The BrightEdge platform provides unparalleled insight into the natural search competitive landscape for your clients. BrightEdge gives you the information you need to wow your clients while empowering you to make data driven strategic decisions. Talk with your CSM for more recommendations on driving strategic competitive insights!

• Share of Voice (SOV): Differentiate your reporting to compare against both “perceived” (tracked) competitors and “actual” (SOV full landscape) competitors. Paint a picture to clients on how they’re performing against most important core competitors and actual market share against all competing sites. 

• Data Cube: Identify content gaps and opportunities for expansion for your clients. Explore Data Cube results for any keyword or competitor (including full domain, sub-folder or individual URL). Build a case for developing new content by uncovering new terms that are driving qualified visitors to competitor sites. 

• Content Analysis: Compare how competitors are leveraging keywords and marketing copy in the most important on-page elements (including: page title, description, heading tags, body copy). Mirror commonalities such as the primary keyword listed first in the page title and communicate your differentiators within the meta-description. 

• ‘Likelihood to Rank’ Analysis: Determine how difficult it will be to improve upon current rank based on offsite factors such as inbound links, anchor text and social media activity. Prioritize low hanging fruit for quick wins while building a long-term strategy for highly competitive keywords. 

As discussed in our recent post on email marketing performance metrics, this “traditional” channel is increasingly providing an impressive return on investment and playing a central role in achieving business goals for marketers the world over. In this post we’ll go over three key tactics to realize the most ROI and better conversions from your email marketing efforts: lead nurturing, content repurposing and content personalization or dynamic content.

Tactic 1: Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing can be an elusive concept. Simply defined, lead nurturing is offering prospects a consistent stream of content that is helpful, useful, entertaining or otherwise engaging to encourage them to move forward in the sales funnel. By “warming” potential customers who have supplied their contact information (namely, their email addresses), lead nurturing lays the groundwork for facilitating actual sales conversations and conversions down the road. It’s a smart strategy to start off light with emails containing smaller bits of non-sales content, so subscribers aren’t overwhelmed or otherwise put off. Examples include a brief blog post or a short video clip on a relevant, trending topic.

As the nurturing program matures and leads become more engaged, the content shared can be more involved and graduate to including a call to action (CTA). In the meantime, however, the goals of lead nurturing are to establish rapport with prospects and build their trust in your brand by demonstrating its credibility and authority. As lead nurturing campaigns are ultimately intended to support business goals, the frequency of emails should be determined by the speed of your brand’s sales cycle. For instance, for relatively long sales cycles such as a consumer car purchase or a manufacturing equipment investment, the lead nurturing process may take up to a year or more. In this case, a monthly email may be the most appropriate. On the other end of the spectrum, if your offer is time-sensitive and the sales cycle is relatively fast, a bi-weekly email cadence may be in order.

Tactic 2: Content Repurposing

Closely related to lead nurturing is content repurposing. As the term implies, content repurposing means recycling significant, information-rich content, such as white papers, case studies, videos and presentations into email materials for lead nurturing programs. By repurposing time- and cost-intensive content assets, breaking them out into smaller bits of more “digestible” information for lead nurturing, brands can extend their longevity and realize a greater return on the initial investment. You can employ this cost-effective strategy using most any substantive content asset.

For instance, do you have a lengthy white paper? Slicing it up into several interesting factoids or translating them into an infographic will provide you with resources to share with prospects in your lead nurturing campaign. The same applies to longer videos; rather than email the entire video, consider chopping it into brief clips that can be consumed in under a minute. Given the relatively short attention span of consumers and the need to not tax their time and patience, abbreviating and repurposing content is a win-win solution for both your brand’s overall content ROI and email marketing performance.

