enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Rolling Panda Updates

When Google’s Panda update went live in 2011, it had a tremendous impact on the marketing industry. The first roll out of the change impacted nearly 12 percent of all queries in the United States. Another update a few months later impacted an estimated 6 to 9 percent of queries in many non-English languages. This change saw many established websites take tremendous hits in their rankings while other websites receive much needed boosts in SERPs. Although it has been over four years since that first rollout, the results of Panda can still be felt across the marketing industry. The regular updates continue to impact existing sites. Countless websites have also had to change their entire content development strategies. Here is what all marketers should know.

The focus of the regular Panda update

The regular Panda update was introduced to weed out weak and thin content. Google understands that when people use the search engine to find information about their particular topic, they want sites that help them answer their questions completely and thoroughly. Users want authoritative content that they can trust. Google’s tries to deliver the most appropriate content to those customers. When Panda rolled out, sites that managed to rank well despite having poor or thin content were generally hit hard.

Panda is a filter that runs periodically through the entire web to find content that manages to beat the algorithm itself and ranks higher than it really should. The filter needs to be run on a regular basis to catch any new content that does not meet the desired quality standards as well as to see if any of the penalized websites have improved. It is also necessary to check for false positives. The filter itself is regularly updated to better search through the Internet to sort quality content from poor content. Each of these updates tends to be the focus of regular conversations among webmasters trying to evaluate if their websites were hit by the updates.

Panda looks for content that does not seem to serve much of a purpose on its own, such as affiliate sites. These sites exist solely for the purpose of encouraging people to click through to other websites. Countless affiliate sites, even the veteran ones that have been around for years, have seen their rankings suffer with the regular Panda updates.

The regular Panda updates

Regular Panda updates have been a source of confusion and frustration for many site owners. There were 25 confirmed updates, including the original launch, between the original rollout date in the beginning of 2011 and March 2013. These different updates were aimed at refining different parts of the filter and often targeted different aspects of the web, such as international English-language websites. After the early 2013 update, however, Google announced that they were unlikely to confirm future Panda updates. Around the same time, Google also announced that the process of rolling out the Panda updates would be changing. Now the update would not be happening all at once. Instead, it would be rolled out slowly over the course of several days.

In March 2013 Matt Cutts said that Panda updates would also be integrated into the search algorithm itself and therefore the updates would be happening in real time and would not be pushed out manually. With the integration, webmasters would no longer see sudden changes in search engine rankings and would be able to test their Panda-friendly fixes without having to wait for the next update. Google has now gone back on that announcement and has admitted that as of 2015, the updates were still being pushed out manually. Gary Illyes also announced in the beginning of June 2015 that there would be another update in two to four weeks, which means that it has likely just taken place in July.

How webmasters can make their content Panda-proof

For website owners who want to make sure that their content is prepared to weather any upcoming Panda updates, there are a few steps to take to ensure that everything has been optimized for success.

1. Make sure that all content on the page is high quality. The Panda update was specifically designed to root out weak, uninformative content. Google wants to see that every page of your website provides value for the user and is not just a placeholder or an attempt to rank for new keywords. Pages with thin content often do not focus on the needs of the user but instead serve to point the user towards particular links or advertisements. Other times site owners use spun content or machine-generated content to fill space. Every page should focus primarily on the person arriving on the website, so take the time to develop the page correctly.
2. Watch out for duplicate content. Although it is possible for errors to cause duplicate content, such as a malfunctioning CMS, Google knows that it is often because the site is trying to create multiple pages just to rank better for certain keywords or just to spam people. Make sure that your website does not have duplicate content under any circumstances.
3. Watch your ad ratio. Google is also watching for websites that have a high number of ads relative to their amount of content. This tells the filter that your content might not have the best intentions and really just wants to serve as a landing page for ads. It also detracts from the user experience and therefore will be negatively impacted by the Panda.
4. Regularly monitor your site to make sure it is functioning well. Use Webmaster tools to carefully watch how your website is performing. Watch for broken links, redirects and other factors that will hurt the user experience and therefore the website ranking.

