There are more than 1.5 billion mobile internet users worldwide and roughly 80 percent of internet users own a smartphone. If these numbers do not encourage you to take advantage of the growing trend of mobile search, then Google’s recent announcement should give you the final push you need.

The changes coming to Google 2015

On February 26, 2015 Google broke with tradition and gave marketers incredible insight into changes they have planned for their search algorithms and the exact day they will go into effect. Specifically, they announced that on April 21 mobile search engine results pages (SERPs) will be impacted by the mobile-friendliness of a website.

Google wants to make it easier for people using mobile devices to access websites that have been optimized for use on that device. In less than three weeks their algorithms for mobile search will shift to reflect this desire.

This is the first time that Google has given website owners forewarning about an impending change and the day the change will occur.

As site owners head back to their site dashboards, here is what they should know about the importance of this announcement.

What website owners should expect

When describing the effect these changes will have on mobile SERPs, the Google developers specifically said that there will be a ‘significant impact on search results’.

Google has encouraged website owners to take into account mobile users for a while now, hinting that they would be prioritized, but until recently it has been possible for websites to perform well without worrying too much about mobile optimization, including that for the mobile e-commerce. That will quickly change.

Now site owners who have not taken steps to ensure that their sites are mobile-ready can expect to have their mobile rankings hit hard. For businesses receiving steady customers from internet searches, this can result in a major drop in income. Google has made this announcement early so that sites have the opportunity to prepare. Remember that the goal of the search engine is to provide end users with the information they seek and a good user experience consuming it.

If your site has valuable information that performs well because customers find you helpful, they want you to continue to rank well. They simply want to ensure that their users have an optimal experience no matter what device they use.

How should companies prepare?

Google itself offers two fantastic tools that allow you to test your website to see how well it performs on mobile devices.

The first is the Mobile Usability Report that is found in your Google Webmaster Tools.

The second is a Mobile-Friendly Test that can be run on a specific page URL.

Use these two tools to gain a better understanding of how mobile-friendly your site already is and where your main challenges lie. Remember that a well-optimized mobile website will make it easy for customers to find the information they seek and complete their desired tasks on mobile devices. Think about your desired customer and the actions they are likely to perform on your mobile site. Are they there to research or find merchandise? Are they looking up an address or phone number on the way to your restaurant?

Mobile search now accounts for about 60 percent of online traffic to websites, and people use their devices to complete a myriad of tasks. Consider all the possible actions customers might take from a mobile device and use these ideas to guide the planning of the mobile site and the navigation menu. Navigation should be intuitive and easy to use with fingers instead of with a mouse. A desktop site optimized for mobile will also have a responsive web design.

Responsive web design has removes the need for alternate mobile versions of websites and gives you the ability to host a single website that automatically adjusts to the size screen that it is displayed upon. Page visitors do not want to have to scroll to the side to read a news article or have to perpetually zoom in to read the text on the page. The mobile-friendly web design removes this potential hassle. In addition to the responsive web design, Google will be looking at elements such as:

• whether or not the fonts scale for easy ready on smaller screens
• if the touch elements, such as buttons, are easy to use and spaced away from other touch elements
• if the website relies on Flash, which tends to not play well in mobile browsers

It is also important for companies to carefully consider how the demands of internet users differ depending upon where they are and the type of device they are using. The optimized mobile SEO tools used by BrightEdge, for example, allow customers to get a close look at the share of voice in their industry across various devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and compare them.

BrightEdge was the first to release Mobile SEO technology in August 2013, including mobile analytics, Mobile Share of Voice, and Mobile Site Audit. And, BrightEdge has continuously paved the way with technology and research to assist brands in defining a mobile search strategy.

BrightEdge 2014 mobile research has found that 62% of search results vary from mobile to desktop, and that tablets and smartphones make up 35% of organic search traffic. More importantly, misconfigured websites lost 68% of smartphone traffic.

Today in 2015 many brands are concerned about the impact of Google’s Mobile Algorithm update. Meanwhile, BrightEdge customers have had technology in-place for two years to help them understand their rank and the competitive landscape across 605 local, global and mobile search engines - equipping them to win in the competitive mobile battleground.