Tactic 3: Content Personalization

Referred to as “dynamic content,” this email strategy allows for personalized, targeted emails based on user behavior, location and other key demographic data as well as the customer’s sales stage. This is a type of email marketing automation and greatly improves on traditional, generic email “blasts.” By sending targeted communications informed by essential subscriber data, your message become more relevant and will likely realize more engagement and higher conversions. Salesforce.com is a popular provider of this functionality. Keep in mind though that there are several software applications available on the market for developing and implementing dynamic content email campaigns depending on your needs, budget and capabilities. A simple Google or Bing search will display several options from which to choose. In an example of well-honed dynamic content, Salesforce (cited above) shows how an email message from Northern Trail Outfitters targeted towards women and featuring a time-sensitive sale appears:

 

Clearly, this email content would prove far more relevant and compelling than a generalized “blast” to all subscribers, regardless of gender. The more parameters specified in a dynamic content software application, the more targeted and effective the email message. By leveraging these three email marketing strategies, your business can achieve greater efficiency and better conversions. It’s a relatively small investment yielding superior results and clearly worth your while.

There are an estimated 30 million small businesses on Facebook. You face stiff competition when it comes to engaging your potential customers with your company. You want to optimize your content to improve your visibility and prove your expertise. When you share your social content by using the Open Graph protocol you give your site the tools it needs to take that engagement to the next level.  

What exactly does the Open Graph protocol offer?

When you run the Open Graph protocol on your website, you turn it into a rich ‘graph’ object, giving you better control over how your material appears on sites like Facebook. When you do not use Open Graph, you leave the appearance of your shared content to the mercy of the automated content generators of the social site. Using the protocol allows you to optimize your content for clicks within these networks, which can then in turn impact your traffic, brand reputation and even your search engine rankings. When your content gets noticed and regularly shared, it will increase the links to your website, the number of visitors to your website and the engagement of your brand online.  

Social Site Audit and Open Graph

Having content-sharing posts show up incorrectly on social media sites is a common problem. Social site audits, such as this sample from BrightEdge's ContentIQ, can help show companies their own most frequent errors, which can often be corrected by using the Open Graph protocol. You can leverage ContentIQ to perform a social site audit or dive deeper with a full site audit.   

How to use the Open Graph protocol

To take advantage of the Open Graph protocol, you should produce tags for the following areas:

Step 1. og:title

This Open Graph tag will title your content. You want this title to be between 60 and 90 characters but not longer than 100. If your title goes beyond 100 characters, it will be automatically shortened to 88.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”An Engaging Title Here”/>

Step 2. og:url

This Open Graph tag is particularly useful if you have more than one URL for the same content and want to designate one for all your social shares. This tag will dictate the canonical URL for your page.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.yourwonderfulsite.com”/>

Step 3. og:type

This Open Graph tag will describe the type of content you are sharing. There are a number of different types of content that can be shared using this system. For example, you can share:

• Web-based content
  • articles
  • websites
• entertainment-oriented content
  • books
  • movies
• people
  • actors
  • politicians

To see the full list of available types you can visit this site.

If you do not indicate a specific type of content, ‘website’ is generally assumed by default. This particular Open Graph protocol tag can be important if the content represents something in real-life. For example, if you are sharing a book and a user ‘likes’ your content on Facebook, then the book will then appear in her Interest section on Facebook.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:type” content=”website” />

Step 4. og:description

This description controls how the link will be described when it shows up in someone’s feed. You do not have to worry about keywords since it does not impact SEO, but you should focus on engaging copy. It is best to use about 200 characters.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:type” content=”An engaging, entertaining website description.” />

Step 5. og:image

Pictures offer so much value for boosting engagement with your readers. When you do not use Open Graph tags, then when you content is displayed, any image on the page can be selected. This could even be an ad image or no image at all! You can use images up to 5MB and the resolution of 1200 pixels x 627 pixels tends to do the best job of attracting attention without exceeding Facebook limits. A well-used image can produce an eye-catching status like this one:

As your image gets smaller, particularly below 400 pixels, it looks more like a thumbnail, which will not attract as much attention. When you create the Open Graph tags for this portion of the protocol, you will be linking to a URL where the image is located.

