enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Does your job seem like a fire drill? Well, ours sure did when the fire alarm went off in the middle of the 1-hour Titans of SEO webinar. The alarm was so loud that we went on mute and then decided we would do the expected thing and evacuate. Dre de Vera and Eugene Feygin kept the Q&A info flowing from Pleasanton and Chicago respectively. Kirill Kronrod, Yulia Kronrod, Mark Aspillera, and I went down to the Kronrods' minivan and dialed back in and continued.

So now we have done a live broadcast during a fire alarm from a car. Check out how the titans of SEO pulled it off. You can hear the fire alarm from 35:48. Ok so back to the webinar: we brought together 4 titans of SEO for a live community Q&A. The audience asked 167 questions of the intermediate, and advanced level.

Mark Aspillera, senior product marketing manager at BrightEdge, and I moderated, and we tossed the hot potato questions to 4 of the most talented SEOs we know in the industry. These are the people I go to for advice and confirmation on SEO best practices. 

View On Demand Now.

Dre de Vera is currently the Search Marketing Global Lead at Workday and has almost 20 years’ experience in SEO. He has led global SEO efforts at 5 other companies: SAP, SuccessFactors, Anaplan, SmartRecruiters, and ABS-CBN.

Dre is strong at vertical search and YouTube and takes a scientific approach to SEO by conducting single-variable tests. He currently ranks #1 for “enterprise SEO consulting” on Google for his digital agency, Dreme Digital and #1 for “enterprise SEO expert” for his BrightEdge customer video on YouTube.

Yulia Kronrod is the director of SEO at Insureon, 

a small business insurance marketplace, where she drives 45% YOY growth in organic visits and 30% YOY growth in SEO conversions through content marketing and optimization, information architecture, technical SEO, user experience testing, and conversion rate optimization.

From prior work at Adobe, Yulia has extensive international SEO experience, including localization and geo-targeting (hreflang). Yulia hosted the last BrightEdge San Jose User Group. 

Eugene Feygin is the Sears Home Services SEO manager managing SearsHomeServices.com & SearsPartsDirect.com with over a decade of SEO experience in the E-Commerce arena from content strategist to technical research and implementation.

Among his many achievements in his SEO career, he improved page load speed by 80% and conversion by more than 500% at Quill.com. Eugene is the moderator for the Chicago BrightEdge User Group.

Kirill Kronrod manages global SEO at Adobe and has been with the company for 8 years. His focus is content strategy, technical SEO, analytics, testing, and user experience enhancements that push Adobe Natural Search presence and conversions. He has spoken at multiple BrightEdge Share conferences.

Fun fact: Kirill has introduced non-branded optimization at Adobe, and in addition to broad success in Google Quick Answer rankings, he has 1st SERP position (and sometimes the Quick Answer) for the "google quick answer” query for the article he published on the BrightEdge blog.

We hope you can join us for this amazing session.

maspillera

M Posted 7 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Millennials have a reputation for being the social media generation. They were the first digital natives to reach adulthood, and they have now entered the economy and job market, influencing how businesses across the board market and interact with their customers.

The numbers that describe the role of millennials in the workforce are impressive:

• They make about a quarter of the US population
• In the last five years, 87% of Millennials in the workforce have taken on management responsibilities and the buying power and influence that goes along with them
• More than half have either started their own business or expressed an interest in doing so

It is clear that brands that neglect the millennial population are doing themselves a disservice. What has not always been clear, however, is how those within this generation interact with the digital world and brands online. Companies want to know about millennial usage rates between social and search and how this will impact their marketing campaigns and user engagement. Businesses need to know how to connect with this generation of consumers.

Here is what some of the latest research has indicated about millennial internet usage and what organizations should do to build themselves a solid audience with the millennial generation.

Differences in usage between Millennials and Generation Z

Before we can begin to analyze how Millennials use social media and search engines, we must first be confident in our definition of Millennials. This generation is generally described as those born between the early 1980s and about 2000. They were the first generation of digital natives as they were able to start integrating technology into their daily lives before they entered the working world. There will certainly be a large difference between someone born in the early 1980s and someone born in the late 1990s. This generation can generally be considered all adults now, as the youngest Millennials will celebrate their 18th birth at some point during this year.

That means that the generation born since 2000 has an entirely new name, commonly referred to as Generation Z. There are some key differences between these two generations of digital natives, though they may seem subtle. Namely, Millennials tend to turn to social media more for the social aspect, they like to update statuses and check in with their friends. Generation Z, on the other hand, tends to migrate more towards using social media for entertainment and content.

Across these two digital generations, however, there are 5 main reasons for using social media that brands should keep in mind. They use social media to:

• Fill up their free time
• Find content that entertains them
• Stay in touch with their friends
• Keep themselves updated on what happens in the world around them
• Share their own content, such as photos and videos

How Millennials use search versus social when online

To better understand how millennials interact with social media, data has been collected to see how they gather information in real-world scenarios.

