enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Google Ads, previously known as Adwords, rebranded on July 24th, 2018. We look at the history of Google's paid search program and how it became the centerpiece of the company's business model. Paid search advertising is more than 20 years old. Before Google had decided how to monetize its technology, there was the Goto.com search engine. Goto.com established the PPC auction system with advertisers bidding for ad position on keywords and ads ranked by bid value. After the dotcom crash, Goto.com rebranded as Overture and sold itself to Yahoo for $1.63 billion. Google continued to evolve its business model from AdSense and impression CPM billing to AdWords and CPC billing. Google invested heavily in improving the fraud control and relevancy of its offering and outgrew Yahoo handily. Google has grown to over $110B in revenue with nearly 90% of Google's revenue coming from PPC and AdWords.

Following that, Google bought DoubleClick, a digital display advertising company, for $3.1B in 2007, which at the time seemed like a great deal of money, as the paid ads business was still recovering from the dotcom crash. It also made huge investments in the Chrome browser and Android operating system which allows it to stay involved in nearly every area of digital media. The major investments that Google made at the time paid off. Mobile ads now account for 67% of digital ad spending and mobile video spending will exceed traditional TV spending in 2018, according to eMarketer.

Rebranding of Google Adwords

I received this email message from Google:

Hello, You're receiving this message because you currently have an active AdWords account. Earlier this week, we announced that Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads. The new Google Ads brand represents our full range of campaign types across Search, Display, Video, App and more. These help you connect with more consumers as they're turning to Google, and our partner sites and apps, to find information and get things done. Starting July 24, 2018, you will begin to see the new Google Ads brand — including the new name and logo — reflected in the product interface, Help Center, billing documents, and more. Our URL will also be changing from adwords.google.com to ads.google.com. There is no action required on your part, and changes to the Google Ads branding will not impact your campaign performance, navigation or reporting. If you have any questions or would like to contact us, please visit the Help Center. Sincerely, The Google AdWords team (soon to be Google Ads)

According to Google, the rebranding is part of a campaign to simplify the company's paid advertising platforms. As part of that initiative, the full set of rebrands is as follows:

1. AdWords to rebrand as Google Ads
2. DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 Suite unified as Google Marketing Platform
3. DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange unified as Google Ad Manager

In contrast to AdWords, Google Ads will have more automated Google Ads campaign development features that use machine learning and AI to help marketers launch campaigns with less administrative and platform knowledge.

As part of the Google Marketing Platform for larger customers, Google also announced Display & Video 360. "Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center to allow creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute ad campaigns end-to-end in a single place."

Aligning Google Ads Campaigns to the Industry

This move combines the Google DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 Suite platforms under a single brand. Similarly, DoubleClick for Publishers and Ad Exchange will be merged into Google Ad Manager. This move towards branding consolidation, as well as some actual platform consolidation, aligns Google's paid advertising programs with other advertising platforms in the space. For example, Facebook has a similar offering it calls Facebook Ads. Adobe Cloud also enables cross-platform and cross-channel campaign setup and management. So, it is a battle of the titans in advertising, each offering huge inventory, and more breadth and convenience that will make it harder for independent networks to secure ad dollars. 

koleary

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

It is no question that every business now has to consider their marketing strategies on all device types. Understanding how your customers engage with you throughout the buying journey, typically starts with research on a mobile device. For many industries, mobile traffic from organic has surpassed desktop traffic; the latest BrightEdge research has found that on average 57% of the traffic to your website now arrives from either mobile or tablet devices. Ninety-three percent of people who perform research on mobile devices will go on to make a purchase and mobile drives or influences over 40% of revenue for leading B2B organizations. In recent years, your customers are no longer just researching on their mobile devices, but are also starting to convert at higher rates on mobile. It has become critical to have a mobile-first strategy, and a mobile-friendly site. 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." As the importance of paying attention to mobile users becomes clear, so too does the need to optimize specifically for customers on these devices. The mobile SERP has become increasingly contextual. In an effort to boost personalization, search engines use factors such as the person’s physical location when performing searches. The SERP can also differ greatly from desktop searches. Forty-seven percent of keywords in positions 1 to 20 rank differently on mobile versus desktop SERPs. This indicates that people need to create a mobile-specific optimization strategy. Only by focusing efforts on these mobile users can brands effectively engage with on-the-go users and begin to tap into this continually growing market.