This portion of the code will look something like:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.yourwonderfulsite.com/image-name.jpg” />

When you put all of these different tags together, you will see something that looks like this example produced by the Google Developers:

<html prefix="g: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head> <meta property="og:title" content="Enjoy Fireworks"> <meta property="og:description" content="Fireworks are beautiful. This article explains how beautiful fireworks are."> <meta property="og:image" content= "https://developers.google.com/web/imgs/fireworks.jpg"> <meta property="og:url" content= "discovery-and-distribution/optimizations-for-crawlers/social-sites.html"> <meta property="og:type" content="website">

In addition to these basic tags, there are also different types of optional metadata you can use to enhance your postings even further. These would include tags such as:

Step 6.  og:audio

This will allow you to add a URL to an audio file.

Step 7. og:locale

This Open Graph tag allows you to set the location and language territory. When you do not use this tag, the default will be set to the United States and English.

Step 8. og:site_name

This will allow you to display the name of the overall site if your content is part of something larger.

Step 9. og:video

This will allow you to use a video file that is supposed to go along with your content.

Don’t leave your social appearance to the algorithms. Using the Open Graph protocol will give you the tools you need to improve your social engagement on social sites, like Facebook. With an estimated 1.393 billion active users, however, it is worth the effort. Take advantage of these meta tags to capture the attention of more readers, helping to spread your brand and company message.  

In one of the previous blogs we looked at Search Impact Lifecycle and how a structured model can help SEO managers approach changes in search landscape and effectively drive SEO projects in large enterprises. Changes in search patterns can influence SEO and overall business content strategy. For example, shift in search trends from Branded (keywords that include company or product name) to Non-branded keywords suggests creation and optimization of content focused on themes built around these new search terms, for example, topics about specific product features and functionalities. Let’s take a look at the following case study.

Analysis of Branded and Non-branded keyword trends for one of the product showed an increasing trend towards use of Non-branded keywords (please see chart below, representing aggregate search volume for value keywords in both groups). This analysis is performed in the initial, “Change” phase of the SEO LifeCycle. Once we completed the analysis and identified opportunities, we created a POV, got a buy-in, and planned a pilot, when we created 15 pages (SEO-localizing these in 14 Geos) focused on specific product features, targeting high-value Non-branded keywords. In the implementation phase, we optimized and published pages, focusing on user experience. We ensured that Tech SEO was addressed (page template coding, URL naming convention, page indexing, Geo Targeting, etc.). We also tested and selected best-performing Title and Meta Description messaging to maximize CTR from search results and worked on creating cross-links to these new pages from select theme-relevant pages to enhance user experience and also help page indexing and theme.

Search engines indexed the new pages, established theme relevancy and we started to see a steady progress over time for the main SEO KPIs. When analyzing the impact, we looked at the visibility of target Non-branded keywords, using BrightEdge SEO platform. Specifically, we were interested in progress of rankings of preferred landing pages on first page of Google search results (blue area on the bar-chart, screenshot below).

Chart: page visibility in Google (source: BrightEdge platform)

We also tracked business SEO KPIs including visits, trials and units sold, using Adobe web analytics platform. Pages dedicated to Non-branded optimization started to contribute to the business with an increasing pace. Contribution of these pages to the overall SEO of the project increased from about 4% of all SEO visits in the first three months of the pilot to over 60% of SEO visits for the project after two years.

Chart: page visibility in Google (source: Adobe web analytics platform)

Based on the impact case study, we proceeded to identify additional opportunities and expanded content themes and optimization to cover more feature details, and also expand optimization to more Geos.

What’s next: In future posts we’ll cover other case studies on how Search Impact Lifecycle allows to steer SEO projects easier, including Technical SEO, Geo Targeting, SEO testing, and more.

Share15, the leading content and digital marketing industry event, is now accepting speaker nominations. Over 1000+ digital and content thought leaders, brands and agencies are set to gather at the Westin St. Francis hotel in the heart of San Francisco from September 21^st -23^rd. We encourage you to book your place now as capacity is limited.