How BrightEdge Helps with Mobile Optimization

BrightEdge takes mobile reporting beyond the webmaster and to the marketer with reporting that helps brands understand their SEO and content performance by device.

BrightEdge’s mobile SEO reporting allows users to track and measure mobile device performance with things like:

1. Measuring true rank by device in Universal Search (image, video, social).
2. Visibility into local SEO performance by keywords and keyword groups across cities.
3. Tracking and reporting on keyword trends and rankings across device type.
4. Optimizing mobile campaign performance for ecommerce.
5. Understanding the competitive SEO landscape and “share of voice” for a brand across mobile devices.

BrightEdge has offered a complete mobile solution for over 2 years that includes, rank and actual performance by device type used.  Using this information, website designers can gain a better understanding of how to cater to their mobile customers and how to optimize their site to attract them.

Not only will this now help to attract customers, but it can also now demonstrate to the Google spiders that this website takes mobile optimization seriously, which will boost search engine rankings. Google continuously works to update its search algorithms to better meet the needs of their users while websites engage in a perpetual struggle to optimize their content according to the latest Google algorithms.

With this unprecedented announcement, Google has provided site owners with the time they need to prepare for upcoming changes and everyone should take advantage of it.

Considering that mobile now comprises of more than 1/5 of the ecommerce market, making these changes should not only help companies successfully navigate the changes, but also help them capitalize on the ever-growing mobile marketplace. 

Marketer Profile: Mark Fiske is the Vice President of Channel Marketing at Ancestry, a recent BrightEdge customer, a Silicon Valley Search Engine Roundtable founding member and a graduate of Michigan State. Mark has been involved in digital media and search marketing for roughly the last ten years.

I met with Mark Fiske recently to discuss SEO, content, and marketing. He manages a substantial paid budget and a team that handles acquisition marketing across many different channels, including paid and natural search.

Erik: So what do you think is the biggest change in search?

Mark: I think most SEOs will say the move towards secure and the keyword ‘not provided’ data that one can use to optimize search efforts. Now understanding user behavior is more of an art than a science.

Erik: What's the opportunity in the changes if you know what you're doing?

Mark: With paid search I like to say, “You’re only as good as your four dumbest competitors.” Anybody can bid or pay up to skew the marketplace, so being a good marketer often means making the decision to sacrifice volume. That said, you face your best competitors when it comes to organic. As a result, there is often much more opportunity in being advanced in SEO.

You need every little edge that you can get in SEO, every 2% here and 3% there, to actually effect the change you need to get that position. And if you can actually understand and optimize against what's really working for you, you have a way to overcome those obstacles. Data can be material for your program when you think about where you might be applying manual effort of X today versus where you could be with that extra little bit of data to inform that same effort.

Erik: How easy or difficult is it for you to find SEO talent in the market right now?

Mark: It is incredibly difficult. There is a large amount of SEO talent that I've come across who are the very short-term oriented SEOs where they are really good at gaming a system, but they don't necessarily think about creating long-term value. That has been a big challenge. I think on the flip side, a lot of the individuals who have the right mindset about long-term value sometimes don't necessarily have that perfect mix of product, marketing and development background to enable them to effect change to the key components of SEO and infrastructure needed at enterprise organizations.

Erik: Why do you think there aren't more SEOs in the talent pool?

Mark: I'll say it...I've said it a million times, unfortunately SEO is not particularly sexy. In paid search, it’s a dollar in and you can have your dollar out the next day. SEO requires an individual who has a long-term mentality, who can focus on initiatives with a lot of dependencies, product development, and is patient and willing to take a data-driven mindset and kind of wait it out to see what the results of something are and then implement them more broadly. It is a unique person; when you look at the other roles that someone graduating today could go into, you don't see SEOs on the TV show Silicon Valley, right? You do see other types of marketers and functions. I think there is a perception challenge preventing interest in the space to start.

Erik: Has the move to universal search with the carousel at the top, videos, more pictures on top of the results page influenced any of your organic content strategies?