Establish baseline to prepare for mobile SEO optimization

The first step of creating an effective mobile optimization strategy is establishing a baseline. The baseline describes the state of your mobile marketing efforts right now before you change anything. You can use this baseline to understand where you are today, and help you prioritize your efforts as you begin your SEO for mobile.

Step 1

On the BrightEdge platform, log in to view your Share of Voice report. Here you will be able to benchmark your current content against your natural competitors. You want to track and understand how your natural competitors on mobile differ from desktop. This will let you know the strength, or areas to improve, your brand presence when your targeted customers are on mobile.

Step 2

Next, click over to see your traffic report. To better understand how your customers find you, create a chart based on traffic by device type. You will be able to see what percentage of your traffic comes from people on mobile devices versus desktop.

Step 3

As a part of this baseline report, you also want to look for potential mistakes. Use BrightEdge ContentIQ to help you identify potential errors in your content development. You can run a site audit crawl based on a Google smartphone bot, similar to how you would run a mobile friendly test with Google. When you setup the crawl, make sure you also add your mobile domain, or if a responsive site (which is preferred) run the crawl on your entire domain.

Step 4

You also want to examine your site for common mobile errors. These might include:

• Using Flash, which is not particularly mobile friendly. Many mobile devices will not play these elements
• Issues with your viewport that make it difficult for users to see what you posted
• Content or images not appearing clearly on mobile devices. Small fonts or images can both cause issues here
• Touch elements living too closely together. People on mobile devices use their fingers to navigate your site
• Elements, such as submit buttons, placed too closely together will make it difficult for people to properly use the site

Find content opportunities to optimize SEO for mobile

Once you have established your baseline, the next task will be to find opportunities for mobile-centered content development. BrightEdge Data Cube will help you to surface great mobile keyword opportunities. You can measure traffic rates and see which words will likely provide the most return. Central to your strategy should also be "striking distance" keywords. This describes the keywords that you already rank for, where your page falls between positions 5 and about 15. Check your keyword ranking reports. You can filter for mobile devices to find your own list of keywords in these positions on mobile devices. Through fixing site errors and optimizing the content based on your mobile target keywords, you have the best shot of boosting the rankings for these pages. As you use these two strategies, do not neglect to see how the SERP looks for these particular keywords. On mobile devices, the screen can easily be dominated completely by a Quick Answer or video results. You want to select keywords that have the highest possibility of visibility above the fold. Verify the SERP of your selected keywords and tailor your content development efforts for these needs. The best way to understand your organic opportunity is to run the Intent Signal dashboard for mobile (smartphone). We have created a dashboard template for you within StoryBuilder. Target the keywords in the Optimize and Create categories. This is where there is organic content above the fold, but you need to either optimize content in striking distance or create new content for those keywords. Once you have categorized those keywords, you can also use Keyword Reporting to understand the content type, regular web listing or a universal result. If a high-value mobile keyword has a Quick Answer (a universal result), consider using our Quick Answer white paper for more information about earning this coveted rich answer position.

Optimize content for mobile

Now that you have identified your mobile optimization opportunities, you want to create your content. The material you develop should be smart. It should:

• Target exactly what customers need
• Be optimized to ensure visibility
• Be up-to-date
• Be integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts
• Be profitable

Remember the goals that your mobile users most likely have, and incorporate the answers to their needs into your content. Data Cube can help you find semantically related keywords. These related keywords can help you further optimize your content and demonstrate your value to the search engine. Google uses these keywords to better understand content and see how it relates to queries. Incorporating the appropriate ones will show depth.

