Throughout Share16 speakers provided us with valuable insight throughout the conference. Here is a recap of some intriguing topics covered during sessions and panel sessions.

During Share16, in addition to the excellent breakout sessions and networking events, we also had several expert panels where attendees have the opportunity to ask questions of a few of the industry leaders who attend.

Key skills to thrive in the industry

The Share panelists and speakers represented some of the best in the field, so all of the attendees were interested in gaining some professional advice from them. Many questions for the Share panelists were around what skills they thought really helped their success in the industry.

Several of the Share panelists and speakers addressed the ‘people’ aspect. Succeeding in any industry requires understanding how to work with people. This includes understanding how to approach problems, build arguments, and leverage data to drive people and help them understand your point of view.

Critical skills, such as effectively managing meetings so that each session is productive and actionable, also impact leadership ability. Being able to effectively articulate a problem can mean the difference between getting the funding you need and being overlooked completely.

To really thrive in your professional interpersonal relations, emotional intelligence and empathy are golden. This applies both to effectively understanding those you work with and understanding the pain points and needs of everyone from stakeholders to customers.

Similarly, professionals should understand how to control their stress. SEO and digital marketing are never static industries. Those in the field must be ready to continually adapt and adjust to both new consumer demands and patterns as well as changes to the algorithm. This can be stressful. Those who want to succeed need to be able to manage the stress that comes with the territory in a healthy way so that they do not lose sight of their goals. F

rom a personal standpoint, having ‘sandbox projects’ can also be an effective way to demonstrate ability and continue learning. Those who want to succeed in SEO and digital marketing should have their own sites or related projects that they regularly play around with to learn more about driving traffic and finding success.

Finally, having a clear vision about where you want to go and how to get there is important in driving yourself forward. Understanding where you want to go will have a tremendous impact on what you achieve. Kelly Rivard, SEO strategist at HallMark shared some great tips on her personal journey and how Hallmark has reinvented themselves by investing in people they can trust and breaking down internal barriers to communication.

Other Share16 speakers and panelists - such as Alex Volk of Microsoft, Dave Lloyd from Adobe, Dixon Jones of Majestic, Mel Carson of Majestic, Adam Audette of Merkle, and Adam Singer of Google Analytics - identified visual content as a key frontier and viewed as an important piece of this puzzle. Younger people today live on various visual-dominated social platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat. The experts believe that this will pave the way for a visual digital future.

Brands will also need to be better storytellers. They will need to understand how to engage with the audience. In particular, marketers will need to reach their audience on an emotional level. Future technologies, such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, will be an important aspect in better engaging with target audiences and creating that one-to-one experience.

People-based marketing, where brands are able to create the ideal experience for a particular individual based on their needs in that moment, is also becoming increasingly tangible. Artificial intelligence and machine learning also will play a large role in this development.

With these changes the role of the SEO will also evolve. People will stop thinking about algorithms and search engines and pay more attention to who the audience is, where they are, and how to communicate the right message to them.

Many of the experts at Share also foresee a shift away from standard, traditional SEO towards a more entity-based form of optimization. The way data is structured will need to change to better reflect ideas rather than web pages to better address the needs of the end-user.

Preparing for Share for our Share panelists

The Share conference strives each year to be an informative conference where attendees and speakers alike find a platform to share ideas and walk away with actionable insights. It was very interesting to hear speakers asked to describe how they prepare for Share and how this conference differentiates itself from other marketing events.

The experts said that they like to look at what has been happening in their own organizations so that they can create presentations that deliver actionable insights. Since the people at Share either use or are considering the BrightEdge platform, knowing that they have this common ground to grow from allows them to dig into the strategy and platform usage on a deeper level, creating a unique experience.

The attendees at Share also hold a particular degree of SEO expertise and understanding, which allows the presenters to discuss the finer points of SEO, creating more interesting presentations. The people who attend do may fit under broad definitions of digital marketers, but also have deep expertise in the world of SEO, which helps to guide conversations.

Share panelists and speakers also mentioned the unique track based around self-development and hope that it would catch on at other conferences.

Gaps in the SEO world

Gaps in talent for digital marketers have always been a pressing concern for many in the industry. In one session, an audience member asked the speakers where they saw the largest holes in talent within the digital marketing space, and the answers largely revolved around big data.

Data scientists, people who can really analyze the numbers in front of them and walk away with actionable insights, remain very valuable. There exists incredible demand for qualified analysts and data scientists. The deficiency is so great that some brands are even looking outside the marketing sector to find professionals who are good at analyzing and can provide organizations with the insights needed.

