enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 9 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

With the growth of the Internet, the entire consumer purchasing process has changed - forcing SEO writing to the forefront of content marketing strategy. An estimated 67 percent of the customer journey now takes place digitally, with 81 percent of shoppers and 94 percent of B2B buyers saying that they conduct Internet research before purchasing a product. Customers use the Internet to learn about brands, products, and services that they might be able to use. They compare options and learn about the various potential solutions to their problems. For companies to succeed with these digital customers, they need to have a strong online presence. It is only by being visible in the channels that customers are using to search - such as organic search or social media - that brands have the ability to establish themselves to prospects. They will then be able to cast themselves as the reputable industry leader from whom consumers should make a purchase. SEO writing is a large part of developing that important reputation and brand reach. Strong writing can help organizations improve their ranking within the search algorithms while also being engaging for readers to encourage sharing and interaction.

What is effective SEO writing?

When you sit down to develop an effective piece of textual content, you want to write something that provides immediate value for the reader. It should not just be a regurgitation of everything else on the web. You want to add your own expertise and point of view so that readers have a reason to come back to you specifically to learn more. Your writing should help establish you as a trusted leader within your niche. You should demonstrate a keen insight into the blog topics that matter the most to your intended audience so that you can be there to answer their questions and address their needs. At the same time, your content needs to be developed with the search engine algorithms in mind. The piece needs to clearly communicate to the search engine the topic and value of your material. Google will be looking to understand how your piece fits into the greater digital ecosystem as well as where it fits into your site. This will provide clues and insight about where to display it on the SERPs and for what queries. This means placing carefully-selected, thoroughly-research keywords in certain areas, paying attention to your site structure and taking the time to balance your content with your SEO efforts. Your SEO writing strategy needs to be attentive to effectively communicating both with your target audience and with the search algorithm.

How do I develop effective SEO writing?

• Step 1: Determine the goal you want to accomplish with this particular piece.

You will not be able to effectively write and engage prospects if you do not know exactly what you want to accomplish with a particular piece of content. You should look at the outline of your ideal customers and their buyer journeys and know how you want this particular piece of content to fit into that funnel. For example, is this piece of content going to be an end-of-funnel piece that encourages people to make a purchase? It might have more product mentions and comparisons about why your brand is superior to competitors. On the other hand, if the content will be for the top of the funnel, it will likely focus more on being informative about the industry and less about your company in particular.  

• Step 2: Review what others have written about the topic.

Considering that we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, the vast majority of the conceivable topics available have been covered to at least some degree. By reviewing what the highest-ranking sites for your particular topic have developed, you will have a better idea of what people want to see when they search for this keyword. You can search for ways to improve upon what has already been created to maximize your potential ranking.

• Step 3: Create content that addresses the targeted audience’s need at this particular point in the buyer’s journey.

Once you know whom you are writing for and have an idea about effective strategies that will help you with this topic, it is time to develop the content. Seek to add your own unique perspective to the content so that customers see you as a trusted authority.  

• Step 4: Be sure to provide depth while also making the content easy to scan.

While you do not want to compromise on the depth of your material, it is important to still make your piece easy to scan. Most people are not going read each word you produce individually, they will quickly look over the material to see how relevant your content is to their needs. You want to pay attention to your headlines and make sure they are clearly relevant to the topic that brought the person to your page. You also want to use listing features, such as bullet points or numbered lists to make your ideas easy to explore and retain. Optimal page word count is now believed to be around 1100.  

• Step 5: Draft an effective title that draws people into your material.

An estimated 8 in 10 people will read your headlines but not go on to read your content. This gap is because brands do not make their headlines engaging enough. Their headlines do not effectively draw in customers and convince them that this will be the content that answers their needs. Using your keyword in your title helps to communicate your relevance. Using phrases such as ‘how to’, titles that indicate lists or words that otherwise pull in the reader will help you increase clicks. Generally keep your title around 70 characters or below to make sure all the words show up in the SERPs. Long titles that become like title tags can trigger Google to rewrite the title tag for the SERP.  

• Step 6: Optimize the content with keywords.

Your content should also be optimized with the keyword, but be careful - overuse, also known as ‘keyword stuffing’ - is a damaging SEO writing practice. Instead, aim to have a keyword saturation around one to two percent and make sure that it is always used naturally throughout your piece.  

• Step 7: Write an engaging meta description.

Although Google has indicated that they do not scan meta descriptions for ranking factors, that does not mean that this feature is obsolete. Meta descriptions influence how many people click through from the SERPs because they help to indicate the relevance of your content to the query. Writing a quality meta description that invites readers in so they can learn your valuable information will improve your clicks, your engagement and stickiness, and therefore your rank.  

• Step 8: Distribute the content and measure your results.