The Share15 theme: Share insights – elevate performance 

The Share15 theme this year is based around two essential elements fundamental to the success of marketers regardless of their discipline – the sharing of insights and the subsequent elevation of performance. BrightEdge invests heavily in the success of the digital community, and at Share15 this year the objective of peer-to-peer knowledge transfer is, once again, top of the priority list. The Share15 elevate program is being specifically built to focus on the key trends that fuel the new digital and content marketing economy and deliver insights and practical takeaways to elevate personal and professional marketing performance.

Tracks, labs, forums networking events and more 

Following on from the outstanding success of Share14 the team at BrightEdge has been collaborating closely with speakers, customers and industry thought leaders to shape an agenda that reflects how our industry is evolving. Key topics will focus on practical strategies that help marketers take advantage of the Content Performance Marketing Sweet Spot where owned, earned and paid media converge. This year Share15 will have three dedicated tracks focused on:

• SEO Evolution
• Content Marketing Convergence
• Digital Marketing Integration

Breakout sessions will include practical case studies and knowledge centric from brands, agencies and Silicon Valley technology partners. General sessions will discuss the latest trends and the leading issues across SEO, Content Marketing and Digital marketing. In addition to these three breakout tracks hands-on labs will allow you to interact with product experts who will provide guidance and best practices with the latest products, features and solutions from BrightEdge and our partners. Special networking events are also being planned, alongside the now legendary BrightEdge party, with more detail and exclusive invitations to follow.

Call for speakers now open 

Due to the overwhelming response and requests to speak at Share already we are opening submissions early. If you have an interesting success story to share, practical insights or performance-related case studies then we want to hear from you. In fact, the Share15 attendees and BrightEdge community of over 20,000 marketing professionals want to hear from you! See videos from our outstanding speaker lineup from Share14. To submit a speaking proposal or nominate a speaker, please fill out the speaking submission form. Identify the track and proposed topic. At this early stage we are open to your topic suggestions to help formulate and shape track topics of most value to the community. Because of the high expected number of submissions not all speakers will be selected. Over the coming weeks we will be adding topics to tracks based on speaking proposals and community feedback. Elevate performance and join the best marketers at Share15.

Read more about Share:

Share15: Shaping The Future of Organic Content Performance

Share Insights Blog Posts Share15 Website

In an attempt to reward sites creating quality content, keep searchers secure and to deter blackhat SEO tactics that focus solely on keyword ranking, Google no longer shows you how your site ranks for keywords. However, any SEO professional worth their weight in salt understands that keywords are still an important part of search engine optimization.

The important question most of the SEOs have is: How to get keyword-level data which is actual and not an estimate?

It's not good enough to simply estimate your rank and visits especially when those estimates might be way off. You'll need to find the right SEO platform to provide the information that Google once offered.

BrightEdge’s Page-Based SEO and Real Metrics Based on Actuals

BrightEdge is the first and only platform to solve secure search to reproduce keyword-level data. We use various APIs to integrate seamlessly with your Analytics and Google Webmaster tools data enabling you view the keyword data at page level. Through and API the BrightEdge platform imports actual performance data from Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Coremetrics and Webtrends. Google Webmaster Tools data is integrated within BrightEdge labs. We know that SEO for the greater part of a decade has focused on keyword research and usage. There's no denying that this has been effective, but with Google’s shift towards 100% secure search, the metrics and methodology SEO practitioners have been using have dramatically changed.

BrightEdge saw the shift to secure search coming and doubled-down on its page reporting solution and created the Secure Search Manifesto as a guide book on the not provided highway.  SEO in 2015 can use some of the tried-and-true tactics that incorporate keywords, including site structure; however, search engine optimization must now be more than that. This is why page-based reporting and SEO makes so much sense. But what exactly does this method mean? This page-centric approach does away with the single-keyword optimization, for example. Webmasters and SEO experts alike need to recognize when multiple keywords apply. However, not all keywords are created equal, either. Prioritizing is important with page-based optimization efforts.

