We live in a real-time society and expect information and services in an instant at our fingertips. Everything from grocery shopping to hailing a car to checking who’s at our front door can be done in an instant from our mobile phones. According to Salesforce Research, 64% of consumers and 84% of business buyers expect companies to respond to them in real time. We expect real-time responses, and waiting even a few extra seconds is too many for most of us. More than half of consumers are not willing to wait longer than 5 seconds for a webpage to load. We’re also researching our purchases online, even when taking our business to a brick-and-mortar retailer. More than 80% of smartphone users consult their phones while standing in a store deciding which product to buy.

At the same time, search is changing and is faster than ever before. These changes bring more economic opportunities but also make the work of SEOs increasingly complex. In today’s world, changes are instant, SERPs are evolving and responding in real-time. And, search is more than desktop and mobile; it’s also voice.

SEO today is time consuming, doesn’t scale, and gets increasingly harder by the day. In BrightEdge's latest research we found SEO practitioners are using an average of 6 tools cobbled together and 4 hours a day on research, reporting, and analysis. With half the day of an SEO practitioner spent on research, reporting, and analysis, it’s hard for them to find the time to actually make SEO changes and drive strategy.

There’s a better way:

• Move away from inaccurate, cobbled-together point solutions and hours of analysis in Excel

• Say goodbye to old data, limited geographic scope, and cringing anytime you need to provide reports, recommendations, or analysis

• Go beyond theory and authoring a point of view to your organization and take action in real-time.

BrightEdge Instant is a game changer--the first-ever, real-time SEO solution on the market. Now you can optimize at the speed of search, understand the customer experience as it’s happening, improve workflow and operational efficiency, optimize in real-time, and discover in-the-moment opportunities as they arise. BrightEdge Instant is an all-in-one workflow for real-time research, rankings, and recommendations.

Demo BrightEdge Instant

Research

Utilize real-time research to answer questions and uncover opportunities as they happen. BrightEdge Instant gives you access to real-time, on-demand data which empowers you to ask specific questions and discover quantitative, data-driven answers with rapid speed, ease, and accuracy.

Deliver a real-time voice strategy with BrightEdge Instant

As an industry, we’ve been talking about voice, but no one is really doing anything about it. Meanwhile, SEOs are expected to have a voice search strategy, and understand the conversations that are happening in the market. The challenge is that conversational queries change so fast that they become instantaneous. And, when strategizing for voice, SEOs must understand the conversational journey and the next three follow-up questions someone is going to ask. Your strategy involves wading through a list of keywords from keyword planner, manually looking for conversational searches, or turning to a point solution with display-only capabilities, lacking search volume, disconnected from your SEO workflow.

Here’s what your voice search strategy looks like with BrightEdge Instant

BrightEdge Instant is a better way to research:

• Make voice a reality – For the first time SEOs have a solution for voice search and a way to identify the conversations happening in their space. Easily identify all the top-of-the-funnel awareness- generating question keywords with search volume. Analyze the keyword landscape and which portion of your keywords contain questions and which percentage you are winning.

• Real-time topic research powered by machine learning – BrightEdge uses the power of AI to curate the most-relevant topics and keywords to go after. It takes a seed list of relevant keywords and expands it by 100X. So, you gain a finely crafted targeted list of relevant keywords to go after and can uncover what’s currently trending in real time.

• Instant keyword research based on location – SEOs now, for the first time, can account for trends, seasonality, and events as they relate to their search traffic on a global basis. Gain a comprehensive, current pulse of demand across all the locations in which you operate. Search thousands of keywords in one query across 37,000 locations worldwide without needing to track the keywords.

• Seamless navigation of keywords – Content research is made easy by categorization of keywords. Easily and instantly navigate keyword research and organize automatically into thematic folders. Discover ideas containing word groupings and apply filters to search for terms that do or do not contain a certain word.

The most scalable & efficient keyword workflow

• Scale research across thousands of locations and dozens of languages all in one platform
• Perform real-time research tasks directly within one platform
• Make smart, high-impact decisions quickly and seamlessly
• Gain a competitive edge and be the first to find new, actionable, data-driven opportunities before anyone else and act on them quickly

Rankings

With BrightEdge Instant, understand in real-time how your content is performing across all the vertical and global engines

Identify your rank anywhere you operate

Trying to keep up with the changing dynamic of the SERPs is truly like running on a treadmill set to fast. You’re never able to stay up to speed. And when an executive or category manager says your rank has slipped, you’re stuck manually performing web searches in an incognito window trying to record what’s currently happening. Ultimately, you’re left without any way to understand your rank at scale across hundreds or thousands of locations.

Here’s what your ranking analysis looks like with BrightEdge Instant

Within one centralized platform you can access

• SEO at the speed of Google – BrightEdge Instant offers truly live, real-time (not cached) rank check at scale, empowering you to stay ahead of the real-time nature of search. Respond to change as it happens and drive the right content for the changing moment. Access real-time, mobile and desktop rankings across 37,000 locations and 46 languages.