Measure and improve for mobile

Once you begin to publish your mobile-centric content, you will want to keep a careful eye on your results. This will let you know if your efforts are helping you accomplish your goals. It will also help you redirect your efforts if necessary. Page Reporting will be used to track your traffic and compare it to your revenue. Here you will see how well your traffic boost rates compare to revenue. If you do not see corresponding lifts in revenue, then you can look for problems towards the end of your sales funnel and make the appropriate corrections. Page Reporting will also help you see how much time people spend on your page as well as your bounce rates. Poor numbers in these areas can be good indications that your content does not align well with user intent. You will want to reexamine other high ranking content on the SERP for these queries to see where important adjustments need to be made. BrightEdge also offers a mobile-first dashboard. You can add in any more charts that you want to include, customizing it to best meet your needs. As you look at your progress, watch your rankings. Look for improvements as well as new striking-distance keywords that you can capitalize on. The modern consumer is a mobile consumer. People use their mobile devices to engage with people around them and businesses they care about. The better prepared you are to work with these customers, the easier it will be to interest them in engaging with your business. Get started to today!

1. Establish your baseline
2. Prioritize mobile keywords
3. Optimize/Create content targted to mobile
4. Measure and track progress
5. Iterate plan based on progress

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

The BrightEdge community is robust and always expanding. As the VP of Customer Marketing, my job is to launch and support programs that drive community relationships and marketing success. Here is an update on some of the most popular programs BrightEdge runs.

BrightEdge Product Certification—More than 7,000 Certified—50 New Product Training Videos Just Released

More than 7,000 people have passed the BrightEdge certification, making it the largest certified enterprise SEO community in the industry. BrightEdge Certified Professional is an often-cited requirement in job descriptions as more than 1,600 companies and 57 of the Fortune 100 companies use BrightEdge. This quarter we released a beta version of the Update Certification that covers: Home, New Settings, ContentIQ, Anomaly Detection, HyperLocal, Intent Signal, and Insights. New videos are available in the study guide link below the test link. We just published 51 new product training videos. To find the new videos and exam BrightEdge customers will: Log in, Go to Settings > Profile and Preferences > Get Certified, and then Certification Training Videos and after you review BrightEdge Update Certification 2018. We are updating all the training materials again for release in early Q4.

BrightEdge Certified Professional Group on LinkedIn—More than 4,250 Members

Once you pass the basic BrightEdge Certification, you can connect with the worldwide BrightEdge community and harness the power of more than 4,250 SEOs and content marketers. You can post a question, an answer, a job listing, or apply for a job. Post a question and leverage the knowledge and insights of thousands of SEOs from across the BrightEdge community.

BrightEdge User Groups—15 Groups Running Worldwide

BrightEdge launched the User Group program over a year ago in New York and it spread quickly across the worldwide community. There are now 15 cities up and running from London to San Francisco. The BrightEdge user groups are an intimate client-led event setting where our customers have the opportunity to meet other local platform users and share their experiences using the BrightEdge platform, research, case studies, SEO opportunities and challenges, search marketing best practices across industries and verticals, and more. User Groups are 2.5-hour meetings held at a customer site and are moderated by customers from two companies and BrightEdge employees. They occur 2 to 4 times a year as preferred by the members. The meetings can be over breakfast or dinner. Have a look at the User Group events page.

BrightEdge Webinars—More than 35,000 Views of Valuable Webinars on Range of Topics

Based on the overwhelming response we've received, we hardly need to remind you of these wildly popular online events. In 2018 the webinars are grouped into Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, and Elevating Marketing to make it even easier to find the ones that are right for you. Even better, all the webinars are available on demand at any time, which is great for people in different time zones. The interactive polls are still active during on-demand viewing, so you can have nearly the full experience of live webinars. 

BrightEdge Awards— Awards Call for Nominations Are Open

The 2017 awards were presented at Share NY and Share London and were a huge success. The 2018 awards call for nominations is open and the awards will be presented at Share San Francisco on October 10. You can submit for yourself, a client, or a colleague. BrightEdge customer success managers can submit on behalf of their customers also. Here are the nomination categories for 2018:

1. Innovator Award
2. Performance and Results
3. Michael Kirchhoff Technical SEO Award
4. Digital Marketer
5. Elevating Award
6. Community Ambassador
7. Best International

The criteria considered include detail about the problem and approach to solve it, specific BrightEdge functionality applied, and specific numeric business results. We recommend 200-400 words in the submission. There is no limit to the number of categories or campaigns to which you can apply. We look forward to reading about your success and good luck.

