enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

What's the news?

Last week, marketers across the community received notices that informed them that Google was switching their domain to mobile first indexing. BrightEdge received this notice last Wednesday.

"Mobile-first indexing enabled for https://www.brightedge.com/ To owner of https://www.brightedge.com/, This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.

Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they're looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site's content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable."

Back in 2016 Google first detailed its plan to change the way its search index operates and how it would eventually use the mobile version of a website’s content to index its pages. On page speed, Google further explained, “Related, we recently announced that beginning in July 2018, content that is slow-loading may perform less well for both desktop and mobile searchers.”

What does mobile-first indexing mean for your company?

Mobile-first indexing means that when a site has a different URL for desktop and mobile, Google is crawling and indexing content based on the mobile site first and then primarily using those results for both mobile and desktop SERPs. If a site is responsive, there will be no change in the indexing.

As the number of mobile users continues to grow so too does the need to optimize specifically for the customer experience on mobile. The mobile SERP has become increasingly contextual, displaying different layouts depending on the search query, the location from where the search is performed, and user’s past search behaviors on that device. In fact, this is how Google improves its own customer experience for its search users.

BrightEdge Research has found that during the mobile-first indexing calibration period, rank for the same queries--across mobile and desktop--was different for 79% of searches. And that 35% of the time the content from a domain that ranks highest is a different page in mobile than in desktop results. This is a topic that BrightEdge has been tracking and reporting on since the big mobile update of April 2015. We will continue to monitor the degree of alignment and difference in desktop and mobile results after this mobile-first rollout.

With these changes, brands should continue to focus on 3 primary objectives to succeed with the mobile-first indexing:

1. Quality. Quality content is authoritative and engaging.
2. Relevance. Relevant content effectively addresses people’s needs and questions. Increasing the mobile orientation of your content, for example, place awareness, will make it more relevant to mobile users
3. Customer experience. Customer experience on the site has to do with design and performance. For mobile, page load speed is a major factor in a good user experience as well as having a low bounce rate from your page back to the SERP. Google also recommends AMP-enablement for all sites, which can be both a customer experience and speed factor.

Quality, relevance, and customer experience all work together to entice users to click on your SERP results and then keeps users engaged on your site. Content creators, SEOs, UX designers, and site architects need to consider and verify the content and user experience on mobile to make sure it is well optimized. For example, they need to make sure to check and optimize the page load speed on both devices.

Consumers have gone mobile

There is no question now that every business has to consider their marketing strategies on all device types. Increasingly, more consumers (and B2B customers) turn to mobile devices to engage with brands throughout the customer journey via researching on a mobile device.

• For many industries, mobile traffic from organic has surpassed desktop traffic; the latest BrightEdge research has found that on average 62% of the website traffic now arrives from either mobile or tablet devices.
• According to Think with Google, 93% of people who perform research on mobile devices will go on to make a purchase. Furthermore, mobile drives or influences over 40% of revenue for leading B2B organizations.

In recent years consumers are no longer just researching on their mobile devices, but are also starting to convert at higher rates on mobile. These mobile users want to see quality websites--mobile users who do make a purchase through their devices will visit the website for the brand an average of 6 times before they hit “buy.” It is imperative that brands track the proportion of mobile and desktop traffic to their sites and bias toward the design and experience of the majority so that the buyer's journey is an optimal experience.

Mobile Optimization with BrightEdge

BrightEdge recently released a one-click dashboard template in StoryBuilder, the Mobile-First Dashboard, making it easy to establish a baseline understanding of your mobile performance. This dashboard will show your website KPIs on mobile vs. desktop, and your SEO performance on mobile SERP vs. desktop SERPs. These metrics will help you identify growth opportunities and prioritize your mobile strategy accordingly.

You can also use BrightEdge ContentIQ to identify portions of your website impacting the mobile user experience. ContentIQ performs a site audit crawl as a Google smartphone bot, similar to running a mobile-friendly test on Google. When you set up the crawl, make sure you also add your mobile domain, or if it is a responsive site--which is recommended--run the crawl on your entire domain. The ContentIQ results will help you identify areas of improvement to make sure your site is ready for the mobile-first indexing era.

See full details in a recent post: how BrightEdge helps with your mobile optimization. 

Resources to help you win with mobile-first indexing

BrightEdge has published a few resources related to mobile optimization. Here is a summary of the top 4 articles that will help you.

1. Winning mobile with Smart Content and AMP
2. Mobile SEO marketing
3. Mobile-first indexing Google
4. Mobile-first experience

Login to the BrightEdge platform to get started today or request a demo to learn more.

jcollins

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

With over 3.5 billion searches made per day, ranking well on the SERP has tremendous power to drive traffic towards your site.

BrightEdge Research tracks channel share and finds that SEO traffic is still the largest trackable channel and in the majority at 53% of traffic, which is a number people across the community use to help elevate SEO to the C-suite to secure more support and resources.

48% of queries, however, also have paid ads that appear above the organic site results, so brands that neglect to integrate their organic and paid search strategies will lose out on tremendous potential for attracting the attention of prospects.