• SEO at the speed of YouTube – Video is instantaneous. Now your YouTube rankings are instantaneous as well. Uncover in real-time the performance of your videos, and your competitors' videos for any search right now. Unlock which products, categories, and influencers are taking off and use that to further promote those videos and inform future content strategy.

• Your brand performance on Amazon – Find out how your products rank on the third-largest search engine in the world. Say goodbye to manual time-consuming searches and instead turn to BrightEdge Instant, the only platform with Amazon rankings. Enter thousands of product keywords into BrightEdge and see how they rank on Amazon.

• Real-time rankings for your global footprint – Understand how you perform on the leading search engines in each of your global markets. BrightEdge gives you rankings for the top 10 search engines around the world and is the only company offering a global footprint outside of Google. Uncover how you’re ranking for any keyword, in real-time, on a global level, all in one search.

SEOs need real-time data for real-time decisions

• Get keyword rank, volume, and ideas in any country or language
• Have visibility into rank for any:
  • Term
  • Search engine
  • Device
  • City
  • Country
  • Language

Recommendations

Gain actionable recommendations to improve page-speed performance, content opportunities, and backlinks

Page speed matters more than price

As an SEO you need to ensure your pages are fast on both desktop and mobile. If your pages are slow to load on either device, Google views this as a poor user experience and you’ll lose traffic. Every second longer your site takes to load means the difference between converting a customer or losing them to the competition.

You dread reporting and performing analysis on page speed because the process is so time consuming. You spend countless hours each month looking up your webpages one by one and recording the information into a spreadsheet then repeating this process for your competitors.

Here’s what your page-speed strategy looks like with BrightEdge Instant

• Integrated page-speed performance and recommendations – Don’t wait for Google to crawl your pages and provide notification of page errors. Instead take an integrated, proactive approach to page speed. BrightEdge is the only SEO platform with page-speed performance. Diagnose pages across both devices and provide actionable recommendations for how to improve page speed across all the pages you care about.

• Real-time recommendations – Take action on instantly identified content opportunities. Open BrightEdge Instant Real-Time Recommendations in one tab and your CMS in another, make a change, hit Refresh, and see the change instantly reflected in BrightEdge. Surface prescriptive on-page and off-page recommendations, including page title, H1 tag, backlinks, and more.

Integrated page-speed performance & SEO insights

• Understand, at scale, desktop and mobile site speed performance
• Benchmark against the competition
• Gain recommendations to drive more revenue

Take action on instantly identified content opportunities

• Gain recommendations updated with instant status updates
• Improve the SEO performance of your site with prescriptive instructions for every content page

We’re beyond excited to give you a glimpse into this groundbreaking new SEO innovation. BrightEdge Instant is made by SEOs for SEOs to address the real-time nature of search, improve operational efficiencies, and scale–all within the BrightEdge platform.

Make sure to stay tuned to our blog as we’ll do a deeper dive on each of the key themes of real-time research, rankings, and recommendations in the coming weeks.

As the Web has become increasingly complex, JavaScript has found itself playing a useful role in the development of engaging websites. Although it was once used to accent content that was otherwise contained within HTML, it is now increasingly on the center stage.

Issues with JavaScript and SEO, however, remain a concern for many website developers. Site owners want to make sure that Googlebot and other search engine crawlers can properly understand sites that contain a lot of JavaScript so that their pages do not suffer in the search engine results. This discussion has even prompted Google to release a series of videos on JavaScript SEO to help you ensure that you prepare your JavaScript pages for the SERPs effectively.

We wanted to break down the essentials of JavaScript SEO to help our community keep their sites optimized and ready to compete on the SERPs.

Understanding rendering with JavaScript SEO

Before we can dive into JavaScript SEO, we must first explore how JavaScript sites behave and how they interact with users and search engine crawlers.

First, Google distinguishes between JavaScript sites and sites that merely have some JavaScript on their page. In the latter, the JavaScript helps to create some special effects, but the core content--the most important information--appears as HTML. This means that the JavaScript does not impact the ability of Googlebot to read and understand the site and thus does not impact SEO.

A Javascript site, however, uses JavaScript to display critical information. This means that content you want included in your index relies on JavaScript to be displayed, making rendering an essential part of the indexing process.

Understanding rendering

Rendering is the process that takes the content, templates, and other features of your site and displays them to the user. There are two main types of rendering: server-side rendering and client-side rendering.

Server-side rendering

In server-side rendering, the templates are populated on the server. Each time a user or a crawler accesses the site, the page is rendered on the server and then sent to the browser. This means that when the user accesses your website, they receive all of the content as HTML markup immediately. Generally, this benefits SEO because Google doesn't have to render the JavaScript separately to access all the content you have created.

Client-side rendering

For certain situations, however, such as single-page apps, client-side rendering does have some advantages.

