enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Reinforcing the Share15 theme “Share Insights – Elevate Performance” BrightEdge will for the first time offer learning labs at Share. At Share15, BrightEdge will launch this new format that will enable digital marketers to deepen their first-hand knowledge in key capabilities of the BrightEdge platform and with key partner technologies. The labs will be smaller sessions where people will work on their laptops to simultaneously learn and master the topics. The labs will be a free option to the session breakouts for all Share attendees. Look for the green section on the Share agenda. Lab details:

• Labs will be 75 minutes, like the sessions
• Labs will be hands-on with some discussion and information transfer and then actual exercises design to help solidify next steps
• The lab topics will roughly follow the three tracks: SEO, Content and Digital Marketing.

Insight, Analysis & Response

Take a deep dive into BrightEdge Data Cube, learn how to use the powerful, advanced capabilities of StoryBuilder, and set up Anomaly Detection within your account. Data Cube provides the industry’s most advanced keyword discovery and allows you to compare to competitors to identify attractive new keywords in the high-volume queries and in the long tail. Learn how to use the nearly unlimited reporting capacity of StoryBuilder to answer the basic and advanced questions about how your content and site are performing. Anomaly Detection will keep you aware of changes you want to track and respond to.

Audit, Exploration & Campaigns

Learn how to review, interpret, and address BrightEdge Site Recommendations from on-page to accessibility to linking. Explore Opportunity Forecasting and how it measures and monetizes the profit impact of improving keyword breadth or rank. Knowing the estimated ROI of an organic campaign is invaluable to marketers to secure budget from their organizations. Lastly, the lab will instruct attendees on how to build and track Campaigns in the platform.

Content Performance Marketing

Content is the core media for organic marketing, and the BrightEdge platform puts marketers in a strong position to understand how productive that content is at generating traffic and results. Learn how to understand local, video, images, Quick Answers and more. Organize page groups to understand how your blog, case studies, and white papers are performing. Having a more accurate understanding of your content performance will allow you to better allocate human resources and program budgets for maximum effect.

Telling the SEO Story and Mobile

Create top-notch dashboards and learn how to target their distribution throughout your organization. Master BrightEdge Page Grouping and BrightEdge’s exclusive Page Reporting to unlock secure search and query volume and clicks to a particular page. Review BrightEdge’s complete mobile solution and learn how to set up your tracking and reports to highlight the differences and opportunities between desktop and mobile for traffic and revenue. In this and all labs, you can deploy your newly acquired knowledge directly into your own account.

Mastering Backlink Analysis and Execution - Majestic Master Class

Did you know that Majestic operates one of the largest crawlers in the world, indexing seven billion new pages on the web every day to create a powerful index of backlink information? That index helps search marketers understand the backlinks affecting their own and their competitors’ websites and rankings. Additional partner labs will be added as we get closer to Share15. Register now to enjoy the 60+ brand speakers, general sessions, labs, forums, and networking. 

A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Share15, the industry’s leading brand-led digital conference, is only a few months away and begins on September 21, 2015 in San Francisco. In the run up to the event we’re connecting with many of the world’s leading brands and the speakers we’ve invited to Share insights into the market and tips on how to make the most of the Share experience. Last week BrightEdge caught up with Jesse Farley, online marketing strategist and SEO manager at Cabela’s, to discuss Share15 and what’s on Jesse’s agenda. Jesse’s work at Cabela’s involves reinforcing Cabela’s as the “World’s Foremost Source for the Outdoors” via earned & owned content marketing initiatives. Below are a few extracts from our conversation:

The Search Landscape

BrightEdge: How much has the search landscape changed over the last year?

JF: It has changed dramatically. It has moved from purely transactional to conversational and transactional.

BrightEdge: What has had the biggest impact for you and your team at Cabela’s?

JF: The biggest shift, is the move from just on-page SEO to more of a content marketing effort utilizing our owned and earned media initiatives, is around promoting our top-of-the-funnel content. For example: How-to guides, buyer’s guides and videos.

BrightEdge: How do you see the space evolving over the next year – what should marketers look out for?

JF: I think the space will continue to evolve in the same way as it is now with a focus on conversational over transactional. Marketers should keep an eye out on how they are communicating to their audience at all times.

BrightEdge: Can you offer any tips to the Share audience on adapting to rapid change in the market?

JF: My primary tip to Share attendees would be - Never forget that digital marketing is all about how people are consuming information and providing what is valueable to them. It is not about your version of value but THEIRS.

The Content Performance Marketing Shift

BrightEdge: How are you aligning your content and search optimization efforts?

JF: The team at Cabela’s has found that you can’t have one without the other! Content and search, both, work hand in hand as people consume information on more than just one website, we have leveraged our agency ClearVoice to identify, recruit, and onboard influencers/websites that will can get involved in the conversation.

BrightEdge: How critical is measurement of content in your organization?

JF: The measurement of content performance is extremely critical at Cabela’s! You have to measure what you doing. If you don’t…then you are doing nothing more than “spraying & praying” with regard to your content production and performance. Understanding the “value of a piece of content” is a hard question to answer so we leverage not only the BrightEdge platform.

BrightEdge: Can you tell readers a little more about your view on the convergence of content and digital marketing?

JF: Content is at the center of all digital marketing campaigns. Content can be syndicated for search, you can remarket with display for those who read that content, and content can be place on-site to improve SEO and quality score for paid search.

The Cabela’s partnership with BrightEdge

BrightEdge: Can you tell us more about how you use BrightEdge and how the platform helps you achieve your business objectives?

JF: Cabela’s use BrightEdge to identify, inform and validate our content marketing & our SEO efforts. I love the data and intelligence we get from the platform.