Once the content has been written and optimized, you then need to distribute it to the people you think will be the most interested in the material. Use a variety of different platforms, such as your social media platforms and your email lists to reach the people most likely to read and engage with the writing. Measure your results throughout the process so that you see how the response of your audience maps to your predictions. Use this information to guide your future content production. Creating an efficient SEO writing strategy and creation process will be the cornerstone of improving your brand reach and creating a strong brand presence. Understanding how to improve your writing will help you boost your online marketing success.  

Content Best Practices

Check out a recent piece on content marketing: A New Era of Content. The paper is based on industry research by BrightEdge and iProspect; it packs a number of content and online marketing best practices into 20 short pages.

maspillera

M Posted 9 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

Competition is fierce in the modern digital marketplace. More than three-quarters of both B2B and B2C companies use content marketing in their promotional efforts and at least 50% across both sectors say that they will be increasing their budgets in the coming year. This means that brands need to be even more attentive to how their company measures up to the competition on the SERPs, including measuring links with a backlink checker. Considering that an estimated 81% of shoppers and 94% of B2B buyers will conduct online research before making a purchase, your position in the algorithm has quantifiable value for your brand.

Succeeding despite this fierce competition forces brands to use intelligent insights to understand how their material is resonating with their audience and how those reactions are becoming conversions and revenue for the company. A backlink checker can be a valuable instrument in this process because it provides irreplaceable comprehension of the quality backlinks and their number. It is important to note, however, that this is just one part of a full platform that can help you maximize your content’s potential. When a backlink checker is combined with other powerful SEO and monitoring functions, your understanding of your content and its performance will be extraordinary.

The role of a backlink checker in your success

Backlinks remain an important part of content marketing. They help to show the placement of a particular piece of content within the greater digital ecosystem. When other reputable sites link to your page, they are vouching for the quality of your material.

On the other hand, low-quality sites will not benefit your SERP. Although Google claims that spam sites linking to your page will not hurt you, many site owners prefer not to take the chance and disavow any negative links to prevent potential backlash. You can disavow links through Google Webmaster.

A backlink checker can help you monitor your backlink profile so you are immediately notified should any poor-quality sites link to you. It also provides understanding of potential link building opportunities so that you can gain more positive inbound links that will benefit your site. Since you can monitor which pages are gaining positive backlinks, you will also have a better idea about which content is resonating the most with your audience.

When you take advantage of all the potential found in the backlink checker, it is an incredible resource that will give you a considerable amount of insight that can help you succeed. It is important to remember that this is just a small piece of the platform, however. Feel free to test your knowledge of other important aspects with BrightEdge Digital Marketing Quiz or SEO Quiz.

Using a backlink checker as a part of the larger picture with an SEO platform

While understanding how many people are linking to your work and in what context is important, the value from this reputation and traffic really comes from business growth and revenue. For this reason, backlinks should be treated as an important piece in a complex puzzle.

Using a backlink checker by itself will lead to five main pitfalls:​

1. You will be unable to judge whether your new backlinks are contributing to greater traffic.
2. You cannot tell if your new backlinks lead to more revenue.
3. It will not be easy to understand how your page performance is improving week-over-week, month-over-month or year-over-year.
4. You will be unable to gain a complete picture of how well your content efforts are reaching the right people and answering their needs.
5. The checker will not provide you with optimization advice about how to attract more traffic that could result in the needed backlinks.

You want to have a backlink checker SEO system that easily integrates with the rest of a complete research and monitoring platform. The checker will then be able to add immediate value to your brand. You'll easily be able to report your efforts in SEO reports. On BrightEdge, our backlink solution is a lot more robust than a simple backlink checker. It is just a few clicks away from critical dashboards and capabilities, including StoryBuilder, Data Cube, and Page Reporting. These pages will complement the information you glean from your backlink monitoring, enhancing your understanding and increasing your actionable insights. For example, you can use BrightEdge's backlink report to see how often people are linking to your content from high-quality pages. You can then click over to Page Reporting portion and see the exact statistics for that page and how well it is drawing traffic. You will be able to tell if the increase in backlinks is correlated with an increase in engagement or visits. You can also use StoryBuilder page to see how those backlinks and traffic line up with revenue, conversions or other metrics that align with your goals for the campaign.

With the StoryBuilder, you can compare your progress week-over-week, month-over-month and year-over-year, allowing you to build a complete picture of how well your optimization efforts result in business growth. The Data Cube can then offer additional insight by computing your Data Cube score. This number will give you a summary of how well you are reaching your intended audience and meeting their needs. The higher your score, the better you are performing. You can also use Data Cube to gain a better understanding of potential brand opportunities, such as by comparing your site to a competitor or researching the keywords you rank for that could be further optimized to move from page 2 or 3 up to page 1.

