A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

David Fisher serves as the Global Head of Search Marketing for Schneider Electric, an international company that has been around for more than 150 years. He is responsible for managing SEO for all the Schneider Electric web assets as well as PPC advertising, strategic direction and the on-site search capabilities for the brand. He has been spending the last year optimizing the web properties of the company, which has been a considerable undertaking that intrigued us. David sat down with us to discuss his excitement for Share, the progress he has made at the company, the role of BrightEdge as well as his thoughts on the industry in general. It was a fantastic discussion that we cannot wait to continue at Share in a few weeks.

The Networking at Share

BrightEdge (BE): What are you looking forward to most about Share?

David Fisher (DF): This is my first Share and I am really excited about the interpersonal connection. I do not really know anyone who does what I do, but I look forward to having the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the best in the industry-- to meet people that I can connect with and send that email or call when I want to bounce ideas off someone.

“It will be great to meet others who fully understand my job and what I am trying to accomplish.”

I really think the best way to get the most out of Share, or any conference experience, is to never be shy about introducing yourself. Turn to the person sitting next to you and just start talking. You never know if they are going to have the advice or experience you need.

On Share and Global Marketing

BE: What will you speak about at the conference?

DF: I will discuss how a brand can push a global effort while managing it on a local level. The biggest piece of this puzzle is realizing that unless you can speak every language, you are going to need people to help you with your global effort. You need to find a balance between giving people free reign and micromanaging them. I will also be discussing the challenges of translating and analyzing content on an international level. For example, we have worked to develop a database of keywords and translations of those words to ensure that our content is optimized for the different countries and that the words are always translated the same way. I will look to share some of the insights I have gained working at Schneider.

About BrightEdge

BE: Can you tell us a little more about how BrightEdge has helped you with your goals in the past year?

DF: I was actually brought on last fall and I have really been focused on change management and helping to bring the brand up to speed. We have been using the BrightEdge platform to track our variety of different web properties. We are a global brand and we have different domains for most countries where we operate-- that means that we have 60 different domains. While this system might not work for everyone, it works well for us. It does make my job a bit more complicated. I have to monitor the optimization, track keywords, traffic and all other analytics for all of our sites-- not just one. We needed a system that could handle our enormous needs, and BrightEdge met the challenge with ease.

“BrightEdge is like a data cruncher on steroids. I have shown it to others and they have been amazed at its capabilities. The Share of Voice, data analysis, Data Cube and other applications make it easy for us to easily see how our different sites are performing. I love introducing people to the program. Even people who are not really ‘techy’ get excited about the features, which then helps me sell them on the larger idea of SEO and optimization. We already have probably 400 users on the platform and we are looking to add even more in 2016.”

Growing with Your Marketing Efforts

BE: What insights about the shift from keyword to page performance strategies have you gained from your work at Schneider?

DF: That is where we are. All the latest advice says, “keywords do not matter”... I tell people: keywords do not matter-- once you have already optimized your content. We are still at that initial stage, getting our content properly optimized. I have found it to be very important to take a step back and evaluate your site. Brands really need to look at their long-term strategy and how they want their website to fit in with their company. Will it be for brand awareness? Will it be used for ecommerce? Once you see how your website fits into your long-term goals, you can work to begin to design pages that fit with that goal and measure more meaningful metrics. Right now we are working to increase our content production and encourage people to opt in and let us know who they are, such as establishing newsletter opt-in or signing up for a callback. In the next year, we hope to begin the shift towards using data instead of hunches. We also want to make the switch from having web assets because that is what you are supposed to do and actually leveraging them for conversions.

BE: What advice you give people about the convergence of paid, owned and earned media?

DF: If you are not at least strategically aligned, then you are really missing out on key opportunities. It is going to be a challenge because there are significant differences in the strategies between the different types of marketing, but you should have at least a high level agreement across all the types of media about your goals and how they fit together. Make it a priority to establish their core alignment to see success in your marketing strategies.

The fun stuff

BE: Can you tell us something fun about yourself?

DF: I am actually a milliner. In other words, I am an experienced hat maker. It was a bit of a spontaneous interest. I was watching Alice in Wonderland and googled hat making. I ended up stumbling upon a class at a local community college and the rest is history. It has been a hobby for about 6 years now.

