Shane Herrell

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Go Global and Manage Your Content

The Internet has been growing rapidly around the world. According to Eurostat, 78 percent of EU member households had Internet access in 2014, which was 36 percentage points higher than 2007. In 2014, it was also reported that 50 percent of people between 16 and 70 had used the Internet to purchase goods and services, compared to 44 percent just two years prior. In parts of the EU, particularly the UK, Denmark and Norway, that number reaches over three quarters of people in that age range. Econsultancy’s State of Digital Marketing in Asia 2013 found that it is growing rapidly in Asia as well.

As many as 73 percent of survey company participants indicated that content marketing would become an increasingly important aspect of their business plans over the next year. The digital ecosystem is growing, and businesses that want to build their brands internationally must be able to scale their SEO marketing strategy, their content and meet the growing demand in other countries and other languages. An effective content strategy to go global with requires more than just translating a website. Here is what all marketers should know about going international with their global marketing strategy.

Understand need

To reach your international audience, you first must have an intimate understanding of what the customers in that particular region want to see from you. It is not enough to assume that every country and language needs their own local site-- that would not be cost effective and might even end up costing you customers. The information you need, however, cannot be understood just from your website analytics.

Research into the local need and website culture is necessary. If you want to sell a particular product in Scandinavia, for example, you want to first establish that there is a market for it. Your website analytics will only tell you how many people speak English well enough to use your existing site. It will not tell you if there is a sizeable market that will be more encouraged to buy from a local site. You also have to watch for duplicate content penalties if you are building multiple local sites in the same language. If you have separate sites for the UK and the US, for example, but simply transferred the same content from one to the other, you might find yourself penalized in search results. You need to make sure the content is unique for the different locations.

Take into account cultural and linguistic factors

There are numerous terms in English that cannot be translated directly into another language. Other languages have their own systems of slang and casual speech that your prospective customers will be using when they type keywords into their search bar. If you want your content to succeed internationally, your global content team has to consider the optimization efforts necessary in the new language. This requires the use of native speakers as translators, not just someone who studied the language for a few years.

Only someone intimately familiar with the culture will be able to provide you with content that is not only in the desired language but also speaks to the desired audience. You should note that using local domains instead of just “.com” can be very beneficial for local optimization. The local domain tells Google where the site serves, helping it rank higher in queries from that region. It also helps establish a degree of trust with the local population and encourages people to link to your site and trust that you want to serve local customers. Making use of Google’s hreflang tag can help Google understand alternate versions of your pages in different locations and languages.

Analyze

A successful marketing strategy to go global with would not be complete without a full analysis. Analytics can tell you what types of content are resonating most with the local population and where you need improvement. Without analytics, you run the risk of just producing continual content and information without the substance needed to make it efficient or valuable. A culture of content can help you accomplish this goal.

Content should not be viewed as an offshoot of a single department. It needs to be part of the entire digital marketing ecosystem. When done correctly, content can provide direct value to the organization by enhancing brand reach and reputation as well as bringing in leads and sales. That is why you should focus on hard metrics that directly measure the site’s performance, return visitors, content engagement, and impact to sales rather than just page views. Metrics that measure your brand reach and reputation can be particularly helpful as you move into a new country and language. You will be able to see how well your site has been received. Measure data such as:

• The number of unique and return views compared to bounce rates and the time spent on the page
• The number of leads and sales achieved
• The number of comments left on pieces and how people engage with it
• What people are saying about your brand and how your content impacts the sentiment
• The cost per lead and the cost per sale

Using tools like the BrightEdge Content Optimizer can be particularly valuable. With BrightEdge Content Optimizer, you can closely look at how your pages are performing and how your competitor’s pages are performing. Learn about topics that are the highest in demand but the lowest in competition so that your writers can produce content that will be most likely to attract the desired audience. BrightEdge Content Optimizer also works inside the Adobe Experience Manager, which makes it straightforward to optimize the content before it’s published, which helps your content perform sooner – reaching a wider audience – almost immediately upon its publication.

