koleary

M Posted 7 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Modern marketers use customer data and insights in order to create a great customer experience throughout their websites. There are two critical data sets you need in order to have a comprehensive view of your customers' behaviors and needs: SEO data and web analytics.

Combining these two types of insights into a single strategy will allow you to create a high-powered website that engages customers and allows you a better understanding of what they want to see from your website.

One of the most common platforms to use for web analytics is the free version of Google Analytics, which provides the foundation for most website owners as they begin to engage with SEO. When the BrightEdge and Google Analytics integration you can take your SEO to an entirely new level.

What insights you can pull from Google Analytics

When it comes to measuring your progress online, Google Analytics forms the foundation for most brand strategies. With Google behind it, it provides immeasurable insight into how your site performs and the demographics of the people who land on your site.

Google Analytics tracks referral traffic to your site. This shows you which channels people are coming from, such as Organic, Paid, or Email. You will be able to understand what programs are the most effective, and what your customers respond to the best. You can also compare the traffic between different dates and between different pages to see how your site progresses with your organic efforts to boost optimization and rankings.

You can also analyze the sources that send the most traffic to your site. Knowing the pages that have links to your site can help you better understand your active backlinks and the importance of those links in generating traffic for your page.

Why you need SEO data with web analytics data

Google Analytics can tell you what happens on your site and how people engage with each page, but it can still be unclear why certain pages are popular over others.

It can also be difficult to evaluate competitor pages through Google Analytics as you can only set up monitoring on your site. Remember that SEO is a zero-sum game; for you to see a rise in the rankings, you must outrank all competitors in the search results. Without a keen understanding of how these rival sites perform, it can be a challenge to formulate a strategy that will allow you to capitalize on potential shortcomings.

Bringing SEO and Google Analytics integration together

The Google Analytics integration with the BrightEdge Platform provide a comprehensive look at your website performance that allows you to evaluate and strategize more effectively to drive increased traffic, conversion, and revenue for your organization.

There are four key areas where the Google Analytics integration will help your BrightEdge platform to drive alignment across your organization and ensure you are reporting SEO success based on business impact.

Understand Customer Experience

You can use the BrightEdge and the Google Analytics integration to accurately measure the traffic and bounce rate that arrives on the website. You can monitor traffic patterns over set periods of time and compare traffic rates between two periods, such as the Q4 holiday season of 2017 with the same period in 2018 to help you understand customer behavior. Marrying this insight against the top keywords that drove lift during the holiday season helps you to understand the popular pages and what products and topics added to that success.

Google Analytics highlights which different pages bring in the most traffic and how well those pages drive conversions and engagement. Analyzing this data within the BrightEdge Platform gives you a better idea of how page optimizations based on SEO insights have impacted traffic patterns and engagement.

You can then break this information down further by analyzing the demographics of your audience, such as location and age. You will also be able to monitor the behavior of the users, including whether they are a new customer versus a returning customer and their session duration. This helps you to segment users if they are a lead or current customers to understand what part of the life cycle they are in and help you understand what content resonates to each audience.

You can also compare your traffic by device, noting how your mobile traffic rates compare with your desktop rates. Understanding which device type your audience is coming from helps to understand customer intent; for example, if your top of the funnel content is mainly coming from mobile devices, meaning consumers are seeking information and looking for and finding your brand.

Analyze your competitors

A key part of winning in search is understanding which competitors you are competing with for each query, which is not always who you think as your typical competitors. Also, understanding what are the winning strategies of those competitors; for example, how are they positioning their listing, what type of content they created (e.g. product page vs. a blog), etc.

BrightEdge tracks competitors and allows you to view their content strategies and monitor keyword rankings to find holes in their strategies to bolster your own. BrightEdge also has a capability to identify who are your organic competitors through Share of Voice for each content category you track.

Understanding the competitive landscape in search will give you more ideas for further developing your strategy and identifying particular keywords to target. With the insights from BrightEdge and the Google Analytics integration and behavior data, this will help you create a powerhouse content strategy.

Prioritize Organic Effort

The BrightEdge Platform has data collected from organic search to help you better understand where you can make improvements to boost rankings and what your projected return can be from certain optimization and content strategies.

You can look at the data from Google Analytics integration with BrightEdge to help prioritize your organic effort based on current page performance; for example, pages that are currently ranking high and have good engagement do not need to be worked on right now, but pages that have ranking within striking distance (Blended Rank 7-20), but low engagement might be the best pages to optimize first. BrightEdge Recommendations will prioritize a list of actions for you based on impact and potential to improve page rankings.