The Panda update caused significant changes in how site owners manage their website content and strategize their optimization efforts. The ongoing Panda updates remind us all that the quest for rooting out spam and poor content is an ongoing fight. Make sure your content is Panda-proof and watch closely to see how your site performs to avoid getting caught in a bear trap on one of the regular updates. To review a timeline of other significant Google Updates, view our blog post: Google Algorithm Updates.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

SEO Forecasting leads to better decisions and greater ROI

People have been attempting to forecast the weather for millennia. Applying both science and technology, they've tried to understand patterns in atmospheric processes and have looked at data to project how the weather will be at a certain time and how it will evolve.

Because of weather forecasting, meteorologists and other weather specialists have been able to predict not only typical trends in weather, but they've also been able to predict extreme natural disasters days and even weeks before their occurrences.

As a result of SEO Forecasting, cities and individuals have been able to prepare, cost in damages reduced, and lives have been saved. Not altogether dissimilar is the forecasting many businesses perform when looking to predict and analyze trends that will determine how to best allocate their funds.

Truly successful businesses will spend time forecasting, looking at specific benchmarks because they know that doing so will garner a better understanding of trends and provide a higher ROI when acting on the information.

SEO Forecasting is no small task

Being able to accurately measure and then predict the financial value of SEO to a business is not an easy task, though a valuable one. But to be able to do so will help you make the most of SEO marketing in an industry that is relatively young but growing quickly.

If you're already using SEO to increase exposure and revenue for your business, it will be helpful to you to understand how to predict how valuable your SEO efforts will be. And if you're not already creating SEO reports, this might be just what you need to hear to convince you to get started.

So how valuable is SEO? Even after deep SEO analysis, it can be difficult to precisely define the ROI of SEO.

One of the reasons that SEO might often be discredited is because, if misunderstood, it can come off as too “wishy-washy.”

Another reason might be because so many digital marketers don't believe that there are hard numbers out there to support the ROI of SEO. Because of this gap in understanding, a lot of digital marketers don't make intelligent decisions when it comes to SEO.

This results in overconfident digital marketers, or SEOs, allocating either not enough or too many resources on keywords out of reach. They might be overly optimistic in their abilities or perhaps unaware of the returns that more resources could provide them.

Maybe the decision-makers see too little value in SEO and, mistakenly, discredit it before understand the returns it could bring. These thought-processes are flawed, and could be costly.

Enter the SEO Forecasting tool

The SEO Opportunity Forecasting tool created by BrightEdge makes predicting the ROI of your SEO efforts easy. You'll be able to see answers to questions that will clear up any doubts anyone might have about what SEO can do for you but also get the most out of what you put into it.

The BrightEdge SEO platform helps you focus on the keywords with the greatest potential for delivering results, to help you achieve forecasted business outcomes.

You'll be able to understand keyword opportunity and to see what the future of certain keywords looks like. It will help you identify and hone in on the keywords with the greatest potential for delivering results.

The answers to these questions, among others, will give digital marketers the tools they need to pitch a robust SEO strategy to those who have the power to decide what kind of resources will be allocated to an SEO game plan.

Ultimately, digital marketing is about making informed decisions, and the more data you have, the more success you will have.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Hospitality Marketing Best Practices

For professionals working in the hospitality industry, online marketing presents its own set of challenges. Our own research has indicated that businesses in these industries have a very high rate of engagement with online content - up to 87 percent. Customers are paying attention to what hotels have to say, but you need to make sure you are getting the right information in front of the right customer. We have worked to bring together some of the brightest minds in the industry to Share15 so that those representing hotel brands could walk away feeling confident in their online marketing strategies. We look to tackle some of the biggest issues facing this vertical.

Dealing with an international audience

By their very nature, hotels and others in the hospitality industry regularly welcome people from far outside their local area. Many larger brands are also interested in growing their brands beyond their native borders to other countries where they can further serve their clientele.

Learning how to write content to engage and international audience is crucial. Creating an international website requires careful thought and consideration. Translations themselves can often be an issue as the literal translation of an English word might not be the term used in another language. It is also important to know about the search engines that dominate other countries and how to reinforce a brand when facing an international audience. Melissa Walner, the Director of Global SEO for Hilton Worldwide, will be one of 6 speakers who will be addressing these issues for those in the hospitality industry and others interested in international search. Her unique perspective on taking a hospitality brand worldwide should offer fantastic insight for those in the hotels vertical.