Cabela’s and Share15

BrightEdge: Why Share15 – why do you attend?

JF: I love to learn new things and that is what Share 15 is all about. The worlds top content, search and digital marketing minds speak at Share. With this level of thought leadership it helps get the brain juices flowing and cultivates a new class and community of digital marketing thought leaders.

BrightEdge: What are you most looking forward to?

JF: I am really looking forward to “talking shop” with other marketers at Share15, sharing insights and implementing new strategies on my return from the conference.

BrightEdge: What advice can you give Share attendees in order for them to make the most out of their Share15 experience?

JF: Take lots of notes & ask lots of questions. The opportunities to collaborate with so many of your peers at large brands, like at Share15, don’t come up often. Engage with the Share15 speakers and ask them questions that help take you and your company to the next level.

About Jesse Farley

Jesse has been in the online marketing space since 2000. Jesse has worked in all aspects of digital marketing including, Paid Search, SEO, Email, Display/Retargeting, Content Marketing, and advanced web analytics. Over the last 15 years he has worked with many Fortune 500 and up companies, such as T. Rowe Price where he led the Enterprise SEO & Content Strategies, US Airways, where he was responsible for the digital go-to-market strategy, BizRate, where he led content strategy and is now in charge of Cabela’s content marketing strategy both internally and externally as well as the SEO team. This year Jesse and team were responsible for a 30%-50% increase in NON-branded traffic at Cabela’s. In his spare time Jesse loves to snowboard and fish. Fun fact – Jesse caught the 3^rd largest Mahi in the World.

Share15 – Join the digital marketing community

This year Share15 is even bigger and better with over 60 speakers from an envious collection of the world’s leading brands. In fact, no other conference compares to Share with regard to

1. Concentration of quality brands and thought leaders at Share15
2. Focus on delivery of insights and actionable takeaways
3. Zero tolerance on sales pitches
4. Attendee profiles across search, content and digital marketing

Space is limited, so register now to avoid disappointment. #Share15 @brightedge

Andy Betts

M Posted 10 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Did you know that you can leverage content and SEO for public relations (PR) in several ways? In this post, we’ll discuss how SEO practices, including quality content, works in tandem with public relations by combating negative queries and reviews, building your brand online and managing your reputation.

Search Engines + Reputation

There’s no question that reputation management and search engines go hand-in-hand. In fact, reputation management has been the center of many “take-down” requests for Google search results that claim to damage the reputation of both individuals and businesses. A high-profile 2013 lawsuit in a French court, reported at Search Engine Watch proved to be a landmark case in search and reputation management. It involved compromising pictures allegedly of Max Mosley, former president of Formula One racing, engaged in acts with prostitutes According to Reuters, the court ruled that Google was to “remove and cease, for a period of five years beginning two months after this decision, the appearance of nine images.”

SEO + Reputation Management

Although brands today are dealing with far less traumatic reputation management issues than Mosely, they still need to pay attention to their brands online. Take bad reviews as an example. Just one way SEO practices can help with reputation management when faced with bad reviews online for queries related to your brand is to put out a steady stream of quality content for any queries that may demand it. Building your brand through creating authoritative content: what’s better reputation management than ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) with useful content for a query? The more your quality insights surface for search queries, the more authoritative and credible your brand is online. This is a long-term SEO content strategy, and could take up to a year to be effective, according to this article by Samantha Wanner over at SEER Interactive.

Wanner suggests creating and building “assets that are more authoritative in rank to slowly detrude” negative reviews and search listings. Among some of the good tips she recommends, take note of: • Creating a blog. • Building links to a positive news story, review or blog post that emphasizes your brand. • Build and cross-link your company’s social media profiles. • Upload any presentations to SlideShare, titling it using the exact match keywords for which any negative reviews are ranking. She further suggests – as many SEO practioners do – that you monitor your brand’s reputation.

SEO + Traditional Public Relations

With Google’s emphasis on quality content, publis relations SEO has become intertwined, as SEO and PR teams often share joint goals: spearheading brand visibility being the ultimate one, as John Rampton recently discussed at Forbes. Creating valuable content that established, reputable sites and publishers vouch for by linking to your site has become the cornerstone of brand building online. And while some of the big PR firms today merely dabble in social media with “one-off” announcements, the smarter PR companies “get it,” says Julie Liesse in Advertising Age’s “The PR Factor 2010.” Part of PR firms “getting” social media management is by partnering with SEO professionals that create great organic content for their search strategies.

Some PR firms are now often hired to help manage a brand’s social media, and by joining forces with SEO practitioners, they have compelling organic content in the form of blog posts and articles to share on their client’s social accounts. Thanks to Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing for the image above that eloquently highlights how to break down silos. For more on these ideas, check out this post.

I did on the evolution of the content marketing system at Relevance.com. SEO can further boost PR efforts towards brand visibility with well-optimized social media profiles that will show up in search engine results pages (SERPs), notably Google+ and LinkedIn (Facebook and Twitter have little to no organic reach). Tips for optimizing your brand’s LinkedIn profile are shared by Jim Yu at Marketing Land, here, while SEO for Google+ profiles is discussed by Kristi Hines at Search Engine Watch. An informed SEO content strategy also provides your PR team with the “right stuff” for initiatives like getting out a particular brand message, as well as helping to get the word out about an event.

One example is the content we featured right here on the blog leading up the BrightEdge Share14 conference, which featured interviews and tips from speakers ahead of the event. Stay tuned for something similar with next year’s Share15  event. And it’s future is destined to grow as mutual goals of brand building, messaging and reputation management converge. What do you think? Tell us about it below!