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.

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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

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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”

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