Communicate successes and tie SEO effort to business outcomes

BrightEdge StoryBuilder has robust and flexible visualization capabilities that can help you make data-driven decisions and elevate the importance of the website. Use executive customizable dashboards to showcase the positive impact on brand equity and revenue from website optimization efforts or build convincing business cases for additional resources.

StoryBuilder blends search engine, web analytics, and proprietary BrightEdge data to show how your content aligns with customers’ search intent, drives business outcome, and impacts brand equity.

The Google Analytics integration with BrightEdge empowers digital marketers to create meaningful experiences through their website and search. Understanding how to use these two platforms together can help any organization build a stronger site and develop the campaigns that will boost their bottom line.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge has released 8 new industry vertical SEO research reports, which you can download free now. The first 8 industries covered are:

• Ecommerce
• Retail
• Travel
• edia and Publishing
• Financial Services
• Higher Education
• Real Estate
• Healthcare

Each of the SEO research reports covers: industry-specific data, top industry trends, primary marketing channels and tactics, content comparison benchmark, industry SEO click curves, and primary SEO use cases and BrightEdge solutions for the industry. They are useful for enterprise SEOs to understand context and plan for SEO success. Here is a quick preview from each of the reports:

Ecommerce

2018 worldwide ecommerce sales are expected to top $2.8 trillion in 2018 with $653 billion expected in the US, according to Statista.

Ecommerce providers need to manage the buyer’s journey and the full customer experience to be successful to develop good bounce rates.  For commerce providers that also have retail presence, customer journey requires both physical and digital elements to maximize potential.

There is a new acronym for something many have been doing before they shop offline, and that is research online. ROPO – Research Online, Purchase Offline – where people are looking for reviews and making sure they are getting a good price.

Download Ecommerce SEO Research Report 

Retail

According to a recent Gartner Digital Business Survey, as few as 3% of retailers are delivering clear results from their digital marketing initiatives.  The survey further finds that there is a lack of clarity by retail marketers concerning their objectives.

We now live in a new world of "omnishoppers" where 81% of shoppers first learn about a product online before they buy in-store.  It is vital to support this new hybrid (online and in-store) shopper with easy access to all the information they need at the moment they need it.  

While the customer journey clearly begins online it has been reported that up to 88% of online shoppers will continue to make the purchase in-store after making the buying decision online.  In order to drive results, marketers in the retail industry should focus on omnichannel marketing strategies.

Download Retail SEO Research Report

Financial Services

71% of financial services brands said they plan to increase digital marketing spend in 2019 according to a study by Econsultancy. In contrast to that large majority, however, the same study found that only 7% of financial services brands place creation of high-quality content as a top marketing priority, compared to 15% in other industries.

The digital channel, and SEO with it, is rapidly becoming a centerpiece of marketing efforts in an industry that has traditionally been seen as a conservative one. The low numbers around prioritization of quality content and SEO research might be discouraging at first glance, but they speak to the pronounced SEO opportunity for financial services brands that exist right now.

Ninety percent of U.S. consumers want personal finance courses to be part of high school education according to a survey from Equifax, suggesting older generations feel unprepared to equip younger people with the financial skills they need. As a result, the potential demand for informational content about financial literacy to fill the gap is great.

Download Financial Services SEO Research Report 

Travel

Like many other service-based industries, travel and hospitality is in the midst of a fundamental shift towards digital transformation. As consumers trend away from absolute brand loyalty and towards a longer conversion funnel, opportunities arise for SEOs and digital marketers in this space to get search visibility with prospective customers.

A full 72% of businesses say improving customer experience is their top priority, according to a Forrester survey. As websites, mobile applications, and progressive web applications (PWA) increasingly become the main place where customers and prospective customers receive the brand experience, this has obvious implications for web owners in the travel and hospitality space. Ever-increasing digital market: The market for online travel sales has grown consistently since 2014. Total digital travel sales worldwide are forecast to reach $817.54 billion by 2020 according to Statista.

Growing budgets for digital marketing: Travel and hospitality brands are responding to the outsized growth of opportunity in the digital space. A 2017 survey of hotel professionals by SiteMinder found that 48% planned to allocate “high spend” towards digital marketing, including website and SEO research.

Download Travel SEO Research Report

Media and Publishing

The birth and growth of the digital ecosystem has had a tremendous impact on the media and publishing industry. Advertisers must counter falling print circulation, which in turn has impacted how they approach the market and invest their budget. Advertisers spent 6.8 percent less in 2016 than they did in the previous year, and it is expected to drop another 6.8 percent in 2018.

As distribution and storage became ubiquitous, instant, and virtually free the pendulum has swung back to “content as king” as can be seen with massive sift to original content creation and licensing. Creating and controlling exclusive content has become a hallmark of successful digital publishers of all types.

