A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

Conveying trust and authenticity to your audience is a key component in gaining competitive advantage. An estimated 80 percent of customers say that authenticity is critical when they determine whether or not they want to follow a particular brand. Influencer marketing can be an important building block in conveying both of these messages to your intended audience. It allows you to tap into the power of an industry authority whose opinion the audience values. Influencer marketing, as the chart below shows, is dramatically on the rise. Last month the Wall Street Journal reported how Forbes is changing its business model to invite advertiser’s advertisers to pay for access to influencers across networks of journalists, academics and bloggers. This is a clear sign that influence has monetary value.

What is an influencer

An influencer is a person who is respected as an authority in their subject area. People listen to what they have to say and take their recommendations and suggestions seriously. They are regarded as informed and viewed as a leader within their industry. Source - http://traackr.com/faces-of-influence

Influencers will also have a sizeable audience of people who follow them to learn and participate in conversations. This audience often engages on social media, where sites such as LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter have offered people the platforms they need to build a personal brand with thousands of followers. For influencer marketing to be effective for you, it is important to focus on finding one who has an audience that overlaps with your own target consumer. When you are able to successfully engage with your influencer, they will be spreading the message about your brand to others who are the most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. It is important to go through a careful vetting process when finding the right influencer for your brand. Although technology can help spit out results, telling you which people have high numbers of followers, it is only by looking carefully at their content that you can gauge their authenticity and trustworthiness.

How influencer marketing can help you

There are a number of different ways that influencers can help you spread your brand. Small actions, such as liking or sharing a post, can help lend some credibility to what you have to say. When a person with thousands of followers acknowledges your content, that can help get your material in front of countless people as it shows up on their own feeds. You might also consider asking an influencer to mention you or your products and services on their channels. This does not have to be a formal recommendation, but it can be a shout out, an acknowledgement or other means of letting their followers know that you are available to help them with their problem.

Finally, influencers can help you by directly recommending you or providing you with the opportunity to post on their website or blog. With a formal recommendation, the influencer will be throwing their professional authority behind you, which will help to inspire their followers to learn more about you. Those who were debating about whether to use your organization may have the scales tipped towards you. A guest post gives you the platform you need to directly address the influencer’s massive audience. One of the biggest struggles for many companies is attracting people to their blog. They might have fantastic ideas, but with a limited audience, it can be a struggle to get them noticed.

When you produce something for an influencer’s blog, then you have the audience already in place and it is your chance to shine. It is estimated that influencer behavior can produce 16 times the engagement rates of alternative marketing tactics, such as paid media. A study that looked at the impact of influencer marketing across a variety of industries found that brands saw an average earned market value (EMV) of $6.85 for every dollar they spent. The stronger the endorsement you can receive from the influencer, the more their potential impact can be magnified to persuade people to do business with your organization.

Putting influencer marketing to use

1. Find relevant influencers who have an audience that aligns with yours. Use technology and research to learn about the influencers in your industry. Identify a few key players and examine them carefully to learn about their audience and how closely it matches your ideal buyer personas. Vet their quality and authenticity to make sure it will be a good match.

2. Build a relationship with them. Once you know who would be a good fit for your campaign, you then need to focus on the relationship. No one wants to do favors for someone they just met, and being too forward, without establishing the bond first, can end up hurting your reputation. This relationship can be built by following them, sharing their content, commenting on their material and otherwise engaging them online.

3. Show value to your targeted influencers. As you build your relationship, you also need to reflect on your ability to provide value for the influencer. For example, if you are adding a new product or service to your industry space, an influencer who recommends you early on to their audience can be credited with ‘discovering’ this incredible value. Even just providing content that regularly adds tremendous value for the audience can offer something for the influencer.

4. Reach out and ask for more direct engagement. Once you have laid the foundation for a strong relationship with an influencer and they have been receptive to what you offer, you will then be in a better position to reach out and seek more direct engagement. You might ask for an endorsement or space as a guest poster, for example.

Influencer marketing is all about leveraging the human element in marketing - tapping into the power of the recommendation and what people are willing to trust online. In a world where people have seemingly limitless options when it comes to the businesses they can buy from and the resources they can learn from, communicating trust and authenticity are key. Influencer marketing gives you the power to tap into this potential. You can read more detail about the power of influence in this post by Andy Betts on the BrightEdge blog which take marketers through 9 steps to influence.    