Customer Case Studies and Videos—39 Case Studies and 90 Videos Available on the Site

Seeing what customers do with the BrightEdge platform is always one of the highlights of marketing work. So many great brands share their stories to elevate SEO and help and inspire others in the community. Read SEO case studies about L'Oréal, Wiley, Twilio, WhiteHat, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic, Molecular Devices, Living Spaces, U.S,. Bank and many more.

Customer Reviews

A big thank you to all the customers who have taken the time to review BrightEdge on G2Crowd. Have a look at the reviews and share your opinion on the product and the service BrightEdge provides. Here's what Chad Hallert of Noble Studios had to say in his review: "The BrightEdge SEO platform offers access to a tremendous depth of insightful data that can be used to better inform your SEO strategies and ensure program success. We leverage the platform for virtually all of our SEO clients, and have found a benefit both in terms of the overall results; as well as our internal efficiency in identifying and executing on opportunities.

We've also found that the platform offers a large benefit to our content creators and copywriters, who now have a streamlined process that leverages BrightEdge to identify search demand and better understand what to write about based on the intent behind the customer's searches. This has made our content more effective both in terms of traffic and conversion." Please take a few minutes and share your BrightEdge experience on G2Crowd.

2018 Share Conferences—New York and London Are Done and San Francisco Is Next on October 10

BrightEdge is taking Share on the road again! Building on our 2017 momentum, the Share18 Global Insights Tour will be even bigger and focus on the key trends driving performance across search, digital marketing and content. Whether your focus is SEO, digital marketing, leading a team, or simply driving performance, our event has something valuable for everyone.

New Keynote Speaker for Share SF:

 

Join Olympic athlete and inspirational speaker Derek Redmond for his inspiring keynote: Sport is a Business, Business is a Sport.

Come and join us in the BrightEdge community programs that meets your needs. And thank you for being our customer.

maspillera

M Posted 7 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

The 2018 SMX Advanced has come and gone. We share some of our main takeaways. Much of the focus at the 2018 SMX Advanced conference was on subjects that have been on the community’s radar for awhile, such as machine learning and AI, the mobile-first index, voice agents, and voice search, but as is often the case, there was value to weave  those disparate SEO threads together. Below is a breakdown of some of the key SEO and digital marketing messages we took away.

Google voice search ranking factors are quantified and public

Google does yet provide direct data about voice search queries available, but the on and off-page elements that it takes into account when deciding which results to provide for a voice query are known. Additionally, there are other horizontal areas that can be leveraged to get insights on what the target audience is asking questions about: Long-tail keyword research, social listening, internal site search, user research, CS feedback, chatbot logs. One of the biggest revelations at SMX Advanced, however, was that the actual mechanics through which Google decides what to provide as the result for a voice search is not just known, it’s public. In her presentation as part of the panel “Optimizing Content for Voice Search and Virtual Assistants,” Upasna Gautam of Ziff Davis recapped a case study published by Google titled “Google Search by Voice: A case study.” In this study, Google walks through the parameters it uses to evaluate and present search results via Voice.

What are Google’s voice search ranking factors?

Below is a summary of the five main categories of Google’s voice search ranking as described in the Google Search by Voice case study:

• Word Error Rate (WER): Google measures grammatical and spelling errors at the word level and counts them against the recognizer. This was broken down into an equation: WER = # of word substitutions + insertions + deletions / Total # of words
• Semantic Quality or “WebScore”: This is the overwhelming ranking factor for appearing as a voice search result. WebScore is calculated by measuring how many times the search result as queried by the recognition hypothesis varies from the search result queried by a human. Basically: WebScore = # of correct search results + word deletions (e.g. dog parks [in] sf) / Total # of spoken queries
• Perplexity (PPL): The size of the set of words that can be recognized next in a sequence, given previously recognized words in query. Lower PPL = better chance of model predicting the next word in the query
• Out-of-Vocabulary Rate (OOV): % of words spoken by user not modeled by the language model. Basically, if your target audience is using words that aren’t in the vocabulary of your content, it will result in a recognition error, which may also cause errors in surrounding words as the predictive model breaks down in a cascade effect
• Latency: Total time in secs it takes to complete a voice search, measured as the end of the user’s sentence all the way to the search results appearing on screen. (Yet another reason why site speed is supreme)

You can read this Google voice case study right here.