For example, one survey examined how people would look for recommendations for a new dentist. They found that only 5% would turn to social media and those in the millennial generation were actually more likely than those older than them to turn to search engines to find this type of information. Similar results were recorded in other types of information-gathering situations.

Social media was essentially viewed as a place to solicit the opinions of many people at once, but when people need more concrete answers, they turned to different solutions, like Search.

The survey also found that 97% of people conduct at least one search per day. It is interesting to compare this to social media usage. Although usage has definitely risen dramatically over the past few years, only 69% of adults-- in contrast to search engine usage-- actually log in each day.

For those in the millennial generation, 62% of those asked reported performing at least 5 searches per day, and 68% of this generation also reported that they did nearly all their searches on phones.

In other words, despite the rise in social media usage, search remains a critical part of any successful digital strategy. While the younger generations turn to social media for entertainment and engagement with friends and even brands, when it comes to looking up information, turning to search engines remains the most popular option.

How to effectively engage Millennials

Devising a digital strategy that will target Millennials requires brands to consider how they use social and the search engines. No one can afford to neglect their Organic and search engine paid strategy, even if their target demographic is comprised largely of Millennials. All brands will need to follow the organic search basics of:

• Targeting keywords of interest for the prospective audience
• Developing content that offers value
• Including images and structuring content to make it user- and spider-friendly
• Monitoring your sites progress on Google Analytics and through platforms like BrightEdge to make sure you understand the performance of your site, traffic, and how well your prospects respond to the content your produce.

Social media provides the opportunity to share content that relates to entertainment and information that customers will appreciate. Remember that when it comes to finding more practical information, people still turn to search engines. Therefore, brands should not depend on social media to help prospective customers discover their value, they should instead be viewed as opportunities to nurture relationships.

Material that will promote sharing and social engagement, particularly contests, user-generated content, and content that focuses on providing entertainment will be the most successful on social media. Publishing and promoting this type of information will provide the greatest opportunities for promoting the brand, generating social proof, and uncovering more potential customers interested in engaging further with the organization.

Millennials have undoubtedly turned commerce upside down with their priority of digital media. The better brands can understand how Millennials interact online, the easier it will be for them to create sound strategies that engage with these digital natives and drive business growth.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 7 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge has started releasing a new series of platform training videos to help clients become even more familiar with how to use the platform. Produced by BrightEdge experts, these new platform training videos are designed to be relatively short introductions to various areas of the platform for busy marketers who rarely have large blocks of time available for training.

BrightEdge Customer Onboarding Manager George Stanton from the Seattle office, who loves helping customers and has a "sunny" disposition as you can see from the photo, made a comprehensive series of 54 platform feature videos over many weeks. You can access the platform training videos from the platform in Settings > Profile & Preferences > Get Certified or find them in the Help section by various platform topics.

Next we want to share more in-depth workflow and solution videos. A great one to start with is a two-part program training viewers in how to use the Data Cube for keyword research as well as analyzing a competitor’s domain. Each of the two segments is about 20 minutes long.

The Data Cube videos were created by Bill Fergusson (Bill Sensei) from the Silicon Valley office and Head of Employee Onboarding. “Over the years I’ve developed several exercises for training our new employees in the Data Cube, and I shortened these to fit into a 20-minute time frame for the new video series.” A simple worksheet accompanies the competitive research video.

Needing to present SEO metrics easily to those who are not SEO savvy? Uncertain how to create a relevant dashboard of SEO metrics? Short on time to figure out the best way to get to numbers that matter?

BrightEdge has some really good templates to build your reporting arsenal to measure success and determine optimization opportunities.

Solution Consultant Michael Mazzone from the Cleveland office led an introduction to dashboarding in his recent webinar, where he covers these 4 sections:

1. Executive Dashboard,
2. Primary Competitor Insights,
3. Category Action Plans,
4. Editing, Time Frames, Events, and Dashboard Distribution

This material is designed for and appropriate for BrightEdge beginners and intermediate-level users.

Coming soon:

Solutions Consultant, Justin Abrams from the NY office will explain how to run an effective site audit using ContentIQ. Justin recently rocked presentations on SEO and the BrightEdge platform at Eric Enge's (author or The Art of SEO) training class at SMX East.

Justin was one of the Advanced trainers at the 2018 BrightEdge Share conference in San Francisco. “The importance of becoming proficient and autonomous within specific disciplines is more important now than ever. The ability to diagnose challenges, strategize a plan, and execute accurately could be the differentiating factor in your digital transformation.” We know that video is a great way to learn, so this expert team will keep rolling out the tutorials in the coming months.