enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

For brands to see genuine success from their digital marketing strategies, they need to develop mature practices. They must grow from their early, rudimentary efforts that yield little success and become a highly efficient and effective content-production organization. Brands that reach these upper levels of maturation are able to scale their content production across their business, accurately measure their progress and results, and provide innate value to their customers. A recent survey of B2B businesses, however, found that only 8 percent viewed themselves as being at this late stage. Before looking at content audit, let's dive a little deeper into the survey results. More than half of the surveyed categorized themselves as being at the middle stages, described in the above survey as the adolescent and mature phases. These brands see some success and are beginning to delve into accurately measuring and integrating their processes across the organization. A correctly-run audit can provide brands with the positioning they need to progress further in marketing maturity and begin to build a content production system that will advance their organizations online. Here is how to take your content audit, and your business, to the next level.

What is a content audit?

A standard content audit is the process of categorizing the content you currently have to better understand your strengths and weaknesses. Armed with this information, you can then move forward and fill in any gaps, strengthening your online presence. The basic audit will follow these steps.

1. Take an inventory of current content

You want to look at all the current content available on your website, including your main site, blog, and gated content. You need to have a complete list so you can accurately determine where any gaps in your content creation exist. You will also need to be checking for any duplicate content.

2. Evaluate if content is accurate and useful

Not only do you need to know what types of content you have available for users, but you also need to know if that content is accurate and useful. Content that needs to be updated because it now contains incorrect information, for example, should be addressed. You can provide visitors with better information by including links to updated posts. Develop a rating system that will be able to help you quickly gauge how important a piece of content is. Look for the value it offers users and how well it meets the guidelines you want to establish for your brand. Grade your content based on how much it needs to be updated. Feel free to test your knowledge with BrightEdge Digital Marketing Quiz or SEO Quiz.

3. Measure traffic and engagement rates for content

You also want to see how well your content is drawing traffic and if it is capturing the attention of your visitors. Note the types of content that seem to be resulting in the highest engagement rates. Look for patterns in styles and topics that can help you better understand the needs of your audience.

4. See how well the content is organized on the site

Successful content marketing also requires taking a careful look at how your material is organized on the site. Customers and Google alike want to see sites that they can easily navigate to find what they seek. This means making URLs easy to understand, labeling features on the page clearly, including inbound links that are useful, and making it simple for people to return to the homepage.

5. Check the optimization of the content and see where weaknesses lie

Have a checklist prepared of optimization features that you want for every page of your content. This should include the basics such as:

• The keyword in your H1 and H2 tags
• Alt tags
• The keyword in your URL
• An engaging, customized meta description
• Internal links to relevant pages

Any pages missing these features should be edited to help them rank higher.

6. Determine what content is missing

Once you know exactly what content you have published and how well it is helping you to meet your business objectives, you then need to determine which gaps you should fill. Look for trends in your content-- such as blog posts that are missing images or posting multiple pieces related to your product and fewer pieces pertaining to the top of the sales funnel.

Taking your content audit to the next level of marketing maturity

Although this basic content audit can be helpful for your marketing efforts, those who want to mature in their content marketing strategy can also use this opportunity to amplify their efforts and start to see improved results.

1 Map all your content to the buyer’s journey for specific personas.

For you to mature in online marketing, you need to know exactly who you are addressing and what they want to see from your brand. You do this by understanding your targeted customers’ pain points and concerns. You also understand where they are on the path towards a purchase and the type of information they need to encourage them to move forward. Once you have this information, you can align your current content to this path and gain a clearer picture of what you need to produce and where you need to focus your efforts to better move people towards conversion. You will also be able to produce more effective calls to action.

2. Use more in-depth metrics.

The more information you can gain concerning the impact of your content, the better you will be able to develop an effective and scalable strategy. Look at statistics related to your backlink profile for the pieces of content, noting the topics and styles that seem to attract the most high-quality attention. Measure the impact of different pages and funnels on sales and conversions. For example, on the BrightEdge platform, you can create groups for different types of pages, such as those related to specific topics or those targeting specific customers, and then monitor those groups compared to sales and conversion data. You can also watch month-over-month and year-over-year data to see the impact of your efforts to improve the success of your pages.