Using Content Optimizer has the additional benefit of delivering scalable content optimization tools that improve content performance globally. Although different parts of your team will be working with different languages and cultures, Content Optimizer gives you a common framework for managing content performance, improving traffic, centralizing global content performance analytics, and unifying your content teams across the world. As an increasing number of businesses look to expand to markets beyond the English-speaking world, learning how to scale content globally is critical. To find success on the international stage, however, you need to scale your content efficiently, keeping in mind both the international concerns and the analytics of your content.  

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

How To Create Successful Content Performance Marketing

BrightEdge engagement research reveals the secret to successful content performance

We’ve spoken often about the content battleground that has emerged: every brand is fighting for attention against the massive volume of content being published daily. So what truly drives performance? As the leader in Content Performance Marketing, we wanted to dig deeper and offer a window into how brands can compete and be heard above the noise. Tapping into the Data Cube, a dataset of billions of pieces of web-wide content, we analyzed how B2B and B2C can create successful content performance online and across devices in our Content Engagement Study.

The successful content performance engagement marketing gap

What we discovered is a major disparity between the content that exists and the content that drives traffic, conversions, and revenue. We refer to this trio as "engagement," which happens to be the best predictor of successful content performance. Our research shows that consumer engagement is a mere 20 percent with B2C content, while B2B content engagement sits higher at nearly 50 percent.

Industry analysis – hospitality engagement is high but vertical strategies differ by industry

Broken down by industry, you can get an even more granular look at how engagement stacks up. The range in content engagement levels can be attributed, in part, to the fact that each industry’s content and sales strategies differ. Read more about how strategies differ in the full report here:  

Smartphones lead by devide type but lag behind desktop engagement

Regardless of whether you work in Hospitality, Manufacturing, Technology, Insurance or Retail, when it comes to engagement one fact holds true: there is a massive opportunity for strengthening the performance of your content — and this is especially important when device type is taken into consideration.

Interestingly, we found that although smartphones lead all device categories in market penetration, they lag behind desktop in engagement by a whopping 30 percent. Fierce competition on the content battleground means marketers can’t just blindly produce content and hope it performs. Instead marketers need to implement a cycle of demand, measurement and optimization — combined with analysis of competitive data — to drive successful content performance across the board. To learn more about how various industries stack up on the engagement scale, or to gain actionable best practices to improve your own content, check out our Content Engagement Study.

Be sure to join us at Share15 September 21-23 in downtown San Francisco. We’ll be meeting with leading marketers to discuss, learn and share insights around topics like content performance and driving engagement.  

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

As the very first SEO manager for The Container Store, Cade Burk is responsible for leading and growing all of the brand’s SEO efforts. We had the chance to sit down with him the other day and talk about some of the changes the brand has seen recently as well as the upcoming Share conference. It was a great conversation and we wanted to share some of the highlights.

On changes for the brand

BrightEdge (BE): What has been the biggest change for your company in the past year?

Cade Burke (CB): There have been many exciting changes to The Container Store online department in the last year. This includes launching our SEO department in 2014. We have also been working on improving our mobile usability and functionality while also doing a site-wide, URL restructure. These efforts have been yielding some great results as we are eager to see where the next year is going to take us.

BE: What are you doing to shift the focus from keyword to page performance strategies?

CB: Since our SEO efforts are new, we still have to do a considerable amount of work with keywords. We believe that keyword research is the basis of a successful SEO platform. As we begin to look beyond these basic SEO techniques and reach towards page performance, we have been leveraging BrightEdge in a variety of ways. The platform, for example, provides us with social recommendations to increase social shares. We have also launched a new lifestyle blog, Container Stories. We hope that with our efforts to create highly relevant, SEO- friendly content we'll see a rise in our performance in the SERPs.

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

CB: As the leader of storage and organization in the retail world, it is important for The Container Store’s online efforts to reflect this same level of authority. In doing this, like most, we want to better understand what it is our customers are searching for and what their basic need is when inquiring on a search engine. By creating fresh content on our new lifestyle blog, Container Stories as well as constantly updating our website’s content we hope for our content marketing and our SEO efforts to become synonymous. It is important for us to still remain in line with the Hummingbird update and to provide not only a “best answer” approach, but also supply semantically related searches that portray a conversational approach to our content as well. We want to aim to tell a cohesive, keyword- friendly story throughout our content and pages.