Along similar lines, the future of data analysis will be data integration. Brands will need to be able to understand the threads that run through the data they pull in and how data from different departments might benefit others, such as how PPC data might help those working with SEO. Professionals that understand how to fill this gap will be excellent assets. From a personal development perspective Amy Shipman from HP shared some great insights into problem solving in a digital world.

The Share16 speakers all offered some awesome information for our audience and we cannot thank them enough. The Share panelists who participated in further audience discussions offered some great insights for the future. Thanks to all who participated!

Enjoy the Share16 testimonial videos to gain insights from current customers and learn more about SEO maturity. Use them in your own company to help grow SEO maturity and secure more resources for the largest channel.

Every year at the Share conference, the BrightEdge community comes together to exchange ideas and learn more about SEO and digital marketing as a whole for an information-packed three days.

There are countless conferences that take place across the country every year, but Share is unique in its ability to bring together a group of some of the best digital marketers in the industry to learn about elevating SEO strategy and practices within their own organizations. Brands exchange ideas based upon their own experience with the BrightEdge platform and walk away feeling more equipped and ready to mature the digital marketing process in their business.

Throughout the conference, we had the chance to sit down and speak with a number of different customers. These videos are now live and we wanted to bring them to the attention of our audience. The conversations we had with these customers were informative and insightful, and we hope you will like them as well.

Share16 Testimonial videos in the B2B space

Astute Solutions

“In about a 6-month period with the help of BrightEdge, and with the help of the team there... we’ve been about to increase the amount of listings we have on page 1 through 10 by 20% just in 6 months and actually increase our organic site traffic by 60% in that same amount of time.”

- Natalie Skarzynski for Astute Solutions

Natalie describes how BrightEdge helps her and her team move forward, understand the biggest priorities, and create content and strategies that will maximize their impact.  

WhiteHat Security

“With BrightEdge Content, we have the ability to kind of fast-track, the ability to build out optimized and targeted content. The content that we produce out-performed our blog content by 170%.”

- Avi Bhatnagar, WhiteHat Security

Avi spoke about how WhiteHat Security uses BrightEdge to identify Moments that Matter and create content that appropriately targets their customers. He also spoke about the level of support he receives from BrightEdge and how the platform has become a core part of their strategy. Through their successful use of the BrightEdge platform and BrightEdge Content, they elevated SEO and made content an important part of their brand.  

Share16 Testimonial videos in the B2C space

STAPLES Europe

“The first and more important problem that BrightEdge helps me solve for our business in Europe is to make SEO tangible. So we use the Story Builder to really combine all the different data points and the insights that we get with the platform so that we can tell the whole story.”

- Michel Kant, STAPLES Europe

Michel describes how their BrightEdge usage helps them maximize their resources. He is able to use the data from the platform when talking to others and to show the business’s progress.  

Hallmark Cards

“We’re a very small team doing a large amount of optimization for a large organization spanning multiple countries, multiple verticals; and ultimately, the amount of data analysis we can offboard into a system like BrightEdge that can then spit out very, very actionable insights for us, it’s been a game changer.”

- Kelly Rivard, Hallmark Cards

Kelly spoke about how the BrightEdge Share of Voice helped them better understand the optimal directions for growth. Working with Professional Services, she was able to see rapid growth at Hallmark, and uses that case study to continue to replicate their results across different aspects of the site, elevating SEO within the organization.  

Share16 Testimonial videos on the Global level

Oracle

“By gaining key customer insight through tools like BrightEdge, now you can create more relevant content, more relevant campaigns and messages that really resonate.”

- Kelvin Gee, Oracle

Kelvin spoke about the transformation that many brands are undergoing as they venture from the old way of doing marketing to the new digital strategies- and how BrightEdge can help brands successfully mature in this way. Using the platform, Kelvin and Oracle can better understand what customers want and then produce the content needed to engage with their audience.

“We’re using the BrightEdge Data Cube to inform our content and create intelligent content so that we’re matching the content to the search activity of our target audience.”

- Joyce Boland, Oracle

Joyce explains that BrightEdge has played a core role in the creation of content that better aligns with customers. Rather than creating content based around what they want the customer to know, they now create the content that people seek. They can better develop the material for the entire buyer’s journey.  

Adobe

“BrightEdge’s platform helps us in a couple of major areas. One of them is in just insight into our SEO data. It also helps us forecast business cases, predictive modeling.”

- Jay Middleton, Adobe

Jay says BrightEdge helps Adobe look globally at their SEO efforts and strategy while also monitoring over a million keywords. They use a variety of the different BrightEdge functions, such as Story Builder, Data Cube, and Share of Voice to better understand their position and strategy.