BE: What about your company, anything interesting there?

DF: I find it intriguing that I do not actually share an office with anyone else with whom I work. I have colleagues in Paris, Rhode Island, California... it really is a global team! It was great chatting with David in preparation for Share15.

Conference Details September 21-23 Westin St. Francis San Francisco, CA 

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

You know you want to attend Share15, but your boss may need some convincing. If it’s not enough to share what previous attendees have to say about the conference, let us help prepare you with ways to convince your boss. Three main reasons:

1. Product Knowledge
2. Industry Insights and Skills
3. Networking

You will gain valuable insights with incredible learning opportunities

Share15 is packed with great ways to learn the latest skills, techniques and the latest thinking. From BrightEdge certification courses for those new to the platform and for more experienced users, to hands-on labs, group discussion forums, breakout and general sessions and more.  Whether you want to roll up your sleeves and learn new products and features, hear experts discuss the latest trends or contribute to discussion forums on marketing challenges, Share15 has something to offer for your interests and expertise. Sponsors and BrightEdge will be showcasing the latest technologies at the solution showcase and during hands-on labs held throughout the conference.

Attending Share15 will elevate your performance

The agenda has been created to focus on delivering answers to the key challenges facing digital marketers, content marketers and search professionals today. You will hear from practitioners, experts and leaders in the industry who will offer insights from case studies of real-world application of the latest marketing techniques.  With over 60 case studies from marketers at leading brands, you will walk away with practical solutions you can put immediately into use.

You will network with leaders in our industry and our peers

Share15 is full of marketing leaders and practitioners.  With over 60 speakers and attendees from many of the world’s largest brands you will make connections you can only imagine. Whatever your role, industry or company type Share15 will have attendees and speakers ready to share their insights, knowledge and skills with you, or to just chat about industry gossip over lunch or drinks. We’ve designed the event to give you plenty of opportunities to engage with the other attendees in a fun and meaningful way. If this information alone isn’t enough,  we’ve created justification letters you can share with your boss to convince them to send you. You can download versions customized for Search Professionals, Content Marketers, and those most interested in Digital Marketing. They help explain the benefits you and your company will gain from your attending the event and will help you create an approximate budget to show what the investment will be. We hope you are able to use all of this to convince your boss to let you join us at Share15. 

dpatel

M Posted 10 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

For both B2C and B2B companies, exposure and driving relevant traffic is critical to finding new leads and improving the brand’s reach. Content syndication offers brands an opportunity to leverage the audience of other popular sites to increase the visibility of their original site. Content syndication can be controversial in the minds of some marketers, because like many other SEO methods, there is both a right way and a wrong way to use it. If you do not use this system correctly, you can end up penalized because of duplicate content, hurting your marketing efforts. If you are considering using this method as a part of your lead generation tactics, here is what you should know about using it successfully.

Understanding how content syndication can boost lead generation

Content syndication means publishing a copy of your existing content from your website on another site. You might choose to do a copy of an entire article, a snippet or just a headline. The goal behind this type of tactic is to attract the interest of the audience on the more popular site and send them back to your original site and grow your own brand reach.

By publishing on a more established website, you can also give your content greater authority because you will be associated with the site and brand the audience already trusts. Generating greater traffic and improving your brand authority are both valuable aspects to finding new leads, and content syndication can be a successful method for both B2B and B2C companies. The key to using this method appropriately is selecting the right content and posting it on the right website while also avoiding any potential Google penalties that could end up hurting your original website.

Choosing your website

Using content syndication successfully requires sites that can help you attract the traffic you need. That means finding a website that targets your own ideal audience and has a higher authority than your site. This can help bolster your own reputation and encourage the people who visit your brand site after reading your content to trust what you have to say.

Choosing your content

Generally, it is best to syndicate some of your highest quality content. You have to remember that the site publishing the content is considered an authoritative website. If you publish only mediocre work, then the article will not attract the desired attention. At the same time, the entire purpose of the syndication process is to send the traffic from the publishing site back to your original site. That means you do not want to publish all of your best work on other sites. There should be enough left that is unique to your site so people who visit your page will find something valuable which encourages them to stay and explore. You also need to consider the type of content you want to publish. If you are interested primarily in growing traffic, for instance, it might make more sense to syndicate just headlines or smaller portions of your pieces. This will offer the audience enough to interest them and encourage them to click through and learn more. If you are taking more of a brand awareness approach to building leads, you might find success by syndicating entire articles or longer excerpts, which will increase the number of people who read your ideas in full on the original site.