Robert Lim

M Posted 10 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

Domain authority and Trust Flow both measure the influence of a website as primarily measured by the number and quality of the site that link to it. When Google determines how well a particular page on your site ranks for a query, the algorithm is not only looking at the individual page that has been optimized for that keyword or phrase - it is also looking at the reputation of the entire website. That is why a site like SearchEngineWatch can publish a new post, and it will quickly rank highly on queries. Meanwhile, your new blog that you started a few weeks ago might post a fantastic, insightful article but you cannot find your site until page three or four of the search results.

Established, reputable sites, like BrightEdge and SearchEngineWatch have a strong domain authority. These domains, which Google has already established as trustworthy, are regularly scanned by spiders to check for fresh content like this post. The strong reputation helps to boost the new web page, even before it has time to cultivate much traffic, many backlinks or other known factors in Google’s algorithm. While much of SEO focuses on optimizing specific pages of content to perform well in the search engines, it is important not to neglect domain authority. As your overall site reputation improves, it will help to boost every page on your domain. Here are four steps you can take to start improving your domain authority or trust flow today.

Cultivating good backlinks

Your backlink profile is an important means of demonstrating your domain authority to Google. When one site links to another, in many ways they are putting their own reputation behind the second site. The site is saying that this source is reliable and trustworthy for their visitors. Websites, therefore, that cultivate many links from a variety of other reputable sites can be regarded as equally authoritative sites. As Matt Cutts from Google has said: backlinks are a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results - backlink relevance still really, really helps in making sure we return the best, most-relevant, most-topical set of search results On the other hand, sites that receive multiple backlinks from poor sites, such as spam links, may be seen as untrustworthy.

Although Google does not say that sites can be harmed in their rankings from bad backlinks, the possibility of this threat remains. It is best to use Google’s disavow tool whenever needed. This tool will let Google know that you do not want to have anything to do with the poor links, which will help ensure that you do not receive any negative ramifications. Building a strong backlink profile can be a challenge. The most important thing you can focus on is producing high-value content that is engaging and people like to read. Then promote this content as often as possible, across social media and other distribution methods. You can also seek opportunities for guest posts to demonstrate your thought leadership. The more people who read and value your content, the more they will be willing and eager to provide you with backlinks from their own material.

Build internal links

Many sites neglect the importance of internal links. Linking from one page of content to other, relevant pages can help customers move around your site and understand your navigation and organization. Not only do these links help human visitors explore, they can also help the spiders crawl that arrive from Google and the other major search engines. This improves your reputation, resulting in stronger overall domain authority. These links can also encourage readers to remain on your site as they examine what you have to offer about their topic of interest. The more time people spend on the page, the higher your engagement statistics will be for the search algorithm, improving your reputation and rankings.

Reexamine technical SEO

There are also a number of other technical SEO methods that you should employ to boost your domain authority. It is important to go through your site and make sure that you are completely updated in the following areas:

• Set up easy site navigation with the sitemaps uploaded and an organized, understandable domain
• Use meta tags and meta descriptions to make it as easy as possible for Google and users to know when your site is relevant
• Use alt tags for your images so that the search engines know what your visuals show
• Make sure that the pages of the domain have been optimized with the appropriate keywords that reflect consumer vocabulary and queries so that it appears in the appropriate queries
• Minimize the load time - Google and visitors do not like it when a site takes more than a few seconds to load

Build brand trust

As you work to build your brand trust, you will also increase your domain authority. Brand trust is something that will need to be cultivated across the web. To build brand trust, you need to begin, once again, with your content. Content that adds value and answers the needs of your customers will be content that is trusted. You should be researching topics and keywords that your intended audience is most interested in reading. The BrightEdge Data Cube can be an excellent resource to guide you in this area.

You will then need to develop content that addresses the needs of these consumers. The content should provide immediate value and go in depth with the topic - a cursory exploration or a reposting of what every other website already articulates will do little for your content exposure or your visitors. This content will be promoted on social media. On these platforms you want to cultivate a strong following with outstanding content and an interactive style. Ask questions of your followers, address their inquiries, entertain them with contests and reward them with occasional coupons or other bonuses. The BrightEdge platform provides detailed backlink count and Trust Flow information over time.

BrightEdge also displays the quality and Trust Flow of a site's backlinks. The BrightEdge SEO platform also breaks down the content types in which the backlinks exist. BrightEdge will also help a site identify the gap backlinks a competing site has that your site does not. You can also build brand trust by tapping into the influencers in your industry. Influencers are people that your customers already rely on for accurate information and advice.

