Craig did a lot of landing page testing. He figured out that by testing, he could let the numbers speak and each market would find itself winning pages. To address website changes, he put together an "SEO council" of 5 individuals to start which included IT, data management, UI/UX, and content writers. Using BrightEdge, Craig was able to discover high value keywords to track, develop landing pages around those keywords, and measure the rise in rank. Craig and his team were able to stitch together organic traffic data from analytics with conversion data which ultimately allowed them to calculate how much each organic click was worth.
THE RESULTS
BrightEdge reports showed that 3M experienced large gains in organic traffic for several years. Specifically, they saw 20% growth in organic traffic YoY for 3 consecutive years. That traffic equates to an incremental $25,000 a month in business value for a single business unit on a single topic. That proof, though small in absolute terms, will be significant when rolled out across more of the thousands of products at 3M.
The opportunity to license BrightEdge has been huge for us, very helpful
THE PROBLEM
Time Inc. has 95 iconic media brands that serve 81 million online visitors every month who generate ad inventory they sell to advertisers. Time’s content development effort is vast, varied and complex, so coordinating SEO efforts is extremely difficult. Time’s SEOs face duplicate content, lack of thematic grouping by keyword, non-optimal internal links, and significant crawl and redirect errors. The holidays present a significant opportunity for a media company, but also create narrow time bands in which to enhance and optimize the site for SEO. Travel and Leisure and 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas topics represent 9.7 million+ search query volume.
THE SOLUTION
Binti Pawa, Head of SEO for Time Inc.'s Affluent Media Group, works on such brands as Travel + Leisure and Food & Wine, where she is responsible for leading, developing, and integrating SEO and content strategies. Pawa approached the holiday opportunity by doing a site audit, creating a keyword content model, and using the keyword and content features of the BrightEdge platform. In addition, Pawa resolved over 500 crawl errors. She also executed the kind of fundamental internal link and anchor text recommendations provided by the On-Page Recommendations of the platform. Sitemaps were improved, rich snippets were added, and duplicate landing pages were removed. After doing all the technical work, she found her best keyword opportunities and built content around it. And the results were stunning.
THE RESULTS
In the 4th of July season Time improved its Page 1 Food & Wine 4th of July rankings from 2 keywords to 7, which led to a 30% gain in organic traffic vs. 1 year earlier. Overall Food & Wine Page 1 ranking keyword count improved from 620 to 757, which produced a 34% increase in traffic and ad inventory. Travel and Leisure keywords ranking and traffic increased 45%. Pawa found that tracking, tools, timing, and planning are critical to capture the significant seasonal search volume and that 3-4 months is the appropriate lead time required for SEO success.
Keywords are still important. You have to know what keywords you want to go after. We did so much research and took so many approaches and BrightEdge has really helped us do that and monitor our success”