3. Make sure your content efforts stretch across specialty and departmental boundaries.

One of the focal points of the marketing maturity model is making sure that your content development efforts become integrated across the organization. This means that content should play a role in a variety of business functions, including customer service and PR. Monitor how much content has been developed to fill these roles and how well they are helping to improve the customer experience and the brand reputation. You also want to check how well your marketing efforts stretch across the different specialties within the marketing department. Your content experts, SEO specialists, paid search professionals, and social media contributors should all be collaborating on the creation of effective content and means of distribution for specific pieces. A content audit can be an effective, helpful means of boosting your content marketing effectiveness and providing the lift your entire organization needs to mature in their marketing efforts. Take this opportunity to go beyond the minimum and instead enhance your content production effectiveness and efficiency by becoming a more integrated, data-driven, and content-oriented organization. 

brightedge

M Posted 10 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

The Local Three Pack

Introduced in 2014, the local three pack is a feature that occupies the top of the organic portion of the organic SERP, provides a map of the user's area, and provides address and contact information for three physical locations that might meet the needs of the user. It also provides review scores for each of the three listings. Here's what a typical local three pack looks like:  

If a brand has physical locations this result drives traffic to physical locations as well as traffic to a website. If not, then keywords with this SERP feature need to be noted because significantly less traffic is going to make its way down to the traditional web listings. Now that we've covered what the local three pack is and what it is useful for let's dive into the world of micro-moments.

The "I Want To Go" Micro-Moment

Google has come on strong lately with the micro-moments concept. They believe that users have very specific motivations that brands can understand and help to answer. In response, Google is trying to provide content which is focused on providing a simple answer to the user's need. The micro-moment of interest to us is "I want to go." This moment represents a user who has intent to physically go to a location. They may be interested in a web page in order to find information about the location or to make an order prior to going there, but at the end of the day their goal is to go somewhere and do something. Since micro-moments are strongly associated with mobile search, "I want to go" is a very powerful example since a user can expect to not only look up a location to go to, but can actually be directed to that location.

Tying the Local Three Pack to "I Want To Go"

With a good understanding of the major components of the situation, let's look at the connection between the two. Google has the most sophisticated relevance engine in the world, especially since the introduction of RankBrain - the objective of which is to identify the content that will be best able to meet the quickly diversifying and evolving needs of their users. This helps them by driving additional searches and usage through their search engine. The result is profitable because it drives more market share and more ad revenue for Google. The interesting point here is that Google's algorithm is not only attempting to find the the best content for the user, it is also trying to provide content in the correct format for the user's consumption. The combination of the two factors provides the best possible experience for the user. In the case of "I want to go" micro-moments this means presenting the user with a local three pack full of relevant physical locations. This is the most efficient way to present the user with content to meet their needs. It also allows them to take action by linking directly to Google Maps for directions or turn-by-turn navigation.

Relating Back to SEO

Knowing how Google provides relevant content and appropriate types of results informs how marketers can benefit. The idea is to understand the micro-moment that you are dealing with in each situation. This will allow you to build the correct content to serve the user and be ranked by the search engine. To execute, group keywords together which have local three packs. Do so with the understanding that those keywords represent the "I want to go" micro-moment. Once that has been established then when you build or optimize content to earn traffic from a specific keyword, you will have a great indication as to what type of content to build for that keyword. Also, once you have built or optimized content for these keywords, your next objective is to get those pieces of content ranking in the local three pack.

Applying This Concept to Other Result Types

Can transfer this concept to other micro-moments. The simple answer is yes, you can. In order to do so, identify another type of content or universal category which Google has paired up with keywords representing another micro-moment. Once you have that, you can follow the same process of identifying keywords and taking the action that was outlined above.  

In the long-term, this is a very strong way to organize your content creation and optimization effort, since it aligns with Google and helps to define what you need to build for any given keyword.

Scaling for Enterprise

The process of grouping, optimizing, and measuring results is fairly straightforward. The problem you may run into is trying to do this at a large scale, when the process of manually managing all of this becomes a huge hassle. BrightEdge can help with this. As the global leader in enterprise SEO, we are uniquely positioned to support you and make this process simpler and smoother. You can leverage the power of Keyword Reporting and Universal Results to identify which keywords have universal presence and where you are currently ranking. Once you have done that, you can track the impact of your optimizations on your bottom line by looking at traffic, conversions, and revenue performance using Page Reporting. Lastly, you can report on progress at scale by using StoryBuilder to create all the visualizations that you need and schedule them for delivery to your stakeholders.  