The SEO journey at Share15

BE: Can you tell us a bit about your topic for your Share15 presentation? You do not have to give away the game, but we would love to get some teasers.

CB: At The Container Store we only really created an SEO department last year, so SEO is still a pretty new initiative for our brand. I plan on using my presentation to discuss our SEO journey. I think a lot of the attendees will be interested in seeing how a major corporation begins such a project from the ground up. BrightEdge has been a powerful ally for us in this journey, and we plan on discussing how we have learned through our partnership and what we have been able to accomplish so far.

BE: What are you looking forward to most about attending Share?

CB: Personally, I am looking forward to learning more about how other SEOs work in their day-to-day. I am interested in their team structures and how they tackle SEO initiatives at their respective companies.

The role of BrightEdge in this journey

BE: Speaking of BrightEdge, what has been your favorite part of the platform?

CB: I love the inventive reporting options as well as the possibilities that are built into the platform. I feel as though I am constantly learning something new when I sign in. There are aspects that I have not quite mastered, but I am looking forward to seeing what else the platform is capable of doing. One tool in particular, however, saves my team and me hours of work - the Data Cube! We love the insights and analysis available. We are also very pleased with the level of communication we receive from our BrightEdge representatives and account managers. Everyone has been incredibly helpful and a fantastic resource to have.

The fun stuff

BE: Can you tell us something fun about yourself?

CB: I love to travel! Last summer I climbed Machu Picchu. For my next trip, I want to do the TransAmerica bike trail across America. I am also an avid reader and have recently been trying to step up my golf game! It was great having a chance to chat with Cade before Share begins and we look forward to continuing the conversation in just a few weeks.

If you have not yet registered for Share, visit our event page to learn more. We look forward to seeing you there!

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

Bill Fergusson

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Knowledge-Based Trust: A New Ranking Factor?

On February 12th eight Google engineers set the search world abuzz by publishing an academic paper entitled Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources that describes how trust and factual accuracy could be used to rank websites in the SERPs.

Here is the abstract from the paper:

"The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy. The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases. We propose a way to distinguish errors made in the extraction process from factual errors in the web source per se, by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model. We call the trustworthiness score we computed Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT). On synthetic data, we show that our method can reliably compute the true trustworthiness levels of the sources. We then apply it to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimate the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. Manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method."

We know that Google’s algorithm takes dozens and dozens of factors into consideration when serving up search results, and we know what a lot of those factors are, such as on-page use of keywords and topics, anchor text, domain authority, and PageRank as a measure of a page’s link equity. But trust? Yes, trust as a ranking factor may be coming soon. And it’s easy to understand why. For a full breakdown of how Google's search results pages have changed over time, access our Google SERP Layout Changes research report.

What problem is Knowledge-Based Trust solving?

We all know the problem – a number of sites have great link profiles that are not generally considered trustworthy. Think about all those celebrity gossip sites out there or sites put up by political fringe groups that garner lots of links. You have to wonder -- might it be possible to algorithmically fact-check millions of pages and sites to identify those that are more trustworthy than others? First, Google’s engineers crawled millions of web pages and extracted 2.8 billion trusted facts. Then they compared those facts to data they found on 119 million webpages to estimate the trustworthiness of each page. When they manually checked a subset of their results, they found their algorithm to be highly effective at ranking trustworthiness.

How is trustworthiness of a website defined?

The trustworthiness or accuracy of a web source is defined as “the probability that it contains the correct value for a fact (such as Barack Obama’s nationality), assuming that it mentions any value for that fact. (Thus we do not penalize sources that have few facts, so long as they are correct.)” This suggests the possibility of calculating domain-level trust as well as page-level trust. If the Knowledge-Based Trust algorithm were to be polished and deployed, Google could, for example, crawl millions of pages on The New York Times site and calculate a Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) score for the entire domain. And presumably a news story published on this domain could rank highly even if it contains a number of facts that cannot be verified algorithmically because the domain is considered trustworthy. We already know through an analysis of URLs published in the In-Depth Articles feature that Google maintains a short list of trusted domains, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Now imagine that Google has the ability to algorithmically rank millions of domains for KBT and rank search results accordingly. It may become Panda on steroids.