Avoiding penalties

Avoiding Google’s duplicate content penalties is always a chief concern for those interested in syndicating some of their content. After all, recent Google updates, including the famed Panda update, have played a large role in trying to eliminate duplicate content from SERPs. Fortunately, when content syndication is done well, you do not have to worry about incurring any problems. Here are a few tips you can use to let Google ‘understand’ your content.

Rel=canonical

Whenever possible, this solution is the best choice for avoiding Google penalties. You place this tag on the page with the syndicated content and have the tag list the original address of the article. This tells Google that the second version is just a copy and where the original lives. Not only does this allow you to avoid potential problems, but any links that go to the copy of the article will be ‘counted’ for the original version. The canonical tag for an article about green dresses would look like this according to Google:

NoIndex

If you cannot place a canonical tag on the copy of the article, see if you can place a NoIndex in the copy of the article. This tells Google not to ‘read’ this version of the article, so there is only one copy in the Search Engine Index. While this will solve your duplicate content problem, any links that the copy accrues will not point back to your original piece, which can limit the benefits of the syndication process. According to Google, using this meta tag should look like this:

Including an attribution link

Sometimes you might be publishing a syndicated copy on a website that does not want to include a canonical tag or a NoIndex. In that case, the best solution may be a direct attribution link. This link should go directly to the original version of the article. This will generally be enough to let the search engines know that this is a copy of the original article. Like the NoIndex solution, however, any links that reference the copy will not acknowledge your original site. If the site that will be hosting your content will not agree to any of these conditions, you will have to carefully evaluate whether the syndication is worth the effort. It is possible that the copy of the article will end up ranking higher than your original, since it is a more authoritative site. If the site is a fantastic match for your marketing efforts, however, and has the potential to generate some traffic and leads for you, then the risk may be worth it.

Paid syndication

In addition to syndicating your content through other industry websites, you also have the option of using one of the many paid options. For this system you will select vendors who will reprint your content on popular websites to help you get your material in front of the ideal audience. Some of the more popular vendors are: - Emedia - Netline - Reachmail - ThirdDoorMedia - Ziff Davis These sites work on a Cost Per Lead (CPL) system. It is generally best for you to start with tight filters that allow you to focus on cultivating the most appropriate leads. You can always loosen your filters as you gauge your success with the system.

Tighter filters will increase your CPL, but the higher quality of the leads should offset the higher investment. Working with paid syndication requires some experimenting to find the system that will work best for you. Begin by confirming with the vendor exactly what they will be doing to generate leads. You will then want to begin with about two to three assets in rotation. It is best to use pieces that have helped you bring in leads in the past. If at all possible, supply your own marketing content as well. If you do not have any available, most vendors will supply it and you can then make modifications to better suite your brand. Beginning with a small budget and a short rotation time will allow you accurately gauge the success of the system based upon your current parameters without spending unnecessarily.

You can then modify your filters or content and try again as you better understood your path to success. Content syndication can be a wonderful means of growing traffic and establishing authority through already-popular sites. To use this system correctly, however, you need to be careful with your selections and employ best practices to minimize risk and maximize yield.  

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Duy Vu is the SEO manager at Assurance, overseeing all the SEO initiatives for their web properties. He is their self-described ‘go-to’ SEO guy, and we thought that it sounded like he would have some excellent insights into the ever-developing digital marketing industry. Duy Vu will be joining us in just a few weeks for Share15, so we took the time to sit down with him and talk about the upcoming conference and his latest insights into the digital marketing world.

Building Your SEO Brand and Reputation

Bright Edge (BE): What project will you speak about at Share15?

Duy Vu (DV): I plan on exploring the intersection of SEO and reputation management. It is a topic on the mind of many marketers and brands who want to venture into digital marketing but worry about controlling how their brands are perceived online. They want to know how to remain up-to-date on what people are saying about their brands and what they can do to improve their brand perception.

