enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

Google has made another major announcement that has the potential to impact thousands or millions of websites in the coming weeks. The search engine giant has indicated their decision to lower or even effectively eliminate the rankings of so-called ‘doorway pages’ -- pages that have been built to rank highly for specific keywords without actually adding any value for the user. This change is expected to have far-reaching effects on websites that employ these tactics.

What is a doorway page?

According to Google, doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. Websites employ these types of sites because they can monopolize top slots in search engine results for multiple keywords without developing the supporting depth of content in the rest of the site to merit the ranking. This allows the site to drive more traffic without actually adding the breadth of value for the user. Google may consider any of the following types of pages to be ‘doorway pages’.

• Pages that are created for the sole purpose of funneling people to actionable parts of the website rather than actually serving a purpose within the site
• Pages that have been developed to rank for general terms even though the content on the page is actually very specific
• Pages that duplicate content from other parts of the site solely to attract a larger percentage of the search traffic
• Pages that have been developed to attract traffic for affiliates rather than provide value and answer the queries of users
• Pages that have been created only for search engines and are not integrated into the rest of the site - ‘island’ pages

Google wants to diminish the ranking of these sites because they disrupt the quality of the search results. When users enter the search terms and click on a doorway page, the site will lack the content that the user had been promised on the search results page and force the user to go looking for the information. Users will often return and try the second or third result on the SERP. With a well-developed doorway page campaign, often these subsequent sites will bring the user to the same or a similar website. The user then becomes frustrated with the search results and their inability to find an answer to their query. This is the problem that Google wants to fix with their latest algorithm update.

What is Google changing?

Google has announced that they will be adjusting the ranking portion of their algorithm to better find these doorway pages and reduce their ranking. Brian White of Google says that, “Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.” While this algorithm update is aimed at low quality sites that seek to capture traffic by using different ‘doorways’ for different locations or products without actually updating information, it remains to be seen how this update will impact local SEO. It is a common practice in local SEO to develop different pages for multiple locations. There have been some concerns from those who work with local businesses about how the changes will impact these sites.

For example, a nail salon with two branches that wants to bring in traffic for two cities may have pages targeted for each city that have the same or similar content and describe the same nail salon. Although the page may not be the spammy page that Google is seeking to eliminate, it could potentially be hit by this this ranking change.

What should businesses do if they fear they will be impacted by this algorithm change?

Businesses that use different pages to attract traffic for a few different keywords should focus primarily on value. In White’s announcement, he specifically mentioned pages that did not offer customers new information. That means websites that have different pages for various services areas or franchise areas should steer away from using duplicate content for different locations. That type of web development may be detrimental to the ranking of the website. A site audit, such as those offered by BrightEdge, can help businesses detect duplicate content so that they know where to focus their efforts. Google has not given a date for the algorithm changes, only indicating that they will happen soon.

Companies should use this time to develop content to add value to their different pages. If a page has been built to target a specific keyword or location, make sure that the content on the page addresses the needs of the users and not just the search engine. Keep in mind that Google will not be punishing landing pages. Landing pages are specifically designed to bring customers looking for a specific product or service to a page created to promote that product or service. There is one central difference between a landing page and a doorway page.

• A landing page makes it easier for customers to find the products or services they seek, creating a positive user experience
• A doorway page forces people to go looking for the content they were promised, resulting in a negative user experience

If a website suspects that they will be hit by the changes, using software such as the event tracking capabilities of BrightEdge can be valuable. This software will let website owners see how their sites perform throughout algorithm updates and other key events through a clear dashboard. Users can also use features, such as the ‘site comparison’ feature on BrightEdge’s Data Cube to compare how the pages within the website perform.

For example, the nail salon described above can compare the traffic to their different sites to judge the impact of the algorithm changes. The patented Share of Voice (SOV) technology produced by BrightEdge can also give business owners unique insight into their relevance and ranking with organic search. These various tools are excellent for tracking the potential impact of the algorithm change on a site’s performance and visibility. In its ongoing quest to improve user experience, Google’s latest algorithm update will seriously disrupt doorway page tactics employed by low-quality spam pages. Unfortunately it also has the potential to catch some local business sites in its net.

Businesses that fear they will face consequences when the new changes go into effect must focus on providing unique, quality content that serves the needs of their customers. When they combine this with careful monitoring tools like BrightEdge to judge their site’s performance, they will be well-equipped to address and respond to the coming changes.  

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

Adobe Summit 2015 was the largest and best Summit yet. The event attracted 7,000 attendees this year - far exceeding the 5,500 they expected. The key themes of Adobe Summit could be summed up as:

1. Context Means Everything - getting the right message to the right person in the right place and at the right time,
2. Agile Analytics and real-time marketing,
3. Content Tracking. The Adobe team put on a great conference, and BrightEdge was proud to be a major sponsor.

The BrightEdge team had a fun and productive time at the Adobe Summit and had valuable interaction and exchanges with marketers and executives from nearly 1,000 companies. Many people stopped by and talked with our team at our booth in the community pavilion, including existing customers and future customers. We demonstrated BrightEdge S3, our industry-leading search and content management platform. Visitors and press were excited about Content Optimizer 3.0, the latest release of that  product that integrates with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and provides actionable insights,  guiding you to create in-demand content which outperforms your competitors and is optimized at the time of creation.

The conference was abuzz about Landing Page Optimizer (LPO) Intelligence, a new BrightEdge product we announced during the conference and which Adobe featured during a number of their sessions. It provides valuable industry and competitor insights to marketers using AEM’s new performance-targeting capabilities. It was great to get to show off our current and new products and hear first hand how impactful they are to our existing customers. At the Summit Adobe introduced innovations to Adobe Marketing Cloud to help marketers deliver customer experiences that get results:

• Marketing extends to IoT. Adobe Marketing Cloud enables brands to extend the impact of marketing across more touch points including wearables and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Adobe Experience Manager Screens and Adobe Target now bring personalized experiences to physical spaces like retail stores and hotel rooms and enable marketers to optimize content across any IoT device. The new IoT SDK lets brands measure and analyze consumer engagