The New Digital Landscape: Content Performance Marketing - Raj Rao & Loni Stark
The New Digital Landscape: Content Performance Marketing - Duane Forrester
[Video] Share14 Afternoon Keynote - Duane Forrester
The New Digital Landscape: Content Performance Marketing - Darren Pleasance
[Video] Share14 Afternoon Keynote - Darren Pleasance
3 Essential Elements of Content Performance Marketing
Learn how to ensure high content performance
3 Essential Elements of Content Performance Marketing
Today’s content marketing landscape is a battleground with companies fighting for consumer attention. Marketers spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year creating new digital marketing content. However, this content has limited value unless it is actually found by users, optimized to achieve maximum impact and measured to assess business results.
In this thought leadership paper, BrightEdge and SAP share numerous insights, tips and a simple 3-step process to guarantee future content performance marketing success and return on investment. The white paper also highlights key content marketing challenges that brands and marketers face
Leverage our full whitepaper to aid you in becoming a thought leader in your industry.
Content Performance Paper
Rackspace Increases Organic, Non-Branded KW Traffic 212%
Rackspace realizes gains through on-site changes and launching an earned media campaign
1100%
increase in keyword position
212%
increase in site traffic
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.
Request a demo of the BrightEdge platform today!
Rackspace Case Study
8%
increase in CTR
15%
increase in referred traffic
THE PROBLEM
As content marketing becomes more important for generating organic traffic, it becomes more important to have a well-defined process for identifying themes, producing content, repurposing content and most importantly measuring the overall gains from multiple channels.
THE SOLUTION
Ali MacDonald, Content Marketing Manager at Seagate approaches content marketing like this:
1) Identify themes
2) Perform keyword research
3) Develop a content plan
4) Create content
5) Measure progress
For MacDonald, the content plan in step 3 includes the marketing objective, the media asset, and the key performance metric (KPI) to measure the performance.
Tracking in BrightEdge
THE RESULTS
The BrightEdge report captures the dramatic improvement in ranked keywords from 5 to over 32, a 6- fold increase. In addition, the volume and quality of traffic was high with a 15% increase on referred traffic on that topic with a 20% increase in new visitor traffic. The clickthrough rate on the calls to action increased 8% and the campaign was regarded as success by management.
BrightEdge has been huge for us, very helpful.
Seagate Case Study - Keywords
How Adobe Won 66% Share of SEO Voice
B2B software maker took a bigger slice of the organic traffic pie
8%
growth in organic, non-branded traffic
63%
of organic traffic driven from new pages
THE PROBLEM
A few years back, Adobe found that overall organic traffic to their website for non-branded keywords was very low. They had one product page with all of their features on it (more than 30 of them), but no detailed features page. Though the content was completely relevant, Google was unable to apply one theme to the page, which resulted in low or no rankings for any one specific keyword.
THE SOLUTION
Kirill Kronrod, Senior Global SEO Manager at Adobe, was tasked with figuring out how to improve overall organic traffic to the website from non-branded keywords. With so many features, the existing page he had was quite long and very dense. He decided that he would run a pilot creating 15 individual pages for 15 of the features. Each of these pages was specific to not only one feature, but also to one of the non-branded keywords they wanted to rank for. He found these keywords through his analytics platform, Google Webmaster Tools, and the BrightEdge SEO platform. He used BrightEdge’s Share of Voice report to see how his test performed, not only in regard to traffic gain, but also to see if and how Adobe was able to capture a larger slice of the pie from its competitors.
THE RESULTS
In the first year, organic traffic for non-branded keywords grew 8% along with improvement in conversions. Adobe then rolled out individual feature pages for the remaining product features and now 63% of all non-brand organic traffic is attributed to the new individual feature pages. Additionally, the Share of Voice report from BrightEdge now shows that Adobe claims about 66% of the traffic from those non-branded keywords, meaning the 5 competitors they’re tracking through BrightEdge only account for the remaining 34% of volume.
BrightEdge Share of Voice report shows for our set of competitors that we identified... how we were able to establish a really big dominance on non-brand optimization and, based on the findings, how we can expand.
Adobe Case Study 1
Epicor Overcomes Penguin Penalty
Dawn Olsen uses BrightEdge to lead campaign to lift Google manual penalty
23%
jump in organic traffic
3x
increase in competitive share
Epicor Overcomes Penguin Penalty
Dawn Olsen uses BrightEdge to lead campaign to lift Google manual penalty
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