enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 9 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Travel back with me in time to 776 BC and watch local athletes, in a kingdom called Greece, gather together to compete for a prize krotinos—the olive tree wreath. The athletes come from different villages and towns to prove themselves on the plains of Olympia. The winner of such a wreath will experience instant fame and be known throughout the kingdom for their great skill. Someday this set of Olympic Games will grow into a world-wide event and Olympic honor will be sought after by athletes from all over the globe.

SEO Manager - the athlete

Now you may be wondering what the Olympics have to do with SEO but the similarities are there. Think of the SEO manager as an athlete and their skill is, well, Search Engine Optimization. In the early days of SEO, the athlete only had to worry about competing against other text content on the Google plain. Instead of an olive branch, the SEO athlete wins a coveted high rank on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Google SERP – the competition field

Just as with the Olympic Games, today, SERP has more competitors than ever before and the field is changing continuously. The text SEO athlete has a greater challenge as it must face off with image, video, social, and local competition to win a high rank on SERP. Check out Google’s graphic below:

As you might notice, Google is putting more emphasis on universal results, displaying image, video, social, and local results to make search results more relevant to the user. With Search Plus Your World, Google signaled a greater importance for Google+ pages in the search algorithm. The search engine also recently announced that it is offering Google+ Local as part of its Google+ initiative, which means that your competition field has just become a little tougher to navigate. Stating the obvious, tracking rank among text results in the new SERPs is necessary but not sufficient.

Blended Rank - the real measure of success

Blended rank measures rank among all types of search results including text, images, video, local, and social results. This is your true measure of SEO success and it is important to understand how this works. Let’s take a look at the website rank of a company called Café Press. Now, Café Press specializes in custom T-shirts and wants to take advantage of a large music festival named Bonnaroo. If you are the SEO manager for Café Press, and you type in ‘bonnaroo t-shirt’ as your keyword, this is what you would see on the SERP:

What do you see?

At first glance, it looks like Café Press comes up within the first 10 positions on the SERP. However, if you look more closely, you will notice that this is only in relation to a text results. The actual rank of this site in the blended rank competition is 14. If that's not enough bad news, notice that the non-text listings before the Café Press page are serious competitors.

BrightEdge S3 – your coach

Just as the most accomplished Olympic athletes could use a little help from a coach to keep them going, we like to see ourselves your SEO coach— especially when it comes to blended rank. BrightEdge S3 shows you true blended rank and then gives you the tools you need to improve your SERP ranking.  

1. Measure true rank. Track the blended rank for your pages among ALL types of results including text, images, video, social and local.
2. Outrank competition. Track your competition’s rank for all your keywords; identify competitive trends in rank and take corrective action fast.
3. Drive blended rank with social. Correlate social media activity such as Likes, Shares, Tweets and +1s with rank, and manage social media campaigns to drive rank.
4. Drive greater conversions, traffic and revenue. Understand and manage the impact of blended rank on real business results such as revenue, traffic and conversions.

Top Blended Rank – SEO Gold

By understanding how blended rank works, you will be able to draw closer to your goal, which is to put your website at the top of the SERP page. Look for an upcoming post, which will tell you how you can use BrightEdge S3 to manage the impact of a special type of universal search results, the Google+ page, on your site’s ranking.

Too Long; Didn't Read (TL:DR)

Taking a leaf out of AJ Kohn's book, here is the ‘Too long; Didn't Read ’ for this article (scroll down to the bottom of 'How To Tweet What You Want, Because Content Matters' to see why TL:DR is a great idea):

1. Search is changing. SERPs increasingly feature universal results such as image, video, social and local results along with text results.
2. Blended rank among universal search results gives marketers a better benchmark on how they are doing, what they should aim for, and how they can get there.
3. BrightEdge is the first and only company that helps marketers to achieve greater SEO results by tracking true rank and providing insight into competitive intel, influence of social media, and impact on web analytics based on blended rank.

Lennon Liao

M Posted 10 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

As Google has improved its ability to understand user’s search queries and index a variety of types of content, search results have become increasingly complex. It is no longer a simple question of determining where one’s website falls in an organic text-based search. Now sites have to contend with a wide range of different SERPs, such as image searches, video searches, social searches and local searches.

Blended rank is the key to letting websites know how they perform when these different factors are combined. This provides a more complete picture of the strengths of the website and where it still needs to improve. Learning how to improve blended rank can result in measurable boosts for the brand’s bottom line.

The universal results below for the query “Europe” show results that include: Images, News and Knowledge Graph.

How to improve blended rank

• Understand what's giving competitors' sites an edge
• Develop content that promotes traffic and sharing
• Use social media and local SEO to promote blended rank
• Markup pages to better demonstrate the purpose of the website

1. Understand what is giving competitors’ sites an edge. To improve your blended rank, you must first gain an accurate picture of how your website ranks and how that performance compares to your competitors.

BrightEdge offers unique technology that allows companies to measure their website’s blended rank for all keywords and keyword groups. You can also track your competition’s blended rank and identify competitive trends so that you can take corrective action quickly.

Our technology also allows you to see how blended rank is impacting your business results, such as revenue and traffic. This information can then be used to develop a concrete strategy for improving blended rank.

A sample of Google Quick Answers.

The BrightEdge Data Cube and the Universal Results broken down and trended over time. BrightEdge customers can research these results for any site on the Internet to identify opportunities.

For a deeper look at how to size up your SEO competitors be sure to access our video tutorial on 6 Ways to Do Competitive Benchmarking.

2. Develop content that promotes traffic and sharing

When Google now ranks pages, they are no longer just focusing on the content of the site - although that remains important. They also want to see how people respond to that content. According to BrightEdge research, Google pays close attention to the following user signals:

• Click-through rates
• time on site
• bounce rate

Social signals also matter, including:

• Google +1
• Facebook shares/shares/comments
• Tweets
• Pinterest

These types of signs give Google greater insight into how helpful the content is and how well it addresses the query. Content that responds well to these criteria is interpreted to have a high value for users and will likely have its blended rank improved.

3. Use social media and local SEO to promote blended rank

Even if a business works with customers remotely on a regular basis, local SEO can be helpful for blended rank and for reaching those occasional customers that want to be able to meet in person.

According to Wesley Young in a Search Engine Land article, keeping business results updated on social media, including verifying that the NAP (name, address, and phone number) are correct across a variety of social sites and online listings, is critical to ranking well and he tested and showed a 19% explanatory value. Including the city and state throughout the Google+ local page, including the title tag, H1 heading and URL, is important for boosting the rankings of the business’ social site.

These keywords should also be used throughout the content, in the meta description and in the alt tags for images. Google values Google+ pages for local SEO, so these steps are important for local and blended rankings.

Local 3-Pack example:

4. Markup pages to better demonstrate the purpose of the website

In 2013 Google launched the Hummingbird updates to its search algorithm. This update was designed to help Google understand concepts instead of just looking at the words in a particular query. Optimizing websites to better account for user intent may help improve blended rank performance.

Using site markups will provide rich snippets that preview the site on the SERP. This can help users better understand the content they will find on the website, allowing them to make more informed decisions about whether the content will match their intent. This speaks to the goals of the Hummingbird update.

Sites interested in using markups are generally advised to used the schema.org system, as this was developed to be accepted on Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Yandex.

For companies who want to have their websites perform optimally, understanding blended rank and how the site ranks when all of the different types of searches are combined is critical. Tracking only the text-based results can be deceiving and let sites think that they rank higher than they actually do. Once the true blended rank has been determined, companies can then use the above advice to improve their standings and help their site get in front of customers consistently, regardless of the type of search results requested.