As brands compete for attention on the SERP, it has become increasingly common for organizations to invest in PPC. There was a 24% growth year over year in ad spend in 2017. Brands who don't carefully develop integrated campaigns run the risk of being left far behind.

Five ways you can integrate organic and paid search to drive greater success online:

1. Use paid search to test organic keywords
2. Use organic keyword research to find good paid keywords to target
3. Use paid to raise traffic and attention for seasonal or new content
4. Use paid search to target hard-to-reach keywords
5. Use organic content to build stronger paid campaigns
6. Use paid and search together to maximize your presence on the SERP

Use paid search to test organic keywords

Raising your rankings with organic keywords requires considerable effort. You need to not only develop content but also promote the content across various channels and platforms to raise its visibility.

Strong SEO also requires meeting various optimization goals and using technical efforts to improve its visibility on the search engines.

Before you invest your time and energy in this process, many brands find it helpful to first research and see if the keywords will bring in the desired return. You can leverage Instant to deep dive into relevant keywords you should optimize for. PPC can be an excellent asset for this research.

Develop a bit of content and set up paid search campaigns to test the receptiveness of the target audience. Since paid ads will have a prominent display on the SERP when they appear, you can be confident that your site will be visible for the target keyword. You can then gauge the interest of the audience based on how they respond to the ad.

If you get a lot of clicks, for example, but also a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate from your effort, then you have a reasonable idea that your site and content might not align well with the user intent for this keyword. 

On the other hand, if you see an outstanding response to your site and content, then you can feel confident throwing your resources behind an organic search campaign centered around this theme. This will help you better invest your resources moving forward.

Use organic keyword research to find good paid keywords to target

You can use your organic keyword research to find good paid keywords to build your campaigns. Using platform features like Data Cube can provide greater insight than just for your organic search campaigns. You can also use them to create PPC strategies.

Use Data Cube to find relevant keywords and base you interest around the search volume. You can also research the keyword further to see what types of content appears on the page for that particular term, as well as how many ads appear at the top of the page. This will help you create a list of keywords that will provide the most value for your brand.

Use paid to raise traffic and attention for seasonal or new content

Many brands need to produce seasonal or new content for various new products or seasonal events. Producing content and then earning rankings on the search engine high enough to capture a significant portion of the relevant traffic within a very short period, however, can be very difficult. The task can feel nearly impossible for smaller brands who do not have sites carrying an immense amount of domain authority.

PPC can help fill in this gap. You can use paid search strategies to raise the prominence of your site for high-value keywords. This will help you attract traffic and engagement to the page earlier than you would have relying solely on organic.

Since a well-qualified paid search campaign also brings in relevant traffic, your efforts can also help to further boost the organic rankings of the material.

Use paid search to target hard-to-reach keywords

There are more than a billion websites online. This means that nearly every industry has intense competition online. This competition renders some keywords particularly difficult to rank highly for. You likely have encountered some keywords that are highly relevant for your target audience, but the sites that rank well for these terms are well established. Finding ways to surpass these keywords in organic will be nearly impossible.

Paid search, however, can help to achieve this goal. Between one and four ads will be shown at the top of the SERP for most queries. This means that PPC will increase your visibility on the SERP for those hard-to-reach keywords.

You will be able to gain the clicks and traffic that would likely have not been possible without a solid paid strategy. 

Use organic content to build stronger paid campaigns

Building a strategy in paid search requires a greater upfront investment than organic campaigns. You have to pay for the clicks you receive on each ad. Therefore, as you build your strategy, you want to make sure you invest your money wisely. Use organic search and content strategies to build outstanding content that will drive your paid search campaign.

Just like any other type of click, when a potential customer clicks on an ad, they want the content on that page to answer their need. Brands already know about the importance of building high-quality content to meet the needs of their organic campaigns, but those same strategies also need to apply to the paid campaigns.

Create material that addresses the likely pain point of someone making that particular search. Use the keywords regularly in the content so that the site visitor knows immediately that the content has relevance for them. Use images, lists, bullets, and subheadings to make the content look appealing and interesting.

Use organic and paid search together to maximize your presence on the SERP

The key to both paid and organic search lies in visibility on the SERP. When you use them together, you can maximize your visibility and presence.

• Align the language you use across your organic and paid search strategy. Keep the messaging consistent so that users recognize you between channels.
• Leverage the two together to drive traffic towards content. Even if you achieve page one ranking for a particular valuable keyword, a paid ad on that keyword can still boost visibility, particularly since most clicks go towards the links at the top of the SERP.
• Use PPC to drive content engagement on other channels. PPC does not only live on the search engines. It also can help on the different social platforms, driving clicks towards your content through social channels.
• Use the two together to capitalize on user intent. Google has focused over the past few years on deciphering the user intent of people making searches. This explains why the SERP can vary widely from search to search with the number of ads, visual content, and articles that appear. As you create your organic and PPC campaigns, consider carefully the intent of of users for those keywords and create all your material to align with these needs. You can leverage Market Insights to better understand data intent and insights into market trends.