Facing the competition in an engaging and competitive marketplace

There are nearly 53,000 hotel and lodging properties with at least 15 rooms in the United States and the total industry revenue was $163 billion in 2013. Those in the hospitality industry face stiff competition as they seek to get their locations noticed. Richard Mastriani of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts will be speaking about how brands can find their unique spot in the digital ecosystem and engage with customers across search and social through outstanding content. His insight into reaching audiences across the various parts of the web will providing an incredible amount of information for attendees.

Felipe Carreras of Best Western will also be speaking about making content stand out in an intensely competitive marketplace. Along with his co-speakers, he will focus on using tools and strategies to manage content and brand strategies. They will touch upon leveraging the different channels and how to use amplifications, influencer marketing and other techniques to ensure that the brand’s information is heard.

The role of earned, owned and paid advertising for hotels

Earned, owned and paid advertising all have vital roles for hotels. People traveling for both professional and personal reasons often end up staying in hotels for lodging. Surveys conducted by TripAdvisor found that 70 percent of those who travelled during the summer of 2013 planned to stay in a hotel. The high rates of hotel booking and value per transaction means that those who offer lodging can also use paid advertising to drive traffic to their websites when people search for travel terms or visiting sites related to travel, such as booking a flight or researching attractions. As already discussed, hotels tend to experience high engagement with their content, which means that their owned media is also critical. An estimated 57 percent of all travel reservations are made online and 65 percent of hotel reservations made on the same day are made from a smartphone. These customers expect content that answers their needs. It is also worth noting that hotel guests read 6-12 reviews before booking according to another TripAdvisor survey.

The value of earned, owned and paid media cannot be overlooked in the hospitality industry. Those who learn to get these components to work together will experience tremendous online success. That is why Alex Edlund of Marriott International will be joining a few co-speakers to explore the intersection of these three components and how to leverage them for online success. The hotel industry continues to grow and change to meet the demands of modern consumers.

At Share15, we believe that we have brought together a fantastic lineup of experienced professionals who can offer you unique insights about how to succeed in the competitive modern marketplace. If you have not yet registered to attend, we invite you to do so on our event page. We look forward to seeing you there!

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

Matt Saunders

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Replatfrom and Migration

The BrightEdge platform can provide detailed reporting and analysis following site migrations for you when you're looking to track results. Whether moving to a new CMS or changing your domain address entirely, BrightEdge provides the tools to successfully manage major technical site updates. Talk with your agency CSM prior to implementing major technical site updates for additional ideas.

Dashboards: Side-by-side comparison of two domains makes tracking transfer of rankings for target terms from the old domain to new domain extremely simple.

Site Audit: Visualize technical errors trended over time and quickly identify any SEO issues immediately upon site launch.

Data Cube: Track results and aggregate performance of the new domain vs. old domain to demonstrate successful transition of rankings across the BrightEdge 3 million+ Data Cube keyword index.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Keyword Visibility

For Share15 we are excited to have Jumpshot join us as a sponsor. They are also going to be hosting a lab where our attendees can go to learn more about trying to compete in the modern, saturated web.

We had the chance to sit down and chat with Randy Antin of Jumpshot and discuss the marketing industry as well as what the brand plans to share during their lab. Randy is the VP of Marketing and previously worked for Gap Inc, Perfect Escapes and Travelocity. He offered us some exciting insights, and we know that we are eager to see what their latest technology can offer.

All about Jumpshot

BrightEdge (BE): Can you tell us a little more about your business? Randy Antin (RA): Jumpshot is a marketing analytics platform that helps marketers understand their customers’ entire online lives. Users can easily access information such as the key sources of traffic to their site, the browsing and buying behavior on a website and where customers go once they leave the site. The Jumpshot platform makes it easy to map that entire customer journey.