What will be the consequences of Knowledge-Based Trust?

This new world would seem to favor well-financed domains with strong fact-checking safeguards and niche sites with excellent quality control over more limited subject matter. And the consequences could be far reaching. Consider: if you were the editor of a medical publications site, KBT would increase the pressure on you to think even more carefully about publishing an article on potentially controversial research. Remember that article that kicked off the anti-vaccination movement? And certainly KBT would contribute to the continuing decline of link metrics as a ranking factor. Few will mourn the decreased weight of link metrics. There’s a quote in Google’s paper attributed to Isaac Watts that bears repeating: “Learning to trust is one of life’s most difficult tasks.” It looks like this could usher in a new era of trust on the internet.  

Shaun Oaklee

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Social signals and marketing success

The impact of social signals on SEO has been a hotly debated topics for years among marketers. In January 2014, however, Matt Cutts of Google released a video that seemed to indicate that social signals were not particularly significant.

This announcement took the marketing world by storm, but rather than serve as a basis for marketers to abandon social and SEO integration, we would venture to argue that social continues to remain an important factor in the success of content. The critical integration between search, social and content continues to play a critical role in SERPs and how well content is able to reach its intended audience.

The role of social signals in search

Although Google has indicated that they do not particularly look at the number of Likes a piece of content has, there are still plenty of other social factors that can impact how well a piece of content ranks.

Google wants to display pieces that are engaging and informative. Quality and popularity signals impact SERPs, such as:

• the number of backlinks a piece of content has
• the number of views content has
• the bounce rates of visitors on the page

These factors are all influenced by social engagement. When your content receives a number of shares on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, for example, your social media metrics in each of these categories will increase as well. Google indicated in the same 2014 video with Cutts that while they might not look at social signals specifically, the Google spiders do look at social media pages the way they would any other website.

This means that when material is shared in crawlable networks, then your backlink count will increase. The crawlable major social media pages are all considered reputable sources and rank highly on Google. Links coming from these sources would likely be considered high quality backlinks.

When pieces are shared regularly through social media, you will also increase the number of views the content has. People who share content through social media are vouching for it, which makes their followers more likely to click and engage with the material. This high number of views and strong engagement metrics will also influence the SERP ranking of the material.

To be able to leverage the power of search and social signals, however, you need to produce quality content. Content that adds value for the page visitor will be the material that attracts the desired social attention and shares. It is also the content that has strong engagement rates because the information draws in the reader and encourages them to explore all that the website has to offer.

How to leverage social signals with your SEO strategy

Know the topics that are trending on social media

You should leverage tools like Twitter Trending on BrightEdge to gain a firm understanding of what topics are trending on social media. Know what people are interested in reading about to gather ideas about good topics to post. The more traction your content gains on social media-- the more powerful the search and social intersection will be for you.

Develop high quality content

Content is the cornerstone to any digital marketing strategy. Your content will not gain the signals you want to see unless you take the time necessary to develop high-value material appreciated by your readers. Use the topics researched in step one and use your research and personal experience to interest and educate your page visitor.

Ensure your material is optimized for social signals

For your material to get more views on social, you have to be sure that it is optimized for viewing on the different platforms. The use of images and the right keywords, for example, can impact how many people pay attention to your postings. Tools like the BrightEdge Social Site Audit allow you to see how well you are leveraging Open Graph implementation and will help you ensure that your content is appealing to page visitors.

Make sure your social pages are ready to compete

Social profiles themselves also have a tremendous impact on the success of search. Profiles on major social sites rank highly, and thus will often be on the first page of search results for a company. An appealing profile will also attract more attention from visitors, which can therefore increase your content consumption. Tools like the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer can help you make sure that your pages have been optimized for search while also helping you analyze the success of your efforts and measure the overall impact of your social campaign.