The encouraging news is that in the digital era total, ad spend has doubled and new media companies were born and thrived: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Craigslist, and Spotify. Traditional media companies that evolved with the industry include: Time.com, Forbes.com, WallStreetJournal.com, CNN.com, NewsCorp/Fox.com, IAC/HSN, ConsumerReports.com, Latimes.com, WashingtonPost.com, and TheGuardian.com to name a few.

Download Media and Publishing SEO Research Report

Higher Education

In 2015, a survey of college-bound high school juniors and seniors found that over three-quarters of them reported college websites making a difference in their ideas about the institution.

As schools become more focused on becoming successful digital enterprises, they demonstrate a greater understanding of user intent and an ability to enhance the student experience throughout their educational journey. This begins from the moment when the student first begins to explore educational options through their graduation day and beyond as an alumni and potential donor, building loyalty and appreciation for the school.

Download the Higher Education SEO Research Report

Real Estate

2018 is expected to see 6,270,000 homes sold in the US with a total value of $1.73 trillion or 9% of the US gross domestic product. Though the market has slowed some in mid-2018, housing prices are up 6% and volume is expected to be flat to last year.  Commercial real estate sales have declined modestly from their peak in Q4 2015.

With US unemployment dipping below 4%, the demand for commercial real estate is on the upswing in 2018 and expected to remain steady. Job growth bodes well for housing market, but that is also being tempered by rising interest rates. As the market slows, marketing for customers and transactions becomes more important for agents and brokers in both commercial and residential housing.

BrightEdge Research shows that on average 62% of site traffic is now mobile and that 70% of commerce journeys start in the SERPs. Real Estate has very strong mobile use cases because people will be out on the move in the neighborhoods looking around for units.

Download the Real Estate SEO Research Report

Healthcare

The total U.S. healthcare expenditure was more than $3.5 trillion, per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. At that level, it accounted for 17.9% of gross domestic product (GDP). 85 publicly-traded healthcare companies made $47 billion in profit on $545 billion in global sales. Pharmaceutical companies generated 22% of the revenue and 60% of the profit.

In this industry SEO research report on healthcare marketing, BrightEdge discovers how the healthcare industry can deliver higher degrees of personalization, consistency in care, overall capacity utilization, patient satisfaction, and outcomes.

Key trends

• Patient-Centered Care- Improving the patient experience throughout the patients’ journey
• Digitization- Connected devices, sensors, micro-services, and rich applications offer highly efficient options
• Regulation, Compliance, and Marketing- Public exchanges provide more access to insurance as laws impact services and fees
• Reputation Management- Encouraging positive reviews as reputation is the #1 criteria for hospital selection

Download the Healthcare SEO Research Report.

These are just some previews of the wealth and depth of information available in these new SEO research reports.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Losing a single spot on the SERP can have a tremendous impact on your traffic rates, and therefore your conversions and revenue. Position one on the desktop SERP receives an average of 28 percent of the clicks, while position two receives only 13, and position three 9. Earning a leading position, therefore, and maintaining that ranking, can benefit brands tremendously. When it comes to optimizing a website and its content, the list of required steps can be confusing. A number of different factors influence how well search engines understand the content of your website and its ability to align with your target audience. We understand that SEOs have a lot of different jobs to juggle. They want to prioritize the SEO tasks that will give them the largest return on their investment. Here are 5 SEO strategies that will have a positive impact on the success of your website.

Pay attention to image type and SEO

SEOs already know that images themselves play an important role in becoming an SEO expert. BrightEdge Research found that images appeared in 28% of SERPs in September 2018. The increasingly visual atmosphere of the online world dictates that customers want to see images as they browse the web. Posts and pages with images receive better engagement, shares on social media, and overall improve the ability of the content to pull in customers and engage them. To take this a step further, however, we also suggest that SEOs consider the image type that they elect to use. Customers pay close attention to page load speed. Google has found that when the page load time increases from just 1 second to 3 seconds, your chances of people bouncing increases by 32 percent. When your page load time increases from 1 second to 5 seconds, that probability increases by 90 percent. Your images play an important role in how quickly pages load. You have three main image types to choose from: JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Most of the images you see online are JPEG. Since they are widely used, they are compatible with most device types. They also compress images to help keep the file small. This can sometimes hurt the quality of the image, but it also helps page load time. GIF images have gained tremendous popularity over the past few years because they allow users to incorporate simple animation as well as having regular art. These images only use 256 colors, so you would not want to use a GIF to upload a photograph. The limitation also means that the size of the image is small, thus making them a good choice for certain images, such as the company logo, that need to download quickly. PNG images are the newest, which means that you might find support and compatibility of the images lacking in some sectors. These images can use more colors, which makes for a crisper and more detailed image, but the images do tend to be be larger. For your SEO strategies, consider carefully the role the image will play within a particular piece of content on your site and which file type will have the best impact on the user experience for your audience. Balance image quality, load speed, and the need for image compatibility and support to create the best image experience.