Let's say your website sells shoes, and woman's shoes are among the most popular. When creating the page for this category, there are obviously several semantic keywords you can use. But you should prioritize high heel shoes over woman's oxfords if those are the more popular product. To continue with your page-centric search engine optimization, you'll want to beef up internal links to your site's most popular pages. After all, that's what people are looking for, isn't it? Then, you'll want to use traditional SEO tactics such as earning quality backlinks to your most popular pages not just to your domain.

You'll want to follow suit by promoting these pages via social media, too. Share the newest styles of women's dress shoes on Pinterest, post coupons for a specific category on Facebook and let people know when you've updated stock on Twitter. Every post can include a keyword to help your SEO efforts. Plus, page-specific promotion helps to draw in visitors who want to do more than just window shop. For each of these shares, you'll want to use tracking links that you can plug into your SEO.

Making the Move to an SEO Platform

Obviously, it takes more time and effort to optimize and promote multiple pages than it does to work with a single page, but your results should prove more fruitful. You'll need to have the right tools to verify this, however. Site analytics you can get from a single source, whether it be Google, Facebook or Twitter, are limited and don't always paint an accurate picture of your entire SEO campaign. You might get information about keywords from one tool but have to use another to analyze keywords. That's why you need a rounded SEO platform such as BrightEdge.

A full-fledged SEO platform provides answers to multiple questions and integrates with social media and other tools you already use, so you truly get the big picture and not just estimates. There are other perks to BrightEdge including the ability to scale with the possibility of tracking millions of pages and the associated data, which is important for larger sites and even enterprises that are concerned with SEO. However, there's no point to an SEO tool that is this robust if it's rigid. Fortunately, BrightEdge is flexible, and you can customize it to your own needs to track specific data that might be important to you.

BrightEdge and Webmaster Tools

While your marketing efforts will undoubtedly become easier when you use a capable platform such as BrightEdge, this doesn't mean that you won't find tools such as Google's Webmaster Tools useful. In fact, Webmaster Tools and BrightEdge work quite well together, and we've got some advice that will help them marry you to understand your metrics even better. BrightEdge can fill in the gaps while Webmaster Tools still provides with data about click-through, clicks, impressions and backlinks -- the very real analytics we've been focusing on this entire time. In fact, Webmaster Tools even enabled site owners and SEO pros to filter by specific keywords, which is crucial to getting the most out of your SEO campaign efforts. BrightEdge also has a feature that will "reverse index" your website to determine exactly which keywords are working for your pages. With this feature, you can even find keywords that might be helping you even though you're not actively utilizing them in your SEO strategy. You can then add any of those keywords to your campaigns to leverage them.

How well does BrightEdge work with individual page reporting? You'll get actual analytics detailing visits, backlinks and even social media mentions of specific URLs. BrightEdge will also show you changes in revenue and visits over time. BrightEdge integration with Webmaster Tools is nearly seamless after initial setup, and there's one extra key feature to point out.

With BrightEdge, you're not just limited to search and visit data in the last 90 days. This enables you to form a more complete picture of your search engine optimization success over time without having to export data to spreadsheets to ensure you can still see it three months in the future!

Webmaster Tools integration is just one of the features the engineering team at BrightEdge has worked hard to leverage. The innovations at BrightEdge have resulted in a comprehensive platform that provides more benefits than any singular SEO tool or even a multitude of tools awkwardly combined together. Any webmaster who also keeps these tenets in mind will be able to develop strong and comprehensive search engine optimization strategies that won't just work in 2015 but into next year an beyond! You'll be able to roll with any changes from Google, even if those changes suddenly exclude data you'd been relying on for years. But tracking these real analytics would be nearly impossible without an all-encompassing SEO platform, especially if you had only relied on Google's tools in the past. Don’t forget:

1. You need real and not estimated analytics
2. Rank will always matter for CTR and traffic
3. Focus on page-centric search engine optimization
4. All data is important and connected to other data
5. The platforms and partners you rely on for SEO must be trustworthy and provide data and recommendations based on actuals and not estimates

The ability to report on actual business metrics is hyper-critical to your overall SEO program as it gives you the best foundation on which to react, make decisions and generate forecasts. Page Reporting is the only SEO technology that enables measurement of actual traffic and conversion in the world of Secure Search.