The challenges of digital marketers

BE: What are the biggest challenges you feel digital marketers face in 2015? RA: Digital marketers often have deep insight into the performance of their own digital channels and website activity, but they don’t know what their customers are doing the 99.9% of the time when they are visiting other sites. How can marketers know how to provide the right content at the right time to their customers when they only understand a tiny slice of their online lives? With the ever-growing list of marketing opportunities, brands must make choices about what will be best for their business to drive customer acquisition and to help them continue the conversation with their existing customers. How can they decide which ones are truly best with this limited information? This is the biggest query of marketers today: how do I truly know where to engage my unique company’s audience. Sure, everyone is on Facebook and everyone uses Google. But is Pinterest really an essential place for me to be? Maybe I need to focus more on YouTube because my audience loves engaging with video even if they don’t come directly to my site as a result. We have found that these challenges are common for marketers across various industries. At Jumpshot, we address these problems.

BE: How important is it to understand the complete online customer journey? RA: Understanding the customer journey is critical in order to best optimize existing marketing activity and to launch new programs. For search, how can you optimize your SEO strategy if you don’t know which keywords convert best, which keywords are effective for your competitors or what your customers do next if they arrive on your page but do not make a purchase? Jumpshot provides a similar level of insight across all marketing channels so that you can qualify your investments and ensure that every program is receiving its proper attribution.

The incredible Share15 audience

BE: Can you tell us a bit about your lab at Share? RA: In our lab, we will discuss how to bring visibility back into the world of search. Since the search engines made their move to encrypted search both in paid and natural, marketers have been forced to rely on hacks, workarounds and estimations rather than actual visits and conversions. Our product is designed to show marketing experts not only how to regain exact keyword visibility, but also how to tie those keywords to conversions - for any website.

BE: What are you excited most about for Share? RA: We are huge fans of BrightEdge and the service their platform provides to their savvy customers. We think the technology complements our offerings perfectly. We know that the attendees of Share15 will not only understand the immense value that Jumpshot’s Keyword Elite product can return for them, but we think that this audience will also get extremely excited about what we’re offering. We want to partner with everyone to bring back a level of transparency to their search programs that has been taken away over the past few years.

All in fun

BE: Can you tell us something fun about yourself, Randy? RA: Sure! I’m an artist in my spare (ha) time. In my alternate life, I am an artist focused on abstract oil painting and needlepoint. Yes, needlepoint. On business trips, I can be spotted in airports and planes around the world with needles and yarn, which makes for occasional interesting conversations with travelers. Speaking with Randy and the rest of the Jumpshot team is always a pleasure and we cannot wait to continue the conversation in just over a month at Share. We encourage all our attendees to come and participate in these informative labs to see the latest industry technology in person. If you have not registered yet for Share15, make sure you do not miss this incredible opportunity. We look forward to seeing you there.

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

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

Identify Personas and Deliver RTP

Seventy four percent of consumers feel increasingly frustrated when the content of a website they are visiting does not address their needs. The idea of a one-size-fits-all approach to website design and marketing has begun to come crashing down. Consumers now live in an age where they expect companies to provide them with the information they seek and they expect it quickly. Real-time personalization gives organizations the power to create that individualized experience for customers. This experience will be rooted in answering consumer questions and moving them through the sales funnel. Central to the success of this endeavor is the creation of personas and using those personas to guide the real-time personalization of the website.

How to build personas

Every customer who arrives on your website will be completely unique. They will have their own pain points that are driving them to action and personal goals that they strive for. Despite the differences, however, most companies quickly realize that many of their customers can be grouped together into categories known as ‘personas’. These personas describe ideal customers, including their likely motivations, goals, budgets, and backgrounds. Personas make it possible for companies to provide the real-time personalization that has become so important in the digital era.

Building personas requires companies to have an intimate understanding of who exactly their customers are. It is worth noting that for many organizations, there is a difference between who the business believes heir customers to be and to whom they actually end up selling. Uncovering buyer personas requires organizations to take a close look at their current customers and compile research on their intended market. You should speak directly with your customers to learn about what motivated them to purchase and why they chose your company.

You can also use surveys, studies and other types of analytical information to understand who the customers are and what they seek. The information can then be compiled and used to develop the content and user experiences that customers desire when they arrive on the website. According to ITSMA, 85 percent of B2B marketers do not believe that they are using personas effectively, yet this step is critical to successfully engaging customers with real-time personalization.

