Kristin Fletcher relies on the BrightEdge platform and customer service to build content and mobile SEO strategies, using Hyperlocal and Recommendations for optimization
Transcript of Ochsner's SEO Story:
We use BrightEdge. They help us to find keywords to help incorporate on our web pages, so we can show up in Google. They also help us to find content that our patients are looking for; so we can develop content catered to them.
We're more than just the health care system. We want our communities to be healthy overall, have a healthy lifestyle, and they help us to find the content that our patients want.
I really like the Recommendations. If a page, for instance, if the service line leader is like "we're not showing up on Google," I really like the Recommendations and going there and planning out how we can optimize our pages so we can show up in Google.
Local strategy is just to cater to our local patients and each region. Like I mentioned earlier, wer'e more than just the health care system. We want our patients to be healthy overall. The majority of our users are mobile users. We're very focused on being mobile friendly and BrightEdge has definitely been helping us with that.
We've just mainly been using BrightEdge and we're very happy with their service. BrightEdge has helped us to develop really good content for our patients. Just letting us know what our patients are looking for and searching within our regions.
We have a CSM. And his name is Chris and he is very helpful. If I have any questions within the platform he is always there to help me out to better use it and to get content and keywords to help with our Google listings.
I would definitely recommend BrightEdge to other customers.
Keenan Davis, Sr. Director of Marketing at SVS, advocates for BrightEdge's ease of use and deep, actionable insights
Transcript of SVS's SEO Story:
SVS is a home audio brand. We try to create immersive audio experience. Imagine watching your favorite shows--Game of Thrones--in surround sound. We try to produce products that allow people to experience some of their favorite movies, music, streaming TV in such a way that it's just a much more enjoyable experience.
I've been a BrightEdge customer for going on nine years now, since 2011. So, I'm a bit of a lifer.
As I move roles, move companies, I always wind up going back to BrightEdge, bringing them on board. For me, the level of insight that you get through Data Cube initially. There's a lot of innovations coming up now; but all these various tools in my toolbox, at my disposal, to help me evangelize SEO in my companies; it's just super-powerful.
There's one thing with me by myself saying this is important. It's a completely other thing, when you can bring the numbers and the data to support you behind it. And the way the BrightEdge dashboard presents things in such a user friendly in way, that even the highest execs of my company can get it in an instant. That’s the part of our BrightEdge is just really strong.
From a research standpoint, for instance like the BrightEdge Recommendations is probably a really good example of that. Where if you're trying to implement technical SEO, instead of digging around and rooting around trying to find the right thing to do, it just serves up to you on a platter. But all that research aspect of it is not taken off our plate, all we have to do is execute.
A year and a half ago we had no quick answers whatsoever. We’re now at quick answers that are approaching 100 quick answers.
Everyone knows video is important, but we didn't realize how important it was for the universal search listings, so we started getting video popping up as well.
I've been with BrightEdge at SVS for four years now and have consistently grown by double digits every single year. Its peak was, I believe, two years ago when it was something like 60 or 70%. But it's no matter what it’s still consistent growth.
The revenue brought in by organic search prior to me working with BrightEdge at SVS since; it's up to 200%. It's really amazing how they were able to hone in using BrightEdge tools, how much I can run up traffic, and turn traffic into revenue.
As BrightEdge continues to innovate and add more and more resources, introducing products, it allows me to walk away from some of the other things that I have to use. The user experience of the dashboard itself, night and day when you compare the two different platforms. Those two things in particular, the user experience one is really important because I have the younger, less experienced people on my team who are trying to understand SEO. BrightEdge presents the data in such a way that it's like a light bulb goes off. And that aspect of it becomes really easy for me to evangelize SEO throughout the organization.
L'Oreal SEO Finds Website Insights Using BrightEdge
Dhanesh Shelat uses BrightEdge to enhance L’Oreal’s Technical SEO and Mobile Strategy, driving product-specific content to support strong customer experiences.
Transcript of L'Oreal's SEO Story:
Increasing the performance of our site from the technical side is super important as well as really scaling our content with a data-first approach.