CRM is customer relationship management and your business is probably using it to acquire track and help close leads. Salesforce.com defines CRM as a system that “allows businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them.” Before computers, the most popular CRM tool was known as the Rolodex. Today, CRM enterprise software supports not just one person but multiple departments and initiatives, from Marketing to Sales to Customer Success. Worldwide, CRM software grew nearly 14 percent in 2013, according to Gartner. Major players include salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. The demand for software as a service (SaaS) drove nearly half (41 percent) of the total CRM revenue in 2013 and was due to “organizations of all sizes seeking easier-to-deploy alternatives to replace legacy systems, implement net-new applications or provide alternative complementary functionality,” Gartner stated in a press release. So, how does a marketer make CRM work for them?

How CRMs Work for Marketers

Data is being created every day between a business and its prospects and customers. Because of the high number of touch points, CRMs have scaled to provide a single, unified view of the customer journey. CRMs now support campaigns and customizable workflows to enable marketers to build highly automated programs. CRM today can aid in everything from customer service via social media (listening to what’s being said and responding in real time) to email marketing (sending personalized messages via email at the moment it matters) and more. These personalized touch points are going to become the norm in the future of brand communications. Aseem Chandra of Adobe argued this point in his article at Forbes, but says marketers still aren’t taking full advantage of it. CRM helps create visibility for different people in the organization, which improves collaboration and decreases account and management conflicts. All of your marketing campaigns should be set up to feed into the CRM, so you can better determine which programs and channels contribute to success or what the specific ROI of each campaign and channel is. Typically, a javascript file captures the campaign id from the url of a visitor or a lead and publishes it through the API into the CRM.

Implement marketing today with the following basic steps in your CRM

1. Hire a CRM analyst or CRM admin

While I don’t usually like to make hiring part of the recommendations in a blog, getting value out of CRM and the reports it generates requires expertise. You should invest in training and certification for an existing staff member, hire a skilled contractor to get started or, if you can manifest the budget and req, hire a certified admin. Without that expertise, you will have trouble gaining traction and value.

2. Create a campaign A CRM campaign is a collection of contacts who are being tracked and pursued at a particular time. Campaigns are so prevalent that it may be easy to miss them. Were you going to email a reminder to your customers about the dinner next week? Was your PR agency going to reach out to reporters today to promote last week’s product release? Targeting a list with a webinar message. Anything that you do to a group of people is a campaign, by definition.

3. Create a consistent naming structure for your campaigns Before you amass 30 campaigns, now is the time to lay the groundwork for reporting success. Use common words, in the same pattern, across all your campaigns. For instance, you could name all your campaigns in the following pattern “[Who] [How]”. Using the examples from the previous paragraph, you would create the following campaigns “Customers Email”, “Reporters Call” and “Prospects Webinar.” This way you can report on the success of all your campaigns containing the word “Prospects” or the click through rates of all your “Email” campaigns.

4. Create a dashboard It’s great to be organized by creating consistently named campaigns but don’t overlook this last but critical step. While you don’t have any results to speak of right now (because you just created the campaign and you haven’t sent the email yet or made any calls), create at least 1 report to show the number of emails, calls or whatever the activity or success metric is. Then place that 1 report in a brand new dashboard. It will look silly to have an empty dashboard showing 0 results but as the activity happens, you’ll see results flow in to your reports.

The more systematically you use CRM the more it will help you define, organize, track and distribute information about your marketing and sales funnel activities and support improved results through the funnel.