Sites Need Actuals and Not Estimates for SEO
In an attempt to reward sites creating quality content, keep searchers secure and to deter blackhat SEO tactics that focus solely on keyword ranking, Google no longer shows you how your site ranks for keywords. However, any SEO professional worth their weight in salt understands that keywords are still an important part of search engine optimization.
The important question most of the SEOs have is: How to get keyword-level data which is actual and not an estimate?
It's not good enough to simply estimate your rank and visits especially when those estimates might be way off. You'll need to find the right SEO platform to provide the information that Google once offered.
BrightEdge’s Page-Based SEO and Real Metrics Based on Actuals
BrightEdge is the first and only platform to solve secure search to reproduce keyword-level data. We use various APIs to integrate seamlessly with your Analytics and Google Webmaster tools data enabling you view the keyword data at page level. Through and API the BrightEdge platform imports actual performance data from Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Coremetrics and Webtrends. Google Webmaster Tools data is integrated within BrightEdge labs. 
We know that SEO for the greater part of a decade has focused on keyword research and usage. There's no denying that this has been effective, but with Google’s shift towards 100% secure search, the metrics and methodology SEO practitioners have been using have dramatically changed.
BrightEdge saw the shift to secure search coming and doubled-down on its page reporting solution and created the Secure Search Manifesto as a guide book on the not provided highway. SEO in 2015 can use some of the tried-and-true tactics that incorporate keywords, including site structure; however, search engine optimization must now be more than that. This is why page-based reporting and SEO makes so much sense. But what exactly does this method mean? This page-centric approach does away with the single-keyword optimization, for example. Webmasters and SEO experts alike need to recognize when multiple keywords apply. However, not all keywords are created equal, either. Prioritizing is important with page-based optimization efforts.
Let's say your website sells shoes, and woman's shoes are among the most popular. When creating the page for this category, there are obviously several semantic keywords you can use. But you should prioritize high heel shoes over woman's oxfords if those are the more popular product. To continue with your page-centric search engine optimization, you'll want to beef up internal links to your site's most popular pages. After all, that's what people are looking for, isn't it? Then, you'll want to use traditional SEO tactics such as earning quality backlinks to your most popular pages not just to your domain.
You'll want to follow suit by promoting these pages via social media, too. Share the newest styles of women's dress shoes on Pinterest, post coupons for a specific category on Facebook and let people know when you've updated stock on Twitter. Every post can include a keyword to help your SEO efforts. Plus, page-specific promotion helps to draw in visitors who want to do more than just window shop. For each of these shares, you'll want to use tracking links that you can plug into your SEO. 
Making the Move to an SEO Platform
Obviously, it takes more time and effort to optimize and promote multiple pages than it does to work with a single page, but your results should prove more fruitful. You'll need to have the right tools to verify this, however. Site analytics you can get from a single source, whether it be Google, Facebook or Twitter, are limited and don't always paint an accurate picture of your entire SEO campaign. You might get information about keywords from one tool but have to use another to analyze keywords. That's why you need a rounded SEO platform such as BrightEdge.
A full-fledged SEO platform provides answers to multiple questions and integrates with social media and other tools you already use, so you truly get the big picture and not just estimates. There are other perks to BrightEdge including the ability to scale with the possibility of tracking millions of pages and the associated data, which is important for larger sites and even enterprises that are concerned with SEO. However, there's no point to an SEO tool that is this robust if it's rigid. Fortunately, BrightEdge is flexible, and you can customize it to your own needs to track specific data that might be important to you.
BrightEdge and Webmaster Tools
While your marketing efforts will undoubtedly become easier when you use a capable platform such as BrightEdge, this doesn't mean that you won't find tools such as Google's Webmaster Tools useful. In fact, Webmaster Tools and BrightEdge work quite well together, and we've got some advice that will help them marry you to understand your metrics even better. BrightEdge can fill in the gaps while Webmaster Tools still provides with data about click-through, clicks, impressions and backlinks -- the very real analytics we've been focusing on this entire time. In fact, Webmaster Tools even enabled site owners and SEO pros to filter by specific keywords, which is crucial to getting the most out of your SEO campaign efforts. BrightEdge also has a feature that will "reverse index" your website to determine exactly which keywords are working for your pages. With this feature, you can even find keywords that might be helping you even though you're not actively utilizing them in your SEO strategy. You can then add any of those keywords to your campaigns to leverage them. 
How well does BrightEdge work with individual page reporting? You'll get actual analytics detailing visits, backlinks and even social media mentions of specific URLs. BrightEdge will also show you changes in revenue and visits over time. BrightEdge integration with Webmaster Tools is nearly seamless after initial setup, and there's one extra key feature to point out.
With BrightEdge, you're not just limited to search and visit data in the last 90 days. This enables you to form a more complete picture of your search engine optimization success over time without having to export data to spreadsheets to ensure you can still see it three months in the future!
Webmaster Tools integration is just one of the features the engineering team at BrightEdge has worked hard to leverage. The innovations at BrightEdge have resulted in a comprehensive platform that provides more benefits than any singular SEO tool or even a multitude of tools awkwardly combined together. Any webmaster who also keeps these tenets in mind will be able to develop strong and comprehensive search engine optimization strategies that won't just work in 2015 but into next year an beyond! You'll be able to roll with any changes from Google, even if those changes suddenly exclude data you'd been relying on for years. But tracking these real analytics would be nearly impossible without an all-encompassing SEO platform, especially if you had only relied on Google's tools in the past. Don’t forget:
- You need real and not estimated analytics
- Rank will always matter for CTR and traffic
- Focus on page-centric search engine optimization
- All data is important and connected to other data
- The platforms and partners you rely on for SEO must be trustworthy and provide data and recommendations based on actuals and not estimates
The ability to report on actual business metrics is hyper-critical to your overall SEO program as it gives you the best foundation on which to react, make decisions and generate forecasts. Page Reporting is the only SEO technology that enables measurement of actual traffic and conversion in the world of Secure Search.