Measure, refine and improve

As you adjust your social media presence to better meet the demands of modern web users and improve the success of your content strategy, few steps are more important than monitoring your progress. Monitor the metrics of your content as you begin to integrate social signals into your strategy. Use dashboards to see how your progress compares to your competitors and look for areas to improve. Refine your techniques to better match what your customers want to see from you.

The impact of social signals on SERPs has been a hotly debated topic. The intersection of search and social continues to be a powerful motivator for content success. By leveraging social signals, you can improve your search performance and witness the content acquisition power of social sharing. You might also like: Using the Marketing Funnel to Improve Your Conversion Rates.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Content Quality and SEO Results

In between hitting the California surfing waves and running the award-winning digital marketing agency 97th Floor, Chris Bennett found time to sit down and chat with us about our mutual excitement for Share15 this September and the changes he has seen in the industry. It was a fantastic conversation.

About changes in the digital marketing industry

BrightEdge (BE): What has been the biggest change you have witnessed in the search landscape over the last year?

Chris Bennett (CB): One of the things I have seen the most is that people are finally starting to accept that quality does matter and that they should not be taking short cuts. Brands are finally starting to focus on the user and are building something of value for them instead of just trying to game the system. I am really seeing that across the board - people willing to invest in the long haul and the user. I think this is a fantastic thing. For a long time, people were saying that they believed that it was important to value the user, but they still looked for the quickest way to get to the top. As an agency, this has also been great. We find that our clients are more willing to listen to us about how to succeed and build content. I think over the next year, this mentality is going to become even more widely accepted.

While I am excited to see what will result from this trend, it is important to note that this growing recognition of the importance of quality means that the digital space will only become more competitive in the coming year. I highly recommend that people get a jump on high quality routes now to get a competitive edge. People also need to start implementing quality measurements. Metrics are the biggest thing that can help keep you from shooting in the dark. The more you know about how/why/where content is working the better you can refine your content strategy. I tell people that they should not only be measuring your own site, but also those of your competitors. You want to see how you compare, if there is anything they are doing that you need to adapt or if there are certain weaknesses in their marketing campaigns that you can leverage to bring in more of the customer base.

The importance of bringing paid, owned, and earned media together

BE: What are your thoughts on the convergence of paid, owned and earned media?

CB: I love when these three specialities come together. I think they all need to be married into one big happy family. They are each different disciplines and you want to have people who are specialized within each area, but they all need to be working together as well. You want to have an organization where they all know what the others are doing. Each discipline can also give you great insights that can impact the others. For example, paid advertising can give you useful competitive research. It is also a great traffic driver. When these three work together, the results can be tremendous.

Exploring metrics at Share15

BE: What will you be speaking about at Share15?

CB: I am going to speak about how to use metrics and competitive analysis. I will explore the marriage between content and SEO - content and search - from a tracking perspective. I will dive into to the planning side and how it works - or doesn’t work - and how to report back to your team and your higher ups. I have numerous case studies I will be sharing that help to show the process from start to finish, including tools used, metrics and competitive analysis and how to use that information to adjust campaigns. Like I said, people are finally getting the message that quality content matters. While this is wonderful for the user, it does mean that the web is going to get increasingly competitive. Properly using metrics can help you avoid being left behind. I really think that my talk will help people feel comfortable with using these metrics and really get why they are so critical.

The value that BrightEdge offers

BE: How do you use the BrightEdge platform in your content campaigns?

B: I have been familiar with BrightEdge from the beginning. Many of our clients have used the platform and we learned it to better serve them. It turned us into big fans of the technology. We use a variety of the different features, including keyword research and competitive analysis. It really helps put more ammo in my corner - I can show how successful my ideas and campaigns are likely to be even before they begin. We are certified on BrightEdge, which helps us when we want to offer the technology to new clients who did not already use the platform. The technology allows us to go in-depth in our analyses to such an incredible level. I love being able to see where competitors are and seeing precisely when we surpass them.