 

In the increasingly competitive world of online marketing, brands want to make sure that they have the insight they need to succeed. A backlink checker will provide you with important information about the success of your SEO efforts in attracting inbound links while also providing limited insight into how many people read and appreciate your content. When you combine this with the power of the rest of the BrightEdge platform, however, you gain intimate insights about your SEO efforts, people’s reception of your content, and how your online marketing efforts impact the bottom line.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 9 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

Importance of Google Search Data

Organic Search is the largest driver of traffic to websites across the internet, accounting for 53% of organic traffic to websites across the internet. 

Within the organic search category, Google is far and away the largest Search Engine out there, accounting for 88% of all search queries according to Statista. Based on this, it is critical to collect and utilize as much search data from Google as possible. 

Where can this data be found? Let's take a look at the tools Google provides to gather and analyze search data.

Sources of Google Search Data

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC), formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is the primary source of search-related data that Google provides site owners. It is also the tool you use to manage your sites and make Google aware of the content you've published.

Valuable metrics available from GSC:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Top performing search queries
• URLs submitted
• URLs indexed
• Internal Links
• Backlinks
• Crawl Errors
• Mobile Usability Errors
• AMP Errors

While there is a significant amount of Google search data and metrics available in GSC it can be limiting at times, only allowing users to only see the top 999 keyword queries referring traffic, for example.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is Google’s Web Analytics offering. Web analytics used to be the primary source of Google search data because it provided specific information about how much traffic each keyword was referring to a website. This capability was removed with the introduction of secure search in 2013, reducing GA’s usefulness as an organic data source.

It does still provide a lot of valuable data for the site content and channels and conversions, which can be valuable to search marketers. Here are some examples of valuable metrics you can find in Google Analytics today:

• Traffic to your site from Organic Search or other channels
• Landing pages that have high numbers of visits
• Geographies that are driving significant traffic

While Google Analytics doesn’t have as direct a connection to search queries as it once did, it is still the central way to understand how people are getting to your site and what they are doing once they arrive there. It is incredibly difficult to make a real business case for search without using data available in GA.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a tool that Google provides to help people understand what topics and keyword queries are popular in the market at any given time. It has a significant amount of data on different stories in the news as well as trending research topics and the relative popularity of searches within a given industry.

Interesting metrics you can find in Google Trends:

• Trending queries by region
• Related queries to one you identify
• Relative popularity of different queries within the same space

The only concern with Google Trends is that it doesn’t give you very much specific data on how many people are searching for a given query. Instead it focuses on relative popularity within a given industry or space. This makes broader comparisons more difficult.

Google Keyword Planner

Part of the Google Ads suite is the Google Keyword Planner (GKP), a tool that can provide excellent data to marketers focused on organic search. 

GKP is a solid source for identifying keywords that are related to each other and for understanding how many people are searching for any particular keyword over time.

Metrics to look for from Google Keyword Planner:

• Related Keywords
• Suggested Bid Value
• Search Volume

Trying to do demand planning without data from Google Keyword Planner would be very difficult, since it is the best available source for Google search data on volume.

Driving Business Value from the Data

There is a huge amount of Google search data as we’ve shown up to this point. You can find in a variety of places and all of it seems like it could be useful. The next key step is how to turn all of this data into actionable insights that you can use to drive business value. Having data which is spread out across so many sources can make it difficult to consolidate it and mine for insights manually. This is where BrightEdge can help.

Integrations

The most obvious way that BrightEdge can help in leveraging the Google search data mentioned above is through data integrations. From the list above, BrightEdge supports direct integration with your data for both Google Search Console as well as with Web Analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, and Coremetrics. BrightEdge will pull in this data and associate it with other data across the platform so that you can easily tie Google search data back to true business metrics.

Keyword Reporting

BrightEdge also helps you with gathering and understanding Google search data with its keyword reporting framework. We collect not only keyword rankings data for your domain and your competitors, but we also pull in Search Volume Data from Google in order to help you understand your performance compared to the demand seen for any particular keyword or group of keywords.

StoryBuilder

To cap it all off BrightEdge has StoryBuilder, which allows customers to take any data that you have available across the BrightEdge platform and create powerful visualizations and dashboards that you can use to drive performance and report on success across your organization. Demo the BrightEdge platform today.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 9 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

Content marketing continues to explode across both the B2B and B2C industries. An estimated 90 percent of the data available today has been produced in just the past two years. An estimated 93 percent of B2B brands leverage content marketing and 86 percent of B2C consider content marketing key to their strategy. 

The numbers that these modern online techniques bring in continue to be impressive. Content marketing costs less than traditional marketing, but it generates three times as many leads. These success rates have been an important factor in driving people towards trying these new methods. Content marketing is a better long-term strategy brands should work on if they haven't already.