Machine Learning and SEO

The connections between machine learning and SEO are now undeniable. On the search engine side, technologies like RankBrain are integrating machine learning into the search algorithm with the ultimate goal of getting the search engine spiders to crawl websites the way an actual human end user would read and navigate. On the SEO technology side, machine learning is being integrated into the way SEOs discover opportunities, optimize content, and more. In her presentation as part of the panel on voice search, Benu Aggarwal, founder and president of digital marketing agency Milestone, expounded on the concept of AI-first digital marketing. In this model, according to Aggarwal, AI-driven technology like customer service bots, marketing bots, and product bots could all be harnessed not just to direct human users to the content or services they need, but to gather usage data and user queries to better guide the development of the product or website. This was also a theme that BrightEdge covered in its Tuesday session, Accelerating Enterprise SEO Performance: The Dynamic SERPs and Artificial Intelligence.

The truth behind the mobile-first index

As we all know, 2018 is the year of the mobile-first index. That said, there's still a degree of uncertainty in the community over just what that entails. Various speakers provided some much-needed level setting about mobile-first. The best walkthrough was by Alexis Sanders, technical SEO manager at Merkle. In her presentation, Google is Adapting to the Worldwide Shift to Mobile, Sanders summarized the mobile-first index as follows:

• The mobile-first index is about prioritizing mobile
• It's not a separate index/database storing

As such, this is a change that largely only affects websites that still present different experiences on mobile than on desktop, be it through a "m." subdomain or a subdirectory. Sites that are already using responsive design should be good to go, though site speed on mobile is still a major concern, especially since, as Sanders pointed out, the mobile web continues to be a slower experience overall.

Schema tagging is here to stay

The consensus from many speakers was that schema tagging plays a major role in optimizing for voice. Benu Aggarwal was among the most bullish on schema, saying that her content ideation for clients begins with understanding what all the industry-relevant schema tags are and mapping content topics to those tags.

Marketers should be working on their own voice agents

This was the focus of a presentation by Eric Enge, founder and CEO of Stone Temple, and Duane Forrester, VP of Industry Insights at Yext. This is a customized voice that Google, Alexa, etc. hands the user off to once they enter into your brand’s ecosystem to perform certain actions/transactions. The process to develop an effective voice agent is quite complex, involving not just customer personas, but extrapolating those target customers into the development of a brand persona who can embody brand promise. Stone Temple is working on one and is leveraging it to engage incremental traffic the way most brands do with livechat widgets. Enge mentioned that they have even included a digital marketing quiz that can be accessed through Alexa with the query "open the Stone Temple quiz."

SEO is at the heart of customer experience

It sometimes feels like SEO spent years as an outsider to the larger marketing group, like an electrician brought in to wire up a new building after every other team finished building everything else. Increasingly, however, SEO and SEO practitioners are being brought into the marketing conversation. As part of that move the data collected from organic search is being utilized not just as a means of measuring the success of the channel but as directional metrics to help guide other marketing efforts. This was the message delivered by our own VP of Strategic Innovation Ken Shults in our Tuesday session. Together with BrightEdge Director of Product Management Michael DeHaven, Ken talked about how insights from organic search can be used to guide further development of the website. In his example, Ken walked through how to analyze the organic search queries input by members of a specific marketing persona and use them as a kind of backend data source to help guide the refinement of site nav, content taxonomy, and content development itself, echoing the same message given earlier in the day in the voice search panel. If you attended SMX Advanced and are hungry for more SEO and digital marketing insights, be sure to check out the Share Global Insights Tour in San Francisco on October 10.