enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 3 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 10 years 3 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.  

maspillera

M Posted 10 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

The world of SEO and search engine marketing continually changes as Google adjusts its algorithm and consumer tastes evolve. As these adjustments begin to take hold, brands sometimes find themselves facing a site migration. The final push towards making this big change might arise internally, such as when companies rebrand themselves, or it might be caused by external motivations, such as the aforementioned Google announcement.

Regardless of the reason that brought you to the site migration, it is imperative that the entire process is performed correctly and according to best practices. When brands take shortcuts, the potential for catastrophic disaster-- in the form of plummeting rankings and lost data-- looms. With the right advice in mind, however, you will find that a site migration can be not only the transfer of your site from one domain to another-- it can also open up opportunities for you to grow in your SEO efforts and maximize the capabilities of your new site.

Behind these best practices lies superior technology, such as the BrightEdge platform. Armed with the capabilities of the BrightEdge platform, you will have at your fingertips the tools you need to move forward with your project with confidence, verifying that your site migration has been done successfully. You will be able to transfer your domain effectively and efficiently while also seeing the benefits of your efforts on your SEO results.

Using BrightEdge to Maximize a Site Migration

1. Identify the areas of the site that drive the most activity. Use your BrightEdge platform to determine what areas of your site are the most engaging and successful.  You can leverage BrightEdge’s integration with your analytics to identify which pages drive the most traffic and revenue while also using the BrightEdge DataCube to understand which keywords are bringing in visitors for those pages.

It is critical to track your traffic and revenue-driving keywords so that you can easily monitor rank changes that would impact site traffic. This information will empower you as you design your new site, helping you to capitalize on the traits that make these pages so popular, while also ensuring that your most valuable pages do not get lost or minimized during the site migration. As you implement 301s to redirect visitors from your old pages to the new pages, you will also be able to ensure that the new pages are optimized for the keywords responsible for the old page’s traffic and success. BrightEdge makes it easy to evaluate your page priorities quickly and efficiently for a successful launch.

2. Investigate areas of technical SEO that need improvement on the old site. On nearly any website, there are various aspects of SEO that need to be modified and improved upon. Leverage the powerful Site Audit feature in the BrightEdge platform to uncover technical errors on the current site. It is critical to avoid repeating mistakes on the new site. The website audit will help you find errors, such as broken links, 404 errors, duplicate content and missing H1 tags. A site relaunch will signal Google to carefully evaluate the credibility of your site, so it is very important to have all of these problems corrected. You can also uncover optimization areas that your competitors are doing that you are not. You can use the DataCube and Backlinks Report, for example, to identify key features you can improve.

3. Use Recommendations to help you prioritize your optimization efforts. As you build your new site, it is also a good idea to pinpoint where you have the opportunity for the biggest gains for the least effort. The Recommendations provides you with competitive intelligence to understand when, where, and why you should take advantage of particular keywords throughout your page for optimal results. Since you will be making changes to your site’s code already, a site migration is the perfect opportunity to make changes that will take advantage these opportunities to ensure that your site performs well from its launch date.

4. Know the types of content and the pages that have the strongest backlink profiles. BrightEdge has teamed with Majestic SEO to offer you a leading SEO backlink profile, which helps you see which of your pages have the strongest backlinks and from where they originate. Often brands forget that the pages with the highest traffic are not necessarily the pages that have the strongest backlinks. It is important to understand and properly redirect these critical pages to avoid losing any of the link equity of the old site. Accidentally collapsing these heavy-equity pages can damage your rank and organic traffic.  You can use this BrightEdge capability to quickly determine your link value across your site and prioritize the pages that need to be redirected.

5. Ensure you create a strong 301 redirect plan. A 301 redirect is the preferred means of telling both your visitors and the search engine spiders that you have transferred the domain permanently. With a 301, Google will know that you want the new site indexed and ranked and not the old one. This type of redirect will also enable you to transfer your ‘link juice’ from your old domain to the new one. This means that all your hard work earning rank will not be lost when your pages are redirected. This will help you maintain your position in the SERPs and prevent losses in traffic. This redirect plan needs be thoughtfully planned. The targeted pages for the redirects need to make sense and these new pages need to be optimized for the keywords that had driven traffic to the old pages.

6. Set up a site migration dashboard in Brightedge. As your site migration progresses, you want to make sure that you have complete visibility before and after the launch. A site migration dashboard on BrightEdge will help to ensure that the site information and your visitors are transferred seamlessly from one domain to the next. To create this useful feature, develop a new dashboard that lists your new domain as a competitor for your old site, so you can monitor features, such as indexed pages, rankings, traffic, and backlinks. If any problems arise, you can be alerted immediately and correct the issue before it causes serious harm to your rank or reputation. You have a limited amount of time to fix errors before Google starts to penalize your site-- which can result in a reduction in rank and then a huge drop in traffic.

7. Run a site audit while still in the staging environment. The BrightEdge Site Audit can help you uncover any potential problems with your site while still in the staging environment. You can surface potential errors and ensure that your redirect plan works prior to your official launch. This will ensure that both your visitors and the search engine spiders have the experience you are working to design for them. A site audit will prioritize your problems to make efficient use of your optimizing time leading up to the launch.

8. Re-run your BrightEdge site audit when launching the new site. The day your new site goes live is one where everyone from your sales to your IT departments tends to cross their fingers and close their eyes. Running additional site audits, however, can help reduce the drama. Once the site officially goes live, run an additional site audit to make sure there are no unforeseen problems that your customers might be encountering as they reach your new site. You can check not only for potential errors, but also monitor your traffic rates and customer behavior right from the BrightEdge platform, helping you feel confident that the site migration has been completed correctly. Run another audit a few weeks after your launch day to monitor progress.

When a site migration is done correctly, it can be a cause for celebration or at least relief. It is a genuine achievement and requires considerable hard work and careful forethought. BrightEdge helps make this process much easier, and will enable you to transform your site migration into an SEO opportunity that will help your brand and traffic reach new heights.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

Google has been testing changes to its search engine results page (SERP) layout for quite some time. But in February this year, they made the changes to the Google SERP layout official:

• Ads and content were removed from the right side of the page, with the exception of product listing ads (PLAs) and the Knowledge Panel for certain search results
• Maximum number of text ads at the top of the page increased from three to four listings
• Up to three text ads will be displayed at the bottom of the page
• Maximum number of ads per page decreased from 11 to 7

These changes have left many digital marketers like you feeling unsettled, wondering what the implications are to organic and paid search strategies and programs. To shed light on these changes and what they really mean, BrightEdge analyzed over 7,000 keywords across the broad spectrum of the customer journey and across industries. The findings, published in our research report Demystifying Google SERP Layout Changes 2016, quantify the impact of these changes on critical business metrics such as rank and click-through-rate for organic listings across key "micro-moments" of the customer journey. In addition, the report provides recommendations on how organic and paid search teams can work together to optimize digital strategies and programs for greater business impact, given these significant changes. It's time to get informed and to take the lead in your organization. Download the report to learn more.