Mark: We haven't necessarily seen it in our category specifically because the types of queries that individuals might search for in our category are not as topical as the things that tend to trigger the carousel. As a result, we haven't really focused on taking advantage of that specific feature. I've definitely seen it in a lot of other areas like travel with Google's price comparison tools - hotels and things like that. We've been fortunate, but I also think we also need to be very wary because if you look at Google's drive to provide people information at their fingertips and what Google has done in other verticals, such as product shopping or search, there’s a real risk that Google could expand and disintermediate in new categories.

Erik: What kind of an opportunity is there in content? Has that opportunity evolved over the last five years?

Mark: I think a lot of traditional SEOs used to think of content as this is my or your link page or this is what I'm going to use to rank for a specific key word. Today content is more about fostering a relationship with your customer and educating as much as it is about capturing that customer initially.

Erik: So we talked a little bit about HTTPS. What are you doing with having a secure site as part of ‘not provided’?

Mark: There are two layers to that. One is how do you get the data that you need to better optimize your search programs. And the second layer of that is the ranking consideration - Google has fired a shot across the bow, so plan to move to HTTPS. They said this is not a large ranking factor night now, but we expect it will be at some point.

As far as using data to optimize in a world where HTTPS is obscuring a lot more, I think it has underscored the importance of us having really tight keyword and page mappings and understanding what that really means to us.

We look at ranking changes and understand what that means to page-level traffic against a specific key word and monitor page-level traffic with much more regularity and care. You still lose a lot of really meaningful information around keyword clustering and things like that. And those are things we've yet to really crack really as an organization.

Erik: What strategies in regard to external link building and development are you willing to share?

Mark: I still do think the good old fashioned elbow grease approach is incredibly important. If you're doing something and it works instantly, I’d be suspicious. If you're actually taking really great content and forming one-to-one direct relationships with advocates in your space and inspiring them to want to share that content, you're going to have a lot more long-term success. A lot of our effort is spent identifying these valuable influencers and targeted keywords. Not hundreds of thousands at a time but much smaller select groups and then having those discussions in a way that we can inspire and motivate them to share our content.

Erik: Have you ever had an experience with somebody using negative SEO against you, any black hat, any stuff that you needed to disavow?

Mark: Yeah, I think we see a lot of content duplication, content theft, things like that. Not necessarily black-hat SEO. It’s hard to say what the intentions of those individuals were, but there have definitely been situations where we had to disavow the links from stolen content, then file reports to Google to ensure that our unique content can remain our unique content.

Erik: So you don't think anybody's given you bad links to get you a Penguin penalty?

Mark: We haven't seen anything. We monitor webmaster tools and look at our link profile and consistently report on them. I've certainly heard things from other organizations that it is a challenge, particularly in more competitive niches. Fortunately in our space, everyone is very motivated to build the category as a whole and there is less influence from the dark side of the SEO space.

Erik: What are you doing in re-targeting? What's been effective for you?

Mark: Our retargeting playbook is actually pretty straightforward in that it's all about taking what you know about the user, serving them personalized content to the extent you're allowed to, legally and without being creepy, and then really focusing on recency of message and target frequency. What has been impactful is figuring out what is actually meaningful to customers. What they have told you about themselves and then making sure that you reflect that in messaging and then getting that message out there as quickly as possible.

Have a bid strategy that focuses heavily on recency without necessarily throwing away the impressions that might be months out. So focus on your traditional DSP-based buys for the first 90 days, and then look at tools like custom audience lists and others to continue to capture that audience after their cookie might be stale or deleted. As display moves more and more towards the one-to-one world, you'll see media inflation against that type of audience buying. I think right now your high-value business targets are very inexpensive because businesses don't understand how to value that and how to buy those audiences at scale. But as more and more people hop on board I think the market place will kind of normalize and you'll see your 45-old year business executives getting valued a lot more highly then maybe his 16-year-old daughter.

Erik: Have you ever heard of anybody scraping names from social sites to build a list?

Mark: I've talked to a couple of B2B organizations that mentioned that as a tactic. What they'll do is they'll scrape names from social sites. They'll even scrape it directly via the Bing API and get massive lists and using third party tools. You can understand the email address format for a certain domain to generate lists of basically valid emails that they against target companies. And then run custom audience lists against those on Facebook or even use a targeter such as LiveRamp to deliver a very targeted display messaging program.