I plan on delving into a variety of tactics people can employ to strengthen their SEO while also improving their reputation and their relationship with their customers. The people who are most successful with SEO and managing their brand perception focus chiefly on building a strong, positive relationship with their customers.

Understanding How People Search for Your Brand at Share15

BE: Why will attendees want to be sure to attend your session?

DV: Search and reputation management are critical subjects for all brands. We all know how quickly a bad customer experience or a poorly thought-out ad campaign can go viral and hurt a company’s reputation overnight. This prospect scares many companies. They know that they need to leverage digital media, but they want to make sure they do it right. It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that digital media and SEO offer you powerful tools for getting your message in front of customers, but people do not want to get burned by those same methods. I think that attendees at my session will learn a lot about search and reputation. I will delve into understanding how people search about your company, including brand and non-brand queries. I believe that reputation management is an area of SEO that does not get enough attention.

BE: How do you leverage BrightEdge to succeed in your goals?

DV: When you are looking to monitor and manage your reputation through social media, you have to be able to accurately measure your Share of Voice and what people are saying about you. The BrightEdge platform makes it easy to analyze your site and how it is performing as well as your Share of Voice and how people are responding to your brand across the digital world. It is an excellent tool that allows us to leverage all that our SEO strategies are capable of accomplishing.

The Mobile Opportunity

BE: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing people in SEO?

DV: I think fully-integrated marketing is definitely up there. Many companies have siloed experiences rather than integrated. The problem with keeping your various channels separate, however, is that every challenge and development in one area of your campaign has implications across the other channels. It is important to learn how to bring the groups together. This past year has also been big with the various algorithm updates, particularly the mobile update. Some of our web properties had not been mobile-optimized and we really had to get on the ball and make sure they were ready. I think that experience was shared by people across the marketing world. It is important to always be looking ahead and staying abreast of the latest developments to try and stay in front of the changes.

The Need to Experiment with Content and SEO

BE: What would you recommend to people looking to succeed in SEO?

DV: Always experiment. It sounds simple, but so many people get caught up in just doing the recommended updates and implementing the advice from the latest gurus. The reason why those thought leaders have obtained their position, however, is that they are always looking for new ways to improve their SEO-- they are experimenting. You also need to play around with different aspects of your content and see how your website and brand reach responds. You could find some great new broad insights or just learn new ways to implement techniques specifically for your brand.

It is always a pleasure to chat with Duy, and we look forward to continuing the conversation at Share15 in just a few weeks. If you have not registered to join us, sign up now!

Conference Details September 21-23 Westin St. Francis San Francisco, CA

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

This year Clay Stobaugh, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Wiley will be delivering a fascinating general session keynote on how Wiley has transformed their digital business. For those familiar with digital marketing thought leaders and influencers Brian Solis from Altimeter/Prophet, Lee Odden from Top Rank, Rob Garner (formerly i-crossing), Paul Roetzer from PR 20/20, Dan Siroker from Optimizely and Ann Handley from Marketing Profs all have books published with Wiley.

Wiley: Helping people and organizations to develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Wiley is a global provider of knowledge and knowledge-enabled services that improve outcomes in the areas of research, professional training and practice, and education. Through the Research segment, the Company provides scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, magazines, databases and websites. The Talent Solutions & Education Services segment provides services, technology, insights and content that support learners and institutional partners in business and higher education to improve effectiveness by developing knowledge and skills. In Knowledge and Learning, higher education institutions, faculty and students benefit from Wiley’s print and digital content, online program management services and course management tools.

As Chief Marketing Officer at Wiley, Clay Stobaugh is responsible for the company’s marketing, communications and government affairs efforts worldwide. He leads Wiley’s revenue-driving marketing initiatives through key disciplines in the global “Marketing Revenue Center” including customer experience, demand generation, CRM, sales enablement, social media, content marketing, digital commerce, digital analytics and SEO/SEM.

Clay is focused on developing customer relationships and driving new revenue opportunities, he is helping to lead Wiley’s transformation from a traditional book publisher to a global provider of digital content and content enabled solutions. Last week BrightEdge had the privilege of meeting with Clay to talk through the Wiley digital marketing transformation. Below are a few extracts and insights from our conversation.