• Create personas based upon genuine research - do not rely on assumptions, they are often inaccurate
• Make the personas feel like a real person - give them a name and even a photo
• Understand the persona’s pain points - knowing what motivates buyers is key to creating the user experience that will help them the most
• Focus on the people behind the persona and not the company they work for - even B2B professionals do not sell to a company, you are selling to a person

Once you have developed your personas, you can begin to create experiences for each potential customer when they visit your website.

Creating a real-time experience

The real-time personalization experience will ideally take place on several different levels. You can make your website adapt to the customer’s experience on a surface level by using features such as:

• geo-targeting - where your message, offers and information are particularly relevant to the location from which the visitor is accessing your site
• weather - particular industries, such as retail, may have success when they adapt their offerings according to the weather that the visitor is experiencing
• season/holidays - tailoring messages based upon the season and holidays that might be motivating customers
• channel – adjust messages based on what channel people arrive from, like organic search, paid search, PR article, direct response ad

Beyond these surface features, the site should respond to who the visitor is. As a customer interacts with a website, Big Data and machine learning can give the site a very clear picture of what the person seeks. Some of the information will be voluntarily offered, such as their name and that of their company, while other data can be gathered through website movements, such as the pages viewed and searches performed. There are a number of companies who can help companies track an individual’s movements on the website to develop personalized pages, including IBM. This information can then be combined with the profiles created for the personas to determine the type of content that will best speak to the user as they navigate the site.

A retail site might emphasize products that the user examined in the past or that are related to products they have purchased. A site emphasizing cleaning products might prominently display content about the benefits that speak best to this particular persona. The site should work to predict what the customer is looking for and help them easily find it.  

The real-time personalization beyond the website

The real-time experience should extend to all the interactions the person has with the brand. This includes emails that are triggered by certain actions on the website. By using the information gleaned from website interactions and forms that the user has filled out, emails sent to the page visitors should use segmentation and relevant content to speak to the customer needs. Emails should automatically fill in key personal information, such as the person’s name and company name. The content of the email should focus on providing information that is useful for the person based upon their buyer persona and their action on the website. A first time user who is a major decision maker at their company, but has only read a few blog posts, will not likely respond to an email detailing pricing plans.

Providing page visitors with a personalized experience creates happy customers and higher conversion rates. When organizations take the time to produce individualized content, they see between a 19 percent and 21 percent increase in sales. Taking the time to leverage powerful buyer personas and creating an ideal buying experience for site visitors can help companies boost the bottom line and interact more efficiently with their customers.  

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge One of the Fastest Growing Companies in the US

BrightEdge, the leader in content performance marketing, is honored to be named in the top 20% of the nation’s fastest-growing companies in this year’s Inc. 5000 list of America's Fastest-Growing Companies. The marketing technology space has become more crowded than ever and this award is testament to our market-leading growth, focus on innovation, and commitment to customer success. BrightEdge was also the highest-ranked content marketing technology company on the list.

Growth and Momentum

With 587-percent growth over the past three years, we plan on continuing that momentum. From where we stand today, it’s hard to believe that only eight years ago, BrightEdge was a two-person operation based out of our CEO Jim Yu’s kitchen. Fast forward to today, and thanks to every person on the BrightEdge team, we were able to take BrightEdge from a bootstrapped start-up to an established, global marketing enterprise technology leader.

Innovation and Customer Success

Beyond the talent and hard work of our team, this recognition is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to our customers.

Customer success is our number-one priority at BrightEdge and the driving force behind our innovation. This has made it possible for us to maintain significant year-over-year growth.

Innovation and customer success will continue to be the main tenets of our business. We would like to thank our customers, our executive staff, and our investors for helping us get where we are today. Read the rest of the Inc. 5000 list here or visit our awards page to learn more about the slew of acclaim and awards BrightEdge has received.

Join the BrightEdge community at Share15

At Share15 the team will be showcasing the latest innovations set to change the content performance marketing landscape alongside many of the world's leading brands - such as Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Wiley, Marriott, Adobe – and over 1000 digital marketers. Come join the conversation on 21^st – 23^rd September at the Westin St Francis in San Francisco.