Remember mobile site type and SEO

Since 2015 brands have understood the importance of mobile compatibility and since the mobile-first algorithm roll-out, they have taken mobile optimization into account. What many SEOs might overlook, however, is the type of mobile site they use. There are three main types of mobile sites, and each has its own benefits and drawbacks. M(dot) sites M (dot) sites were the first real solutions for brands interested in creating sites for their mobile users. It allowed site owners to create separate sites for mobile devices, which could then be optimized specifically for the user on the go. While these sites served well for the first few years of mobile design, their usage has been declining in many areas. Site owners have to consider drawbacks such as:

•  
• Managing two separate URLs
•  
• Having redirects between the site versions
• Users have trouble sharing links from mobile devices-- as anyone who opens their shared link on a desktop has a poor user experience

Responsive design Responsive design has been the chosen solution for many people. This design automatically detects the type of device that displays the site and adjust accordingly. Google has also in the past stated that they prefer responsive design-- although they also say that they do not prioritize one type of design over another in the algorithm as long as the pages are compatible with mobile users. Responsive design, however, does have a few issues as well. The largest drawback is the need to optimize for both the mobile and the desktop experience simultaneously. This means that if your desktop users prefer the site design but your site performs poorly with mobile users, you have to determine the risk of modifying your site design to please your mobile users and weigh the risks of both audience types. Adaptive Design Finally, adaptive design attempts to correct some of the issues seen in responsive design, as site owners have greater flexibility to create separate journeys for mobile versus desktop users. It also reduces some of the load speed problems seen with responsive design. On the other hand, this type of design can be complicated and require a lot of resources for many site owners. As a site owner, you need to consider the type of mobile site that will work best for your needs. Look at the traffic on your site, the behavior of mobile versus desktop customers, and see which type of site will perform best for you and your SEO strategies and goals. Read more on how BrightEdge drives mobile success.

Hreflang implementation and SEO strategies

Anyone who runs a site designed to reach people in multiple languages or multiple countries should have their hreflang tags implemented. Some people wonder if these tags might be redundant, as Google can automatically detect if a page is written in a given language, such as Spanish versus English. What the tag does, however, is help Google sort through multiple versions of a site that might not be immediately obvious. For example, if you have one version of your website designed for British customers, you will likely target these consumers with optimization oriented towards British search preferences, contact information and shipping information for people in Great Britain, and use British English spelling and grammar. Similarly, you would do the same with an American, Canadian, or Australian version of a website. You want to make sure that even though all of these sites are in English, they get displayed correctly for the audience in the particular country. Using hreflang tags ensures that Google has your site correctly indexed and ready for your customers in various locations. With sites that reach the right audience, you will naturally improve their user experience, which in turn will boost their engagement and your SEO.

Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP and SEO

Remember our discussion earlier of how quickly people will start to abandon a page based on load speeds. In response to this need of customers, since this summer of 2018, Google has also officially considered pagespeed a ranking factor for websites. AMP, however, is a tool that has been a around for a few years and allows you to capitalize on website speed on mobile. By creating AMP pages, you can ensure that latest and most relevant of your pages have speed on their side when customers come across them. Google likes AMP pages because they can be trusted to deliver fast content and an optimal user experience. To create an accelerated site, take advantage of AMP, particularly for any news or similarly targeted articles you create on your website. This will help you get your new releases above the competition and in front of customers, building a strong brand reputation.

Optimize your XML Sitemap for SEO

Creating an XML sitemap can play a strong role in helping Google understand and properly index your page. It provides you with the opportunity to let Google know how your site is organized and where you would like them to prioritize the indexing process. Depending upon where you host your site, you likely can easily generate a sitemap. For example, WordPress allows you to create and update a sitemap with a plugin. You can then take this auto-generated sitemap and submit it directly to Google. Since the purpose of the site map is to help Google know how to index your page, you should not include pages that you have blocked with robots.txt on your site map. If you have a very large site, you also want to make sure you place an emphasis or weight on pages that have been highly optimized and represent your site best. Similarly, you only want to include canonical versions of your website on the sitemap. Once you have submitted your sitemap to Google, go back and review it in Google Search Console. If the search engine has problems indexing certain pages, they will let you know, which can help you quickly fix these potential problems and create a site better prepared for search. SEO will always be a challenging area with a number of various techniques and optimization processes to follow. Sites that want to build a strong presence online should consider how these 5 proven SEO strategies can boost their own performance and what they can do to implement them on their site.