I'm the only one leading web projects and SEO side, but I work quite closely on the brand side. It's generally to raise awareness and then to actually have a fantastic customer experience actually to really help us understand how people are searching. And then so that we can really produce the highest performing content.
We heard the mobile dawn was happening several years ago; 60 to 70% of our traffic is mobile. It can be kind of challenging right when you're working on a desktop all day to always think mobile first in design, performance, etc., approaching everything we do from a mobile perspective.
So, I've used BrightEdge mostly for the Data Cube. I said prior to my role currently I'd used BrightEdge at Group M. From the technical side, I find some of the insights on the homepage as you log into the platform to be super helpful at showing which pages are particularly slowing down your site. So, we’ve taken note of that and that's been our cue to triumph.
A few of our objectives: improving the things on the technical side, improving site performance. We have a couple of brand launches coming up, particularly on acne.
It's a new vertical. And we're looking to really produce content that fits our niche. On the content side it's essentially ensuring that we haven't left any of the high priority strategic brand areas; we haven't left them on the table.
Services have experienced fantastic growth. Our content at the moment is linked to those product launches. I think the key thing with BrightEdge, it really is. I think it more of an SEO toolkit.
I think the features that allow both those who are slightly more advanced when it comes to SEO skills, but also those who are actually not super technically SEO. You can essentially put a URL in or even just a keyword, and it's able to assess this is the kind of data points they’re looking to get out of it.
When it comes to beauty ingredients it’s actually a big part of how users are searching and begin their kind of awareness or their consideration. So when it comes to ingredients, we often use the Data Cube to understand how people are searching for particular ingredients, particularly the longtail feature when it comes to specifically optimizing for that piece.
The way that I approach it is just don't get so focused on that particular keyword just answer that in the best way that you can from a user perspective. You want to answer the question in a way that satisfies the user intent.
BrightEdge promises ‘self-driving SEO’ with new Autopilot offering
News Item Author Name
SearchEngineLand
News Item Published Date
News Item Summary
One of the promises of machine learning and AI is that mundane tasks can be automated leaving people to do more strategic or creative work. That’s what BrightEdge is saying about its new Autopilot SEO product, which the company likens to a self-driving car.
To do content marketing, you'll need to take into account what customers want to read about online and then producing material that appeals to them. Some content marketing examples can include blogs, white papers, FAQs, and more. The material can be featured prominently on the search engines.
Content marketing requires careful analysis of what people search for and thus what they want to find online. To do content marketing successfully, you must have a thorough understanding of who your target customers are and what they want to read when they decide to research on the Internet. Therefore, you will want to follow these steps.
Understand precisely who your target personas are. This requires market research as well as regular conversations with your existing customers. You want to understand what these target customers want to see as they move through the buyer’s journey, and to do that, you must understand their pain points. Develop a firm understanding of why customers choose you over your competitors.
Lay out your buyer personas along their buyer journeys. You must also understand how the content needs of these customers change as they get closer to conversion. You will want to understand the questions they have as they move from their initial investigation surrounding their pain point to evaluating their options and finally onto conversion.
Develop a list of keywords that help you target specific topics. These should be of interest to prospective customers at each stage of their journey. You want to look for keywords that have high traffic rates, which indicates that many people search for this topic, but low competition, which indicates that you will be able to rank for this keyword significantly easier than other keywords.
Write the content. Use your keyword naturally throughout the content so that your topic and target remain clear. Remember that the key to successful content marketing consists of providing value for your readers. Do not just produce content for its own sake, make sure that the material you create offers something unique that contributes to the conversation about the topic. Let your expertise shine through.
Make sure your content is optimized. As you produce your content, go through the material and carefully optimize it. This entails using keywords naturally throughout the material. It also means using relevant images and including keyword rich alt text. Linking the page you produce with the rest of the content you have on your site and then promoting it through email and social media can also benefit your piece's optimization strategy.
Writing for content marketing requires careful consideration of your target audience and what they want to accomplish online. The better you can align the content you produce with the needs of your target audience, the easier you will find it to achieve success.
What is SEO Analysis?
Definition
What is SEO Analysis?
SEO analysis is the process of closely examining a website to gain a better understanding of how well the site has been optimized and what can be done to help the site improve.