The fun stuff

BE: Can you tell us something interesting about yourself?

CB: Well, I start every day with a large glass of butter. Yes, butter. I put two tablespoons of butter into my tea. It has such a tremendously positive impact on mind and my body. It helps me wake up quickly and dive right into my work. It also helps keep me full so I can work all morning without stopping to eat. I usually have a nice meal after lunchtime. I got started on this idea when I was just beginning my business. My wife had just had twins, and needless to say I was not getting much sleep. I started eating very poorly and gaining weight. I got blood drawn and realized that I was having a variety of health problems. I got very passionate about health and learned about the benefits of these fats. I have not looked back since.

BE: Any fun facts about your company?

CB: I think it is a little funny that even though we are called 97th Floor, our offices are actually located on the 1st floor. We actually got the name from the idea of taking customers to the top, but just did not think 100th Floor had the same ring. It was fantastic to speak with Chris about the industry and the Share conference, which is just weeks away.

If you have not already registered to attend and see him and the other fantastic speakers we have lined up, you still have some time left. Visit our events page to learn more.

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

brightedge

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Capture online sales in the holiday season

For retailers, the holiday season is critical to a successful year. In 2013, 19.2 percent of annual sales occurred just during the holiday season. The 2014 holiday season saw $72.03 billion in ecommerce sales and the 2015 season is expected to grow to $82.4 billion.

The holiday season offers multiple opportunities for sales and promotions. The weekend of Black Friday through Cyber Monday was responsible for an incredible amount of revenue, with online sales quickly becoming a major player. According to Adobe, Thanksgiving Day 2014 saw $1.33 billion in online sales and Black Friday saw $2.4 billion, setting new records for ecommerce over the popular shopping weekend.

Failing to capitalize on this incredible source of revenue will leave companies struggling as they enter the new year. Fortunately, there are a few steps and tools that you can leverage to properly engage your website and prepare for the holiday season of 2015.

1.   Understand where the best search demand is on a query basis

Organic is still the major driver of traffic to websites regardless of industry. At BrightEdge, we found that search is responsible for an estimated 51 percent of traffic to websites in retail alone. Display, email and referred email comes in second, followed by paid search, with social revenue falling into a distant fourth. Within the holiday season, it was reported that more than 20 percent of online holiday retail sales originated through organic search in 2014, surpassing all other sources of traffic.

For you to have a successful online holiday season, ensuring that you understand what your customers search for is crucial. It is only when you understand the types of information and products that your customers seek that you will be able to optimize your pages for the impending holiday traffic.

The BrightEdge Data Cube allows you to identify specific keywords and understand the activity of industry customers. By monitoring activity across millions of websites, the data produced will tell you exactly what people are searching for online.

For example, consider the travel and hospitality industry. In 2014 the Data Cube enabled identification a hot hospitality keywords that customers were looking for:

• Flight deals Cyber Monday
• Winter getaways in New England
• New York winter getaways
• LAX airport
• Flights to Florida

Using Data Cube also enables the break down of the information by type of transportation, such as air versus train, as well as the most popular sites, such as Expedia.com versus Kayak.com. Businesses could then use this information to optimize their own sites, such as a bed and breakfast in Vermont leveraging ‘winter getaways in New England’.

You can search by URL or through keywords and see information in real-time in Data Cute. With goal-based research you can specifically select what you are trying to accomplish with your optimization efforts, for example finding high-value or long-tail keyword, and the platform will then help you identify the best ways to capitalize on the holiday demand.

2. Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in desired keywords

It is not enough for you to know what your intended audience seeks-- you must also know how the content of your competitors performs. This can offer you insights on where gaps in their keyword usage or content development are that you can use to improve your own rankings and visibility. You can identify strengths, such as particular keywords or optimization efforts, which might be helping them outrank you. This can then help you adjust your own strategies.

The BrightEdge Data Cube can also provide you with this data you need about the performance of your competitors. You can see how their sites rank along with their traffic and the keywords for which they have optimized their content. Under Goal Based Research, you can even identify specific videos and rich content strategies that your competitors are using so that you can learn from their successes and implement your own.