“Unified BrightEdge platform allows us to very effectively address reporting rather than focusing on just one or two different features, we have a comprehensive view of SEO success and that allows us to actually get more buy-in.” Kirill explains that BrightEdge helps Adobe succeed on a global scale. They can use the platform to improve their organic traffic rates and elevate their SEO success.

Share16 Testimonial videos from agency customers

Overdrive Interactive

“BrightEdge actually helps us solve several problems. First, we use it as a business development tool. Second, we use it as a benchmarking tool to get an idea of where the client is sitting and also from a competitive set. And then thirdly, from a reporting standpoint always showing that we’re doing a great job for our clients and success,”

- Jeff Selig, Overdrive Interactive.

Jeff describes how his agency often works on a variety of different initiatives. They use BrightEdge dashboards to clearly display their performance metrics. They build their dashboards specifically to speak to those in the c-suite to show the work and success of the marketers.  

97th Floor

“One of my favorite real specific features that BrightEdge has, that really no one else has that we found in the company, is the Quick Answers and the reporting tools around Quick Answers.”

- Chris Bennett, 97th Floor

97th Floor founder Chris Bennett was one of our keynote speakers this year at Share, and he offered some great insights into the power of Quick Answers in the optimization process. In his video here, he speaks about how BrightEdge supports him in these efforts and helps him elevate SEO with his clients.  

Noble Studios

“We see improvement across all our clients in performance, we see lift in conversion. We use BrightEdge across all of our accounts, and there is no way that we could replicate the speed and the workflow automation that the platform allows us to do across all of our clients.”

- Michael Thomas, Noble Studios

Michael Thomas of Noble Studios spoke about how the Story Builder on the BrightEdge platform lets them really see the impact that SEO is having on the organization as a whole. The platform is at the core of how they tell the stories of success to their clients.    

Be Found Online

“BrightEdge, well for me, it’s the most complete and comprehensive solution that just gives us everything in one place.”

- Bob Dearsly, BFO

Bob Dearsly of Be Found Online spoke about the importance of moving forward in SEO. Everything is in a perpetual state of change in this industry, and BrightEdge provides BFO with the tools they need to provide for their clients. The BrightEdge testimonial videos from Share16 are now live for your enjoyment.

This is just a sampling of the many people who so generously took the time to speak to us about how they use BrightEdge to succeed. It was great to speak with so many customers and hope that you find their remarks as insightful as we did. You can check out all of the videos on our testimonial page. 

See all testimonials

Take a proactive, unbiased, and data-driven approach to prioritizing keyword phrases that are realistic to target for your next SEO and Content Marketing initiative with BrightEdge SEO Opportunity Forecasting. This powerful capability within the BrightEdge platform analyzes the competitor page that is outranking you for a target keyword phrase. It then evaluates your website’s page and compares the two based on their Domain Authority, Page Authority, external backlinks, and Twitter/Facebook shares and likes. The result shows you the estimated difficulty in overtaking the competitor page in the SERPs.

This feature brings simplicity to the otherwise complex task of identifying high-value keyword phrases where your website can feasibly compete. BrightEdge identifies those phrases where competing pages have an equal or lower page authority than your website. This allows you to target only those terms that you’ve got a realistic opportunity to secure. This way, time and resources aren’t wasted targeting terms that your website doesn’t currently have the authority to compete against.

4 steps to do your own competitive keyword analysis:

Step 1.

Initial BrightEdge setup

Step 2.

Populate your keyword groups via the Search Volume and Keyword Reporting capabilities of BrightEdge. Use these to ideate and build out a robust list of possible keyword phrases relevant for your products or services. Create keyword groupings, compiling similar phrases around an area of service or product.

Step 3.

Using the Opportunity Forecast feature of BrightEdge you can now manipulate the view to show you exactly what you are looking to forecast. You can look at multiple models, adjusting via the Forecast Model dropdown, but we’d recommend starting with the Revenue (default) setting.

• Click into the Conversion rate column and adjust the conversion rate for that grouping of keyword phrases based on the historical data that you’ve collected through your website analytics (such as Google Analytics). By default, BrightEdge will calculate on a 2% conversion rate.
• Click into the Conv. Value column and adjust based on your historical revenue data. By default, BrightEdge will calculate based on a $100 conversion value.
• Click into Forecast Status column and click “run”. Let the platform do the work!

Step 4.

Export your data sheets to further manipulate your opportunity forecasting data and include in your presentations to support your keyword targeting decisions. Now, you can calculate a potential return on investment or Potential Gain associated with your efforts for the purpose of planning. More importantly, you can calculate the time and effort you’ll have saved by prioritizing keyword phrases that are worth that effort.

Watch this short video on Opportunity Forecasting to explore the BrightEdge capabilities and confidently kick off your next SEO & Content Marketing program.