SEO analysis requires brands to first take a careful look at the content they have on their page. They want to see what keywords their content has been optimized for and how well that content performs. This can be completed easily on the BrightEdge platform by plugging the brand URL into the Data Cube to see what keywords the site ranks highly for. Diving into keyword reporting also brings up information regarding what individual page ranks for the keywords in your keyword groups.
The next part of an analysis involves looking at how this performance impacts the brand. You want to gauge how high your content ranks for the targeted keyword, how well content has been optimized, and how this impacts traffic rates and leads. This can also be done through the BrightEdge platform by looking at the Page Reporting feature and setting up dashboards to track traffic over time. A ContentIQ analysis will also help you pinpoint potential errors that could be hurting your SEO progress, including missing meta data or keywords that have not been used optimally.
Knowing how to do website SEO analysis can give you a far greater insight into the performance of your page and how best to move forward. Remember that the higher the page ranks on the SERP, the more traffic it can bring in and thus the more leads and customers. When brands develop a better understanding of their current level of optimization, they can find areas where they can improve.
How Do I Analyze Website SEO?
To do a website SEO analysis you want to follow these steps.
Make a list of the content you currently have on your site.
Use the BrightEdge platform to determine what keywords your domain already ranks for.
Note the current ranking of these pages for these target keywords.
Run an analysis with ContentIQ to find any weak areas of your content. This includes weak keyword usage or missing metadata.
Use Google Search Console to identify important data regarding your traffic on each page, the number of leads that come in through your website, and your conversion rates.
As you build your SEO analysis, look at areas where you can improve. Identify the weakest pages, the ones that do not run well and do not effectively bring in new visitors and encourage them to progress through your conversion funnel. This will help you know where to get started with your optimization process.
You can also use your analysis to see what types of keywords your site still needs content for. You can then start to build a content calendar around these gaps and bolster your site with new content.
By taking the information from your SEO analysis, you will have the information you need to improve your existing content and make it more appealing for the search engines as well as a strong content calendar to build up your buyer's journey with.
Your SEO rank refers to where your website falls on the search engine results page, or SERP. Improving your ranking revolves around a better understanding of what visitors and the search engines want to see and then addressing these issues on your site.
When people type or speak a query for the search engines, they receive a list of sites that are ranked in the order of their likely relevance to the query. Google continues to refine their algorithm as they gain a better understanding of the intent of their users as well as the quality of the different websites.
Where a particular website falls on the SERP can have a serious impact on how many clicks and visitors a particular website receives. Studies on the issue have found that websites in the top three positions will receive 52 percent of the clicks, with the rate of clicks quickly falling to a mere 2 percent and lower by the bottom of the first page. Therefore, brands who discover how to increase their SEO rank can have a dramatic impact on the success of their site and their bottom line.
The search engines want to find websites that best answer the query of the user. Therefore you want to make your site appear:
1. Relevant. It should clearly show the search engines and the potential readers that your content addresses the needs of your visitors. This means that it should contain relevant keywords including semantically related keywords, helpful metadata, and a trustworthy web layout.
2. Authoritative. The content should be written to demonstrate authority on the subject. Ideally, it should be well-cited, proving that the content is not just the opinion of the creator, but carries weight. The author should also ideally have expertise in the field.
3. Expertise. The creator of the context should have demonstrable expertise in this area and their credentials should be featured prominently on the website so that visitors, and search engines, can easily see why they should trust this particular person.
4. Trustworthy. The content should be trustworthy, which means that the content and the entire domain should appear credible and give readers a reason to remain on the page. This means designing a website according to the latest secure search best practices, and not creating a site that could be mistaken for spam. It also means asking yourself how this particular piece of content will help users in their quest to find answers.
To improve SEO rank, brands should therefore focus on the user experience they create within their site and the level of content they produce. Ensuring that their content addresses the needs of their users and provides an in depth, expert-level understanding of the topic will help to raise an SEO ranking and help the page bring in more traffic.
Google works by scanning or ‘crawling’ the millions of websites on the internet and gathering important information from these sites about their content and how helpful they will likely be for users interested in this topic.