When you build relationships with these influencers and they vouch for you by sharing your content or allowing you space as a guest poster, they are throwing the strength of their reputation behind you. This can boost people’s trust of your brand as well. Your domain authority can have a powerful impact on how your pages rank and therefore the traffic you receive. Taking the time to follow these steps and boost your reputation can influence the ranking of every page on your site now and in the future.

spatel

M Posted 10 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge’s 6th annual digital marketing conference, Share16, is coming this October 24-26th at the Westin St. Francis in the heart of San Francisco! Last year we had 75+ of the best speakers from leading brands like Google, Salesforce, Microsoft and Bing. This year we plan on making Share16 even better. We have already started receiving requests to speak at Share16 and so we are opening submissions early. If you want to submit yourself or someone you know as a potential speaker, or have a great idea for a session you want us to consider, please let us know.  

If you have an interesting success story to share, practical insights or performance-related case studies then we want to hear from you! To submit a speaking proposal or nominate a speaker, please fill out the speaking submission form. We will be collecting submissions until April 15 with all potential speakers notified by April 29, because of the high expected number of submissions not all speakers will be selected. Learn more about sponsoring, attending, or speaking at brightedge.com/share16. Check out the videos of all Share15 speakers and their presentations by choosing “Share15" under category: Share15 Search, Content, and Digital Marketing Presentations Recap! 

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

One of the biggest changes to hit the SERPs in years rolled out this week: Google has eliminated the paid search ads on the right rail and added additional paid ads above and below the organic results.

SERPs Survey

BrightEdge performed an initial survey on the topic. Reviewing 12 industries with one query per industry, we found the following:

• 12 of 12 did not display ads on the right rail
• 11 of 12 displayed ads at the top above the organic results
• 10 of 12 displayed a local 3-pack, a local trend which appears to be increasing
• 10 of 12 displayed zero classic organic results above the fold
• 9 of 12 displayed news items with images mixed into the classic results
• 8 of 12 displayed ads below the classic results
• The average number of top ads per SERP was 3
• The average number of bottom ads per SERP was 1.7
• The average number of classic organic links on page 1 was 8.9

So clearly the change is comprehensive and impacting most or all SERPs. Google has expanded the vertical real estate given to paid search results and is usually expanding universal results in ways that give it more influence over what is shown on the page. Other BrightEdge SERPs analysis has shown that optimizing for local and securing the additional universal search exposure of Local and Places gives brands up to a 21% improvement in traffic. Universal results have the effect of concentrating clicks at the expense of classic organic links.

SERPs - New Look

Below is a visual of the typical new SERPs layout. You need to go a long way down this insurance SERPs to get to the first organic listing.  

SERPs Change - Paid Search Traffic

What does this SERPs layout mean for paid search traffic generation? It seems safe to assume that in terms of click distribution that it is neutral or better for paid search traffic. It is unknown if position 3 above the results costs more or less per click than position 3 on the rail did, but the reduced supply in above-the-fold paid search ads suggests more competition and upward pressure on price.

SERPs Change - Organic Search Traffic

What does this mean for organic search and content practitioners? With ads, universal results, and images taking up more vertical real estate, especially above the fold, the top 9 organic results become even more precious than before the change. In other words, being on the first page of the SERPs is in most cases more difficult than before the change. Winning in this context continues to mean having highly focused, relevant, original content with well-organized on-page SEO and backlinks from other web sites.

SERPs Change - To-do on the Platform

BrightEdge customers should create an Event in their account for this week as a reminder of when the change in SERPs (paid search) happened, so they can better interpret the impact on their organic results. BrightEdge is the only technology that shows marketers accurate universal listings to effectively track multi-media and universal optimization strategies. Track actual placement among all types of search results - local 3-pack, quick answers, images, video, shopping, places, and site links. Switch data and reports between blended and classic rank results to gain more visibility and insight. You can also see how your content is performing across device types, like mobile, and in different regions within the same country. The image below from BrightEdge StoryBuilder shows Classic Rank in blue and significantly different rank for Blended or Universal results, which include quick answers, images, videos, and shopping,

• BrightEdge Recommendations provides content-based on-page recommendations which enable users to create high-quality, relevant content that guide multiple target keywords to an individual page.
• BrightEdge Anomaly Detection enables you to build custom rules around virtually any data point which trigger alerts to specific users when critical changes, like this one, occur and change your rank and performance.
• Using the BrightEdge platform means access to insight and more capability to respond to our always-changing industry environment. Contact your customer success manager to review your strategy and response plan or contact us to learn how to start using BrightEdge today.

Learn more about SERPs and universal SERP elements in this post.