Transcript of Starkey.com's SEO Story:

It's myself and an analyst who kind of give the direction and the consulting of SEO for Starkey.com. And we have three writers and a handful of creative people. We have a handful of people who do the measurement and analysis of SEO for our .com, as well as integrating with our content, writers, our creative team, and our development team to fill every need to make sure we rank as high as possible in the very competitive vertical of hearing aids and hearing related devices.

Our SEO program is pretty unique where we have to curate content for people seeking hearing aids for personal use and people seeking hearing aids to sell to patients. We've kind of developed our website to fill the need of needs of both - where people can research products and how they help people from a technical capacity.

BrightEdge has helped us develop the strategy to meet that unique need of fulfilling both of those audiences for Starkey.com

The goal of Starkey.com is to be the online experts of hearing loss and hearing aids. We have two pillars of the website itself. Where one side is all about hearing loss; it's the kind of upper funnel, if you will, of the user journey. Where people are exploring and understanding what hearing loss is, how it happened, how do you treat it, how is it preventable, and how to live with hearing loss once you realize you have it.

Then we have the other side of Starkey.com which is all about the hearing aids itself. We talk about our products features and benefits, a little bit about tiering and cost of the products. Because, again, it's a unique website where we have to have content for both the user and the seller.

The marketing executives are very aware of the shift to digital. They know how important it is to invest in digital tools and platforms to be present and combat, defend your visibility on search engines on the internet. That's part of why I'm here. They see the value in investing in search engine optimization and being present in a digital space. For a long time, even up until the last five years, print was still working very well in the hearing space.

The integration with Google Search Console and the supplement of ContentIQ are probably my favorite features in in the BrightEdge platform. ContentIQ is awesome because it gives the very easy direction to improve your website from a technical perspective. And then just feeding in Search Console data into BrightEdge gives that holistic view of what Google is seeing and how and the power of BrightEdge is combined. It creates this kind of magical spot of search tracking and insights and recommendations to make the right decisions to keep your web properties present on Google, Bing, Baidu, any of those search engines throughout the world.

We do lean very heavily on BrightEdge to give us the right recommendations, the right direction and decision-making powers to share those insights to our developers and content writers. I pull reports once a month to provide technical direction for our striking-distance keywords, low hanging fruits, to make those small tweaks to get present on page one.

Anything that we're not ranking for that is interesting content or instruct interesting phrases; I provide to our content writers to make pages for our blog posts and anything that's kind of the quicker content that we can develop and push out in that moment to get ranking on those keywords we're not ranking yet.

We used another platform for a little while. We found it, for lack of a better word, clunky, and it was hard to align one keyword to one page. Because we understood that there are many different phrases and pages that can be tied to a page on your website.

And also, the customer service we've heard of and received from BrightEdge, was also attractive at the time. Ever since joining BrightEdge, we've been able to get a better understanding of pages on our website by tying a primary keyword with a handful of secondary keywords to the page. It just fundamentally made more sense to approach search engine optimization that way.

The customer service and support and insights we've received from our BrightEdge team is unbelievable. I work with a lot of vendors and my favorite monthly calls are with BrightEdge.

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Transcript of Kiddie Academy's SEO Story:

In our reasoning behind giving direction to our locations on how to implement their local websites, we also work with our education team to deliver highly valuable content around our brand, our curriculum, and provide resources to parents on how to raise great kids.

We work closely with our operations team to talk about everything that's happening at all of our locations. We help implement best practices for our academies to use their websites. We focus a lot on SEO.

My first [favorite feature] is BrightEdge Insights. Getting immediately actionable items to move the needle is very important. I'm obviously very excited about today's announcements and looking forward to using that as quickly as possible. My second favorite [feature] one is ContentIQ. Because in technical SEO there's lots of moving parts, and the crawls that this tool does for you gives you actionable and immediate results.

Local is king on the consumer side of our business. We focus everything on local. with all the websites templated. We have location listing management; we have online review monitoring in place. We focus heavily on local. We’re looking in BrightEdge to help drive better results at the hyperlocal level, moreso than at the domain level for organic search.

We've had months, recently, where mobile has been 70% of our traffic, which is above the standard. And we're monitoring everything from Google My Business actions to mobile website traffic and the difference between conversions on our website from mobile to desktop to tablet to try to optimize all three.

We just redesigned our website. It was designed mobile-first. The other thing that I think about when I think about mobile is Google and the knowledge graph and owning the top of the SERP and being on the local three pack.

I had a franchisee in the last few months send me a screenshot of their mobile device that was clearly a Google SERP with their academy information. It was their knowledge graph or their location and called it their website.

Everything that represents your brand on mobile is your location. We try to control and implement best practices across the board on mobile. We went through a long process, probably took four or five months, to narrow the list to about five or six. We even debated, "do we bring talent in".

We needed a solution that we knew was innovating constantly, was trying to keep up or stay ahead of Google, and was bringing extra value to the table. One that over time we can integrate into our content strategy; that we can coordinate with our paid search strategy, that could handle both our B2B business, and also our B2C Hyper-local business. We had some flexibility, as well, and that was what won the day. In helping us get comfortable with all the new features that are rolling out helping us think through how to effectively build out our platform. They've been super helpful in our migration process. And they're always thinking ahead, which is really great.

I would have to go back and say I have five members of my team, and BrightEdge is one of them.

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Transcript of Graco's SEO Story:

I'm Geoff Angell, Senior SEO Specialist at Graco. I think our next focus here at Graco is going to be all around how do we optimize our images, not only with image alt-text, but contextually optimizing those images and creating some of the relationships between the image and then the page that's ranking for that image. People Also Ask has been a great way for us to uncover other new opportunities around Quick Answers or featured snippets.