Erik: And did those people say they got good results from that?

Mark: They were bragging, so it definitely seemed like it was working for them. I think they were smart enough not to go and take that scraped data and use it to for underhanded activities such as unsolicited email. It seems it's been working well for them when used in a limited way for display targeting.

Erik: Have you tried content targeting with cookie matching or cookie pooling against the text and topical data.

Mark: In paid content marketing, I think the two largest paid content marketing providers are Outbrain and Taboola. They're usually at the bottom of articles on news sites such as Fox News and CNN, but they are also present on thousands if not hundreds of thousands of local newspapers and news syndication sites. And those are largely targeted based on the relevance of the content related to the article the user is viewing. If you're viewing in the lifestyle category, someone might see a "ten reasons why XYZ is the ultimate cleaner" or things along those lines.

Erik: How many tests or experiments do you run per year?

Mark: We perform hundreds of tests a year around content engagement and what behavior we see following consumption of that content. So for example, we might test what a piece of content posted to Facebook around Justin Bieber, which is not necessarily aligned with our demographic, versus a historical event, versus any number of different pieces and actually theming that out and then measuring the response rate - not just on a click basis, but what does that do to engagement and other ancillary metrics. And we have seen meaningful engagement differences between those types of content.

Erik: What's your testing tool?

Mark: We use Adobe Target primarily. We've also used Optimizely for maybe a lighter-touch, lower-impact test where we're willing to focus more on upfront metrics. We have a team dedicated to a robust testing practice.

Erik: Are the testers on the digital marketing team? What types of tests do you run?

Mark: Testing falls under product marketing team. This ensures our testing and optimization informs our product marketing strategy. But when you ask what types of tests we're doing I think many organizations go to where the ROI is greatest, and when you look at the bulk of our tests they still are in the sign up or conversion funnels. The types of test that have been impactful for me being on the paid side of the house are much more around ‘how do I get the conversion rate up from paid media enough so that I can afford to buy more media?’ An example is paid search, where a test can improve the amount you are able to bid, raising average position from five to one or two and driving exponential volume as a result.

Erik: What's the biggest test result you've generated this calendar year for a delta on the test?

Mark Fiske: I can't provide specifics, but we have been able to realize 20%+ gains from specific traffic sources, so it was a very meaningful impact to conversation rate. You kind of get used to finding 2% here, 4% there and then when you have a big one like that - it's great.

Erik: How much more important is content development and deployment than it was 2 years ago? Why?

Mark Fiske: I’d argue content development has always been important, but as others realize the importance, it becomes increasingly difficult to break through the clutter. As a result, the infographics commonplace two years ago might not necessarily cut it and a focus on meaningful rich content grows over time.

Erik: Which of the features on the BrightEdge platform do you think you will now be able to leverage?

Mark Fiske: We’re most excited for the more international search capabilities, allowing us to more easily optimize and manage across our portfolio of international sites. That said, we plan to utilize page reporting, dashboards and look forward to new functionalities such as Target integration.

How do I get a personalized BrightEdge demo for my website?

 

All marketing channels need content and each channel has its own unique set of practices that help with building an audience. 

The explosion of content as a driver of marketing success has left its mark already. Back in 2013, Gartner stated that content creation and management comprised the second largest share of digital marketing budgets – and that was years ago.

The organic search channel in particular is one that shouldn’t be overlooked. In a 2014 study by BrightEdge, we found that the organic search channel was the highest driver of traffic and revenue for a majority of the sectors studied. You can read more here.

When building an audience in organic search, how can you use content to help drive organic traffic and revenue for your brand? Let’s look at the three best practices for building an audience:

• Target your audience's demand
• Optimize content to help your audience find it
• Measure content so you know what resonates 

1. Target Your Audience’s Demand. Sure, you can guess what content your target audience wants to consume, but with all the tools we have at our disposal today, why would you?

An informed organic content strategy starts with first understanding what topics your audience is searching for in search engines like Google. This is so you can create the content you want to be found for a searcher’s query – thus building an audience.