Unfortunately, while people increasingly understand the importance of content marketing, they often either neglect their content in favor of SEO, or they neglect SEO in favor of the content. Those who push strongly for SEO speak about the importance of keywords while only giving lip service to flow and content.

On the other side of the scale, there are those who tell brands that they should not be thinking about SEO at all, and they should just write what the audience wants to read. According to these advocates, the audience will somehow just find the material. These discrepancies may help explain why more than half of B2B businesses using content marketing say that their efforts are not effective.

Brands that lack a cohesive strategy for both production and optimization will struggle. An effective SEO content strategy requires a careful balancing act of both content creation and SEO. It works like a scale, where both sides need to be equally measured and employed together to see true success. Your content needs to appeal to your audience while also being clear and relevant in the eyes of the major search engines.

Leverage a content strategy to better your SEO

Creating SEO content means flopping material that is both written for the people while also being optimized for Google. Brands must understand what their customers want to read and learn about, while also taking the time to ensure that the content is prepared for the search engine algorithms. This optimization process will ensure that the content is easily understood by the search engines so it can be displayed to readers for applicable queries. It is important to remember that Google is now rapidly advancing semantic search.

Since a few major algorithm updates - such as Hummingbird and then RankBrain - went live, there has been significantly less emphasis on matching keywords in queries and websites and a greater importance placed on understanding intent and uncovering context. Your content must similarly fit this pattern. Rather than worrying about using set phrases repeatedly, you want to use keyword research to uncover particular topics of importance that are driving user searches and that interest people in your ideal audience. There should be a far greater focus on creating content that answers the needs of users rather than writing material that checks boxes. Below is an image of BrightEdge Data Cube showing the search volume and listing type. Customers use this to plan out their editorial calendars and help content creators write for both search engines and consumers.

Ideally, you should work on developing stables of content that helps your audience dive deeply into their blog topics of choice. With different pieces of content, you can break down the topics in an increasingly complex and intricate way. You will discuss different aspects of the material and provide internal links to guide users from one piece to the next to encourage their curiosity and help them fully answer their questions. At the top of the silo, you will have a general topic that explores a broad idea. This page will then contain internal links to help users dive more deeply into the material by exploring subtopics related to the general topic.

For example, if a content section was constructed for a retail brand about fall fashion, one subtopic might discuss trends in pants and another in dresses. Internal links and other navigational tools can enable users to move around your website easily, improving their user experience as well. Easy navigation also helps the search engine spiders understand how your site is organized, which can improve your rankings and traffic. Google wants to rank sites that provide an outstanding resource for users, so the easier your readers can explore your material and the more value they can pull from your content, the better your page will be regarded. A strong SEO content strategy also includes off-page SEO, such as social media and building backlinks.

Social media can help you promote your content, driving traffic and readership, which will also boost the ranking and popularity of your piece which usually boosts backlinks. Influencer marketing or syndicating content are ways to bring in strong links from reputable sites. These off-page techniques help to demonstrate how your material fits into the greater digital ecosystem. They demonstrate how much people value your content.

Creating an effective content strategy for SEO

For effective SEO content, you want to remember that Google wants to keep readers happy just as much as you do - so by writing for your readers, you are also writing for Google. Particularly in the content-development stage, you want to focus primarily on your customers. Therefore, writing your content should revolve around these steps:

1. Develop your ideal customer personas.
2. Map your personas to the buyer journey.
3. Conduct keyword research to uncover topics that your customers are most likely to find interesting and helpful at each stage of their buyer journey.
4. Organize your content so that it is easy to find and navigate on your site, which will encourage people to explore more of your content and increase engagement.
5. Use meta descriptions when publishing your content to make it look more appealing on the SERP.

After your SEO content strategy and the content itself has been developed, you will shift your focus more towards the search algorithms to make sure that Google and the other major search engines know how important your content is for a particular topic. This means you will want to include optimization efforts such as:

1. Use keywords in the URLs, headlines and alt text to make the material seem more applicable to particular topics.
2. Have an effective content distribution plan across newsletters, social media and emails to drive traffic, engagement reach and backlinks.
3. Invest time in influencer marketing, finding content advocates and fans and similar chances for backlinks.

An effective SEO content strategy requires balancing the needs of your customers with optimization efforts. When these two aspects work in unison, they are able to effectively promote content in the SERPs and find traction and readers for your articles. Customers who neglect their SEO content strategy find themselves with websites filled with great content but no readers, while those who neglect their content quality will have good technical optimization but low engagement. It is only when these two areas work together in unison that brands start to experience the incredible success that content marketing can offer.  

Content best practices

Check out a recent piece on content marketing: A New Era of Content. The paper is based on industry research by BrightEdge and iProspect, it packs a number of content and online marketing best practices into 20 short pages.