3. Leverage steps 1 and 2 to create a targeted keyword list

To create a valuable, targeted keyword list, you need to take the information you gathered through your demand research and your investigation into your competitors’ sites. You also need to carefully monitor the performance of your own site and know which words are producing the best conversion rates and the best value. These three sources of information should then be combined to create the optimal targeted list.

BrightEdge makes it easy to track the necessary analytics to accomplish these goals. You have access to some of the most sophisticated analytics reporting in the industry. It includes viewing an in-depth analysis of your traffic, such as how long they spend on the site and the total pageviews. You can also map performance goals, how specific keywords drive revenue and access Google Analytics or other platforms’ metrics, such as bounce rates. This information will enable you to monitor your targeted keyword list and its performance continuously, allowing you to make necessary adjustments to capitalize on the holiday season.

4. Develop content to focus on those keywords

Once you have your optimal list of keywords, you then need to create high-quality content that will rank AND encourage people to convert. The content produced should focus on filling a need for your customers and provide them with information that they seek online. Creating compelling product descriptions and using adjectives that appeal to the senses of your customers are two excellent ways to create the type of content that will serve your business well.

For longer types of content, such as blog posts or articles, the BrightEdge Content Optimizer allows you to focus on topics that people are currently interested in. This makes it easy to take advantage of the various trends and topics that are high in demand yet low in competition to help get your site noticed.

5. Optimize your landing pages to improve conversion

Your landing page is your prime opportunity for bringing in traffic and driving them towards a specific conversion. Landing pages should therefore be optimized to help people find the website and motivate them to convert.

BrightEdge will soon be offering a landing page optimizer that will help ensure that you meet these goals. BrightEdge is an Adobe Accredited Application Partner and will be releasing a Landing Page Optimizer that seamlessly integrates with Adobe Experience Manager. You will be able design test ideas and test different potential pages while also getting real-time recommendations and comparing your projected performance with your competitors.

6. Use a platform that gives you a full picture

You want to make sure that the platform you use to monitor the organic traffic around your site takes into account your competitors’ sites and supplies you with all the necessary information so that you can ensure that your holiday season will not be spoiled by a better-prepared competitor. You should be able to accurately identify their optimization efforts and how that corresponds to their progress, so you can preventively take steps to avoid any loss in traffic or revenue before the peak of the holiday shopping season hits.

7. Prepare for mobile and offline/online cross-channel

According to our own data at BrightEdge, we found that e-commerce is no longer dominated by desktop. In fact, over the course of the first three quarters of 2014, we found that the average order size was almost equal between smart devices and desktop-- within a 10 percent range. Customers are clearly willing to buy both large and small items on mobile as well as desktop. No holiday optimization effort, therefore, would be complete without paying attention to mobile performance.

Customers also commonly use mobile (learn more about mobile e-commerce) in conjunction with activity offline, such as making a purchase in-store. Customers want to see improved cross-channel cooperation. For example, 69 percent say they expect prices online and in stores to be the same, but 31 percent say they can find better prices online. Another 69 percent say that the customer accounts they have in store and online are not connected. Customers want to see consistent promotions, prices and access to information about product availability. Creating these links between the various parts of the customer experience can improve satisfaction and the reputation of the brand.

Additionally, mobile and social, mocial if you will, influence buying behavior as people use apps, like Instagram, Snapchat, and Whatsapp to consult with friends and family to purchase items for themselves or their loved ones. Consider ways you can encourage that behavior and of course leverage customer social networks by incentivizing sharing of promotions and purchases.

Online sales has been playing an increasingly important role in the marketplace, particularly during the holiday season where people are often shopping on the go. BrightEdge offers the solution that uses data to create highly effective marketing campaigns that will catch the attention of your customers.

Marketers that invest correctly will reap the maximum reward from the high-powered holiday season. From identifying keywords to developing content opportunities to monitoring revenue on a comprehensive platform, with BrightEdge every step of the process is backed by concrete numbers that help deliver the bounty of holiday revenue.