In order to start, you need to establish a couple things:

1. Find and use a Web analytics platform that can help you find those topics that your audience is searching for.
2. Understand how different content can perform in the search results, for example, video versus text to determine your content’s format (see this research we did on how video fares in the search results).

2. Optimize Content to Help Your Audience Find It. Once you’ve targeted the topics your audience wants to consume and have created the content, you need to optimize it for the search engines so your audience can more easily find it online.

Optimization can mean different things to different SEO professionals – everything from basic on-page tactics for Web pages to implementing schema and beyond.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu gives some basic steps to optimization in this post for Marketing Land and discusses how to address a process for content creators to optimize as they are creating in this post for Search Engine Land.

3. Measure Content So You Know What Resonates. When it comes to measuring how your audience is responding to content in the organic search channel, we have no shortage of options in Web analytics. The key is:

1. Making the effort to track, including taking the time to be educated about your analytics provider and everything it can do for your measurement goals.
2. Tracking the key performance indicators that matter to your business and your organic content campaigns; this can include anything from measuring traffic and social shares to understanding the Web pages driving revenue.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest setbacks marketers face today is not utilizing tracking at all or not having access to quality data as they attempt to stitch multiple fragmented tools together to get a “big picture” view of their content and audience.

In a recent article for Marketing Land, Jim talks about the mounds of data marketers are tasked with sifting through and how the lack of integrated data is doing more harm than good when building an audience.

His advice it to let the machines work for you, not against you:

One of the most efficient ways to deal with big data in our marketing programs is to allow the machines to pull it all in from multiple sources (all the channels and media that matter to your content), make sense of it for you, and output it in a language a marketer can understand and act upon. The right analytics platform should not only be able to integrate multiple data points, but also should make recommendations via machine learning, offering predictions for your next move based on learning from previous data. In short, the platform is making recommendations versus just following instructions.

Of course, the whole reason you want to track is to learn what’s working and isn’t working with your content for your target audience in the organic search channel. You’ll then know how to allocate your resources accordingly, focusing on making the best-performing content even more visible to your audience.

The three pillars discussed in today’s post should create a solid foundation for building an audience through your content in organic search. Building your content comes next – and that’s the fun part! 

Did You Know… That the BrightEdge platform can automatically QA the implementation of optimized content recommendations in just a few steps? BrightEdge can help to save valuable time and resources while ensuring that content recommendations are loaded to spec. Talk with your agency CSM for more information!

Example Scenario – You're building workflows where your SEO team is responsible for identifying pages to optimize and the client is responsible for implementation of those recommendations. Once implemented the SEO team must QA all updates.

1. Determine which pages can be improved via on-page content updates by utilizing the Recommendations Engine. Determine opportunities based on page priority and/or number of outstanding recommendations.

2. Select a page and launch into on-page content recommendations by selecting “Optimize My Page”. Choose the individual page elements you’d like to update (e.g. Page Title, Meta Description, Heading tags, etc.). Input the desired content to be updated on the page and assign a user to take action.

3. Once the BrightEdge platform identifies that the defined content recommendations have been implemented the task will automatically be “closed” out in the Task management system!

 

Use BrightEdge when building workflows for efficiency and best QA practices.

Since 2013 BrightEdge customers have been prepared for the massive mobile shift. BrightEdge was the first to release Mobile search technology way back in March 2013 with mobile and tablet ranking analysis. In August 2013 we built upon this innovation with Mobile Share of Voice and Mobile Site Audit. The BrightEdge platform has been making it easier for customers to optimize and measure mobile performance ever since.

Innovation, customer success and the BrightEdge mobile solution

At BrightEdge our core value is customer success and this value is reflected in the market leading innovations that we continually deliver in our platform. As a leading SaaS technology provider, BrightEdge has delivered over 85 product releases to-date -- all delivered seamlessly to customers accounts without any user action necessary.

BrightEdge has continuously paved the way with technology and research to assist brands in mapping a mobile search strategy.