As a B2B manufacturer we sell through channel and through distribution. Our primary KPI is either lead generation, or also activity on our distributor locator - all of our SEO measures kind of focus on those two primary KPIs on our site. SEO drives the majority of all web leads, and I guess the majority of all leads at Graco.

I continue to do demos of other platforms, I think it's worth you know constantly exploring other tools and know what they have to offer, but I've continued to stick with BrightEdge.

So when I have content writers, I need them to think SEO first when they're creating that content. BrightEdge is a really easy way of getting that content creator into BrightEdge and using it. So they're doing keyword research on their own and I'm not constantly doing keyword research across the multiple business units that I support. BrightEdge is appealing to a broader audience than just the SEO. 

The visibility I get from competitors for my own website makes BrightEdge a really good platform for me. I can quickly see how I'm performing at any given time. And with other tools, it's just not as clear. And I think the Data Cube aspect of BrightEdge along with the tracking of my keywords really gives me a clear understanding of where I stand at any given time.

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Google has recently announced that beginning in December 2019, mixed content will be blocked on HTTPS web pages. This update is designed to provide a more secure browsing experience across the web. We wanted to give our community a heads up about this coming HTTPS change as well as information about what it means and […]

The post HTTPS Update: Google Chrome Announces Block on Mixed Content appeared first on BrightEdge SEO Blog.

Transcript of Orangetheory Fitness and Tombras' SEO Story

Hi, my name is Ryan Edwards. I’m the Senior Vice President, Integrated Search at the Tombras Group. Right now, we have a team of about 11 SEO specialists and we work a lot with hyper-local clients, multi-unit retail, franchise dealership-based business, Great Clips, Orangetheoryfitness, Atrium Health, for exampe; businesses with thousands of locations.

What we’re trying to do right now is use BrightEdge's Hyperlocal custom engine tracking to bring visibility and hyperlocal keyword rank and share of voice, competitive tracking all the way down from the enterprise level to the dealership franchise location level. And with that, do it at scale in a way where you can bubble up data insights that you wouldn’t find at the aggregate level.

We’re using BrightEdge Hyperlocal tracking every Monday morning. My team gets in there. T hey’re looking at which locations that have opportunities and which ones in the last week have fallen out of the 3-pack. We take hyperlocal action, content creation, technical and we find ways to bubble them up and beat the competition. 30% gain on detail pages on Share of Voice organic traffic year over year. With Orangetheory Fitness even more than that. We’re thrilled with the BrightEdge technology and innovation.

BrightEdge helps us save tons of time. Without BrightEdge UI, especially the platform itself, it saves the SEO team dozens of hours every single week being able to find insights; automated insights.

Being able to create custom alerts for when certain things are happening--that’s totally customizable. Not just at an aggregate level but at a location, custom search engine right here based on a zip code or based on latitude, longitude. It enables us to find insights, automated insights and create custom alerts.

Every day I get notes from the team about new products coming out, the StoryBuilder, the content module, and how they’re using it to create solutions for our clients. The clients love it, and my team loves it.

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Transcript of AGA's SEO Story

Our SEO program at AGA is relatively recent. On our old website, we didn't focus too much on SEO. We did gain a lot of organic search traffic just because of the content we had. We didn't put a lot of focus into SEO until our recent website redesign. Because we lost a lot of credibility, due to inaccurate redirects and things like that.

At AGA, we have a combination of three teams that work on SEO. We have our communications team, our IT team, and also our marketing team. And we're kind of going there for different reasons.

Our marketing team uses the Data Cube so that way they can expand their reach through organic search.

Our IT team, they implement things on our website directly, that our communications team can’t. So, if we find coding, something wrong with our JavaScript or something like that they'll handle that.

But the communications team, they're the ones who are really in there. They're the ones working with the Data Cube & Content IQ and also looking at the reports and setting up dashboards for different team members.

I mainly use the Content IQ portion of BrightEdge. It really helps identify areas of our website that really need to be spruced up. One of the main things we noticed is a lot of H1 tags were missing. And that was flagged by the system itself. That really helped us gain credibility, especially with our content pages. But it also flagged that we had a problem with our JavaScript. Some of the pages weren't being read by Google bots. The BrightEdge system and it was able to flag that for us.

And that's kind of why we're actually going to go through another redesign. And we have that in mind, we have the knowledge gained from that in mind for that redesign, so we avoid that problem in the future.

When we did our technical optimization with Content IQ, we actually saw a lot of gains. There's a very clear example with our patient GERD page. It went from being on the second page to the first. BrightEdge has a huge impact on the content we produce at AGA. As everything is tied to essentially how it performs.

So, our marketing team is in IT to make sure that programs and events that we have gain a lot of exposure. And so that we understand how much of it is coming from organic search, and how we're increasing that through things like the Data Cube.

BrightEdge also plays a role in how we push out patient-targeted content. It helps us ensure that we're reaching the right audience. Who's searching for the right terms.

And that's especially important because we're competing with websites, like Web MD and Wikipedia and other associations.

So BrightEdge has been instrumental in our mobile strategy. We've switched to a mobile-first website. Some of the insights we've gained from the BrightEdge platform really help us. What it showed us actually is that our pages are mobile friendly, but they're not loading as fast as they could be. And that's going to ding us in the future because we weren't aware of how slow the pages were. And we also weren't aware how much Google prioritizes mobile so that's been really key in that.

BrightEdge has actually helped us a lot in doing more SEO work because it lets us show the metrics and show the actual wins and also more importantly it lets us show the potential wins. I think when you see all you do is make these small little changes and you can gain a lot of impact, that's huge.

Especially when we're presenting to VPs, or the Board or things like that. The organization as a whole has become more metric-focused. It’s not just about doing a program but showing how that program actually performed on which platforms and what can be learned about what we did.

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