Google has a software crawler, referred to as a spider or bot. This spider regularly goes out and crawls websites available online. When it lands on a website, it picks up important data markers, including important key terms that indicate the topics covered, traffic to the site, how the site is constructed, and how relates to other sites on the topic. It then uses the information to process its algorithm.
Websites get crawled regularly, without any input from website owners. Sites that receive high amounts of traffic and regular updates will naturally receive more frequent crawls than those who do not have either of these traits.
Website owners do have the ability, however, to request that Google crawls their page if they post an important update or piece of content and they do not want to wait for the search engine spiders to notice it naturally. Websites and individual web pages will only be added to the index once they have been crawled, so requesting a crawl on websites can be valuable for those who want to get their material noticed and in front of potential users on the search engine.
The Google algorithm is a sophisticated calculation that takes in countless data points from millions of websites online and computes their relevance to the queries that users type in. When someone asks Google a question, the algorithm computes the relevance of the different sites using the data points the spider collected. The result it returns to the user is known as the search engine results page, or SERP.
The algorithm remains highly confidential, unknown to people outside of the company. Marketers, however, have used a variety of tests and experiments along with conversations with Google representatives to better understand the types of factors Google takes into account.
Through these conversations and tests, we know that the algorithm cares about factors such as page speed, mobile friendliness, keyword and content relevance, and domain authority.
The Google algorithm does not remain static. The search engine regularly looks for ways to update the algorithm to better reflect the needs of users. Its goal remains to provide users with an optimal experience so they will continue to use the search engine. For this reason, the search engine wants to refine their ability to understand user intent and website content. When they make these changes, you will hear marketers refer to algorithm updates. Often, these updates result in shakeups regarding how highly pages rank for different types of queries.
Teradata Achieves High Rank and B2B Lead Generation
Teradata's Global SEO Strategist, Ron Weber, utilizes BrightEdge to optimize all aspects of their Content and SEO strategies
Transcript from Teradata's SEO Story:
The current program at Teradata really was when I took over it was a house on fire. We had a lot of technical issues. We had a lot of content issues. And really it was starting from scratch. It was really analyzing what was happening with the site from all angles and figuring out what to do next.
I am the only person in SEO at our company. I do work with a content team. I have a vast array of resources at my disposal. We have a lot of content-rich assets that are already in place - just a lot of pages that needed to be optimized.
My digital team, which was four people back in March, is now eight. The commitment from management is there. We're pulling resources from all other departments. SEO-led, digital-led; is really what the call to arms is at my company.
The house was on fire when I took it over - a lot of technical SEO work had to be done. Now, we're to the point where we are driving leads. B2B lead gen is the sole focus of our website - that's what SEO is driving towards - that's what everything is driving towards.
As an example, when I first took over SEO I realized that that our cloud section was under-served, under-utilized, under-optimized. I took the section, and I had an SEO led strategy which doubled the number of pages. We went from 14 pages to 28 pages within the span of six weeks put up those pages quickly. They all had SEO journeys in mind. They were all SEO optimized.
The number of keywords in the first position have doubled, the number of keywords in our second position have doubled, and the number of keywords, just across the board, have doubled rankings, all the way from page one to page four to 10. The net impact on the leads that we’re gathering specifically to cloud have been three times what they were back in June.
Our company focuses on megadata customers. I can't quantify what that is, but I do know that the number of leads that are coming from our megadata customers are significant; much more so than prior to doing SEO.
ContentIQ and, as I mentioned, our platform was on fire when I first started in and so being able to see that from BrightEdge perspective was great. And seeing that score tick up, week after week has been really part of my winning strategy.
BrightEdge affects my content strategy in the most impactful way which is looking at competitors. That is something that has served me well for the number of years I've had BrightEdge. And being able to know what my competitors are ranking for that we absolutely should be ranking for is one of those things that I can bring to any content team and bring them the reason to believe why they need to produce content.
Starkey.com Excels at SEO and Content Strategy with BrightEdge
BrightEdge provides Justin Young, Manager of Corporate Digital Marketing at Starkey, with the all-in-one SEO Platform to keep his SEO Program running at peak efficiency
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.