In 2014 our mobile research found that 62% of search results vary from mobile to desktop and that tablets and smartphones make up 35% of organic search traffic. See how it's helped out customers:

“With BrightEdge’s Mobile SEO we’re able to grow our mobile performance month over month, and it’s a great win for us internally because we’re able to visually understand how mobile is performing by device type across our channels”  - Experian

“From a travel and hospitality perspective, mobile is seeing a tremendous amount of growth. For Marriott we need to make sure that we’re on top of our game from a mobile perspective and BrightEdge visibility will definitely help us” - Marriott    

2015 - BrightEdge customers are ready for the Google mobile algorithm update

Fast forward to 2015 and knowing how to optimize your site for mobile requires a deep understanding of the experience your site is creating today in order to make improvements for tomorrow.

Many brands are concerned about the impact of Google’s mobile algorithm update.

Meanwhile, BrightEdge customers have had technology in place for two years to help them understand their rank and the competitive landscape across 605 local, global and mobile search engines - equipping them to win in the competitive mobile battleground.

BrightEdge takes mobile search solutions beyond the webmaster and to the marketer with a comprehensive offering that helps brands understand their organic search and content performance by device.

The BrightEdge Mobile solution allows users to track and measure mobile device performance by:

1. Tracking and reporting on keyword trends and rankings across device type (desktop, mobile, and tablet).
2. Measuring actual rank by device in Universal Search with Blended Rank (image, video, social, quick answers, and local 3-pack).
3. Providing visibility into local organic performance by keywords and keyword groups across cities.
4. Understanding mobile readiness by providing marketers with a complete Mobile Site Audit.
5. Optimizing and understand actual mobile performance based on a deep integration between BrightEdge and mobile analytics.
6. Understanding the competitive organic landscape and Share of Voice for a brand across mobile devices.

The entire BrightEdge platform is mobile aware. Whether you are looking at actual business performance, rank, or competitive performance – mobile is integrated throughout the BrightEdge platform.

The dashboard overview image below illustrates the BrightEdge mobile search solution.

 

Conclusion

BrightEdge customers have been prepared for mobile search optimization since 2013 and our commitment to customer success and market leading innovation equips marketers with the insights and recommendations necessary to succeed with mobile search.

As part of a new ‘mobile solution’ blog post series BrightEdge will be taking a deeper dive into the platform mobile solution as per points 1-6 above. Stay tuned for more over the coming weeks.

Read more about mobile optimization on the BrightEdge blog:

• Mobile Site Optimization: 4 Reports You Can’t Live Without
• Mobile & Local: Insights for a Multi-Device & Hyper-Local World

Tune in to hear BrightEdge VP of Marketing and Products Brad Mattick speak with the Glenn Gow, the CEO of Crimson Marketing, in an exclusive podcast interview on Moneyball for Marketing.

The Moneyball for Marketing podcast invites leading industry guests to examine how marketers can apply big data and technology to improve their strategies. Brad sat down to discuss the state of content marketing.

In the 20-minute podcast titled, Brad and Glenn dig into the enormous influx of digital content that’s created and shared daily, the challenge of making sense of all of it, and how to effectively use the data that’s available to marketers. Nowadays, nearly every brand is a publisher, producing seemingly endless amounts of content to compete for the ultimate prize of consumers’ attention.

The result is what we like to refer to as a “content battleground” — and in order to win that battle, brands will have to be identify what content works, and what doesn’t. Brad shares best practices for winning the content battle, including why brands need to incorporate automated data insights to guide them on the “why’s” and “how’s” of their marketing strategies, and why brands must move past first party data alone to understand the broader competitive landscape.

Content does not live in a vacuum, so being able to understand the ins and outs of your competitors will give you a leg up when it comes time to battle. Just as athletes watch rivals’ film to prep and practice prior to the big game, marketers can prepare for the content battleground by understanding competitor strategy.

Check out the recording to hear Brad’s take on where content marketing is headed and how brands can use data technology to understand content marketing performance and win on the content battleground.

For more details on the content battleground, also check out our new thought leadership white paper, produced jointly by BrightEdge and SAP.

This free-to-download paper shares insights, best practices, and a three-part process to guarantee content marketing success.