A brief history of change at Wiley

BrightEdge (BE): Please tell us a little about the history and the transformation at Wiley

Clay Stobaugh (CS): Wiley operates in three closely connected fields – higher education; professional development and lifelong learning; and scholarly research. In higher education many people still think that we’re simply a book publisher. That perception is changing as Wiley is actually helping people to learn online. In higher education we have witnessed a transformation from traditional textbooks to adaptive online learning environments. If I take a business or accounting class using WileyPlus, for example, the platform will not just provide me the digital book content, but it will also offer assignments, tutorials and study aids that help me understand the material better, as well as the social capability to interact anywhere at any time virtually with the instructor and other students taking the course.

In our Talent Solutions and Education Services business, Wiley is investing in technology that will help a corporation skill-test people to ensure that they’re ready for the job. We also provide certification and online learning solutions such as Cross Knowledge so employees can continue to grow and learn once they have the job. Finally, in our Research business, Wiley works with authors, societies and librarians to publish research that has an impact on our day-to-day lives. Here we are seeing some great changes in how information is used and shared, and as the needs of the research community continually transform, Wiley invests in tools and technology that supports these changes. What makes Wiley unique is that through each of these fields, we support all the elements of the knowledge economy – from education, to job skills, and research and innovation.

Digital transformation at Wiley – mind-sets, skillsets, and toolsets

BE: How do you view the role of the modern day digital marketer at Wiley?

CS: If you think about modern marketers there are three things we talk about - mindset, skill set and tool set. You are not a modern marketer if you have the mindset, but not the skills or tools. As management, it is our job to provide the tools, but they are expensive and complex, so we are responsible for training and creating organizational structure around those tools. As a marketer, I look at the digital tools and platforms that will give us the ability to measure and derive performance. We can then choose the tools that best drive revenue and have a place at the executive table.

Transformation, training,and certification

BE: How did you go about transforming Wiley to a digital organization?

CS: I work very closely with Dan Mooney (who is going to share more insights on this at Share15), and the digital and SEO team, in our marketing revenue center and we’ve been working on centralizing our efforts for SEO. Search and content are pivotal to digital transformation success. BrightEdge is our trusted enterprise Content and SEO platform, and we have mirrored the excellent BrightEdge training and certification program to establish a certification for content and SEO within Wiley. There are three levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced).

Basically, we are making it easier for people to understand content and SEO — we have over 340 of our colleagues around the globe enrolled in our SEO certification. Bottom-up we have certifications and top-down we have SEO scorecards that evaluate the ‘SEO health’ of our businesses. It helps people to understand the importance of content and SEO and then how to act on that. The skill development and roll out of BrightEdge training and certification has been key. As with other marketing channels and disciplines we’re making this a part of our culture to be modern marketers.

Measurement and success

BE: How do you approach measurement and results of content success?

CS: We are currently building out our CRM and our measurement capabilities, but we need that holistic single customer view of what we are doing. But before that is beneficial we need to make sure our employees know how to use/are trained on the sales and social and CRM tools and BrightEdge content and SEO platform. This mindset of delivering the skills and ultimately holding people accountable by measuring results is important.

BE: How does BrightEdge help you with this digital transformation?

CS: With BrightEdge the ability to identify content and SEO areas where we can improve and then show the transformation of that work has a high-value impact.

The BrightEdge platform enables us to identify problems most people didn’t know existed.

Removing silos in the organization

BE: What is your approach towards digital collaboration?

CS: We have created an internal customer engagement framework. This is an 8-step process that goes through all the steps of modern marketing best practices. It starts with research to identify personas and customer journey maps and determine the correct KPIs. We then use these insights to drive our content strategy. Throughout the process, we measure and optimize.

BrightEdge’s Data Cube has been an incredibly valuable tool for researching and measuring our content strategy.

With this framework marketers are equipped to evolve into modern marketers and they are not siloed into a single business department. I will be sharing much more on this and a framework for modern-day marketing success at Share15. To hear Clay speak register for Share15 before tickets sell out fast. 

End Note: digital thought leaders - further reading

For those who like to read we highly recommend looking through the list of Wiley authors and the wealth of digital content and information.