Paid and organic search are two important tools for any marketer looking to increase their presence on the SERP. Understanding how these two interact will allow you to integrate these two strategies and build stronger campaigns, driving greater traffic towards your website. 

maspillera

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

No brand will make the decision to do a website migration lightly. These changes can benefit your SEO, such as if you go from an HTTP website to HTTPS, and they may be necessary in instances of renaming a company, a merger, or other company changes. Small missteps during the process, however, can cause site rankings to plummet, which in turn will impact your site traffic, conversions, and revenue. Performing a successful website migration, therefore, should only be done after careful consideration and planning. The BrightEdge platform includes a number of valuable features that can help our partners navigate this multistep process. A number of our partners have spoken to us about how the platform helped them succeed with the migration. Here are few ways you can use BrightEdge to guide your next website migration.

Prepare the new site to be superior to the last site

A proper website migration is time intensive and includes numerous potential minefields where brands could easily end up losing rankings, and therefore revenue. To undertake a migration, it is vital to ensure that the new site has superior content and a better user experience. A quality site should be populated with high-quality, well-optimized content that aligns well with customer needs. BrightEdge partner Adobe underwent a site migration during some rebranding initiatives. To make their process a greater success, they turned to the BrightEdge platform. They used the Data Cube to uncover keywords that aligned well with the language their customers used. They did not want their content to get caught up in sales jargon, so they relied on the platform to inform and guide their content development strategies. Throughout the website migration, Adobe had to check to ensure that SEO recommendations were in place and that the pages moved to new locations were indexed. They also had to set up redirects to ensure that site visitors easily found the content they sought. Throughout this process, they relied on the BrightEdge platform for guidance. Adobe trusted BrightEdge ContentIQ following their site migration to make sure that they achieved their SEO goals. They also verified that all the necessary changes were properly in place.

“I use BrightEdge ContentIQ following website migration to make sure that our SEO objectives are met and the changes we have applied on the website are in place” - Yulia Kronrod, Adobe

Establish dashboards to track your website migration progress

Before you begin the process of migrating, you can also use BrightEdge to set up a dashboard that will allow you to monitor the progress from the start. By setting up one domain as a competitor, you can see how your new and your old domain lineup with regards to rankings, indexed pages, site traffic, and even external links to the site. This will help you gauge your progress, note how long it takes your site to recover, and will let you know at the first sign of trouble that you may need to fix something. BrightEdge partner Shoes.com migrated their site from the old domain of Shoebuy to Shoes.com. They speak highly about the ability of BrightEdge dashboards to monitor progress during a website migration.

“So [...] we created a dashboard, it’s called The Comparison Between Shoebuy and Shoes.com. There are different colors. On the left-hand side is Shoebuy and on the right-hand side is Shoes.com. So in this way, it is pretty clear to compare different domains.” - Louise Huang, Shoes.com

Using a color-corded dashboard allowed Shoes.com to monitor their sites’ performance throughout their site migration. As the new domain earned links, rankings, and traffic, they could easily compare the two domains and ensure that their process moved smoothly.

Set up the successful site migration

Once you have your dashboards set up, you can then move forward with the migration. You will need to use 301 redirects to permanently send your traffic from the old site to the new one. You want to use 301s specifically because the redirect will live on the site permanently and you want to transfer as much "link juice" as possible.

To ensure a clean migration, you need to pair each page on your old site with a page that holds about the same information value on the new site. This ensures that customers who have bookmarked that page or follow a link looking for specific information will find the right content. This improves the user experience, which also adds value to your Google ranking.

Most brands will find it helpful to keep a spreadsheet to track their 301s. They can track which pages were paired together for redirects to ensure consistency throughout the site migration.

BrightEdge partner Cleveland Clinic completed a successful website migration with the help of our platform. They were able to complete the necessary redirects, but found that it still took a while for Google to crawl their content and understand their content and redirects. BrightEdge was a critical part of measuring the areas where there was a dip in their visibility. The insights they gained from the platform allowed them to see their progress. They could also see where the content still needed crawling. This clarity made the process significantly less painful.

“What we did find, when we worked with BrightEdge during this migration was they were very instrumental in helping us measure, where were there areas where we noticed a significant dip in our visibility and traffic and then identifying those so we could make sure that the right connections were made for redirects and that the content is being crawled.” - Scott Mowery, Cleveland Clinic 

Ask for help

Completing a website migration is a challenging, involved process where simple missteps can have serious consequences for brand presence and traffic, and therefore the company’s income. Working with trusted professionals, like the BrightEdge Professional Services team can help mitigate this risk. Just having a second set of eyes, particularly when those eyes belong to experienced professionals who have worked through site migrations before, can be very helpful. Our Professional Services team can help brands plan and execute their migration while monitoring progress and success the entire time. A website migration can be a dangerous time for websites, but when done correctly, it does not have to seriously jeopardize rankings or traffic.

Understanding how to use your SEO platform throughout the process can offer you assurance and give you the support you need to complete the process smoothly. Take the advice from our partners who have successfully gone through a website migration in the past. To learn more about how they, and others, have used the BrightEdge platform, visit our testimonials page.