Client-side JavaScript can be expensive in terms of performance. It is super important that you do not lose sight of page load performance when making the decision to use JavaScript SEO to render elements in your page. Target page load times for 4G connections on mobile should be under 2 seconds. Having a slow page load can have a negative impact on your overall page rank. Google has stated that page load performance is a ranking factor. Slower page load times can result in higher than normal bounce rates, lower overall time on page, lower than average pages per session, lower conversion percentages and ultimately lower page ranks which directly impacts page visits overall. Avoid using shared libraries across your site and instead try to use your JavaScript SEO and CSS efficiently. Mid-tier handsets have slower processors, usually lower RAM and slower GPUs. When a Browser loads a web page the handset has to download, parse, compile and execute all JavaScript. So, if you pass large percentages of code that is not used, you can greatly slow down the overall page load times. The following is an example page from a live site that has a large percentage of unused code. This report is produced through Chrome Developer Tools Coverage Report. As you can see in this example, 2.2 MBs out of 2.3 MBs are unused.

It is also important to surface as many important links in the html so that they can be crawled in the first pass. By rendering important links by JavaScript you can delay getting those links crawled.

Work closely with your development team and set realistic goals for capabilities that you want to surface on your website that are balanced against having a small footprint in terms of bytes and test the page load performance against different handset types with 4G network speeds.

Some sites also find that they can combine these two main forms of rendering, resulting in dynamic rendering. For example, for a site that has content that will change a lot, dynamic rendering helps sites take advantage of the benefits of both client-side and server-side rendering.

This technique allows sites to switch between the two, depending upon who is accessing the site. Using rendertron, you can program your site to create pre-rendered content that can be delivered to certain user agents, like Googlebot. When regular users access the site, however, the site can use client-side rendering so that the visitor accessing your site can get the most updated information as efficiently as possible. Note that if you do use this strategy, you will want to update your cached version of the site regularly to ensure that the version seen by the crawlers remains up-to-date.

Rendering and JavaScript SEO

Google understands JavaScript relatively well. However, the crawler attempts to interpret and rank billions of websites around the globe, and JavaScript does require more effort than standard HTML. This can sometimes put it at a disadvantage.

Google reports that Googlebot indexes JavaScript sites in two waves. During the first pass through, the crawler will look at the HTML content and use that to begin indexing the site. At a later date, they will return to render the JavaScript that needs rendering. Keep in mind that sites created with server-side rendering, however, display content with HTML markup. Since the main content is already displayed, Googlebot will not have to return to render the JavaScript on the site to properly index the content. This can make your JavaScript SEO strategy significantly easier.

Because of the delay between the first and second passes through a site, the content contained within the JavaScript will not be indexed as quickly. This means that the content will not count towards initial rankings and changes may take a while for Google to notice and adjust rankings accordingly.

For this reason, brands that use JavaScript SEO will want to make sure that they put as much essential content as possible within the HTML of their site. Critical information that they want to have count towards their ranking should be written so that the crawlers can interpret it the first time through.

Common errors with JavaScript SEO

Although JavaScript helps create some exciting websites, some errors do commonly pop up that harm the site’s SEO and online potential. We want to bring a few of them to your attention.

Neglecting the HTML

Containing the most important information in the site within the JavaScript means that the crawlers will have little information to work with the first time they index your site. As already discussed, make sure that critical information you want indexed quickly is created with HTML.

If you are not sure where your critical content lives, you can inspect your page source by right clicking anywhere on the page and selecting "Inspect" from the menu. The content that you find in the inspect page is the content that the Googlebot sees right away. You can also turn JavaScript off in your browser to see the content that remains.

As you progress through a site audit, ContentIQ also has the capacity to interpret your JavaScript frameworks, helping you understand the entire experience your site creates for users.

Not using links properly

Links play an essential role in any website as they help crawlers and users understand how the pages connect. When it comes to JavaScript SEO, it also helps keep people better engaged with your website and interested in your content.

For JavaScript SEO, however, you want to make sure your links have been set up correctly. This means using relevant link anchor text and HTML anchor tags, including the URL for the destination page in the href attribute. Google advises staying away from other HTML elements, such as <span> as well as JavaScript event handlers. These types of linking strategies can make it harder for people to follow links and can also create a poor user experience for those on assistive technology.

Google also recommends staying away from hash-based routing techniques. If JavaScript helps to create a transition between pages, then using the history API works much better.

Accidently preventing Google from indexing your JavaScript

Keep in mind that Googlebot does not render JavaScript until a second pass through your site. Therefore, some sites make the mistake of including markups, such as ‘no index’ tag in the HTML that loads during Google’s first pass through the site. This tag may prevent Googlebot from returning to run the JavaScript contained within the site, which then blocks the proper indexing of the site.

Another common mistake is blocking crawlers from crawling the JavaScript directory. So, make sure that you DO NOT have a Disallow: /JavaScript entry in your robots.txt file.

JavaScript continues to be an important feature of the web as brands use it to mark up their pages and create more engaging websites for their users. Understanding how Googlebot and other crawlers read JavaScript and how it can potentially interact with JavaScript SEO, however, remains a priority for many.