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

Travel back with me in time to 776 BC and watch local athletes, in a kingdom called Greece, gather together to compete for a prize krotinos—the olive tree wreath. The athletes come from different villages and towns to prove themselves on the plains of Olympia. The winner of such a wreath will experience instant fame and be known throughout the kingdom for their great skill. Someday this set of Olympic Games will grow into a world-wide event and Olympic honor will be sought after by athletes from all over the globe.

SEO Manager - the athlete

Now you may be wondering what the Olympics have to do with SEO but the similarities are there. Think of the SEO manager as an athlete and their skill is, well, Search Engine Optimization. In the early days of SEO, the athlete only had to worry about competing against other text content on the Google plain. Instead of an olive branch, the SEO athlete wins a coveted high rank on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Google SERP – the competition field

Just as with the Olympic Games, today, SERP has more competitors than ever before and the field is changing continuously. The text SEO athlete has a greater challenge as it must face off with image, video, social, and local competition to win a high rank on SERP. Check out Google’s graphic below:

As you might notice, Google is putting more emphasis on universal results, displaying image, video, social, and local results to make search results more relevant to the user. With Search Plus Your World, Google signaled a greater importance for Google+ pages in the search algorithm. The search engine also recently announced that it is offering Google+ Local as part of its Google+ initiative, which means that your competition field has just become a little tougher to navigate. Stating the obvious, tracking rank among text results in the new SERPs is necessary but not sufficient.

Blended Rank - the real measure of success

Blended rank measures rank among all types of search results including text, images, video, local, and social results. This is your true measure of SEO success and it is important to understand how this works. Let’s take a look at the website rank of a company called Café Press. Now, Café Press specializes in custom T-shirts and wants to take advantage of a large music festival named Bonnaroo. If you are the SEO manager for Café Press, and you type in ‘bonnaroo t-shirt’ as your keyword, this is what you would see on the SERP:

What do you see?

At first glance, it looks like Café Press comes up within the first 10 positions on the SERP. However, if you look more closely, you will notice that this is only in relation to a text results. The actual rank of this site in the blended rank competition is 14. If that's not enough bad news, notice that the non-text listings before the Café Press page are serious competitors.

BrightEdge S3 – your coach

Just as the most accomplished Olympic athletes could use a little help from a coach to keep them going, we like to see ourselves your SEO coach— especially when it comes to blended rank. BrightEdge S3 shows you true blended rank and then gives you the tools you need to improve your SERP ranking.  

1. Measure true rank. Track the blended rank for your pages among ALL types of results including text, images, video, social and local.
2. Outrank competition. Track your competition’s rank for all your keywords; identify competitive trends in rank and take corrective action fast.
3. Drive blended rank with social. Correlate social media activity such as Likes, Shares, Tweets and +1s with rank, and manage social media campaigns to drive rank.
4. Drive greater conversions, traffic and revenue. Understand and manage the impact of blended rank on real business results such as revenue, traffic and conversions.

Top Blended Rank – SEO Gold

By understanding how blended rank works, you will be able to draw closer to your goal, which is to put your website at the top of the SERP page. Look for an upcoming post, which will tell you how you can use BrightEdge S3 to manage the impact of a special type of universal search results, the Google+ page, on your site’s ranking.

Too Long; Didn't Read (TL:DR)

Taking a leaf out of AJ Kohn's book, here is the ‘Too long; Didn't Read ’ for this article (scroll down to the bottom of 'How To Tweet What You Want, Because Content Matters' to see why TL:DR is a great idea):

1. Search is changing. SERPs increasingly feature universal results such as image, video, social and local results along with text results.
2. Blended rank among universal search results gives marketers a better benchmark on how they are doing, what they should aim for, and how they can get there.
3. BrightEdge is the first and only company that helps marketers to achieve greater SEO results by tracking true rank and providing insight into competitive intel, influence of social media, and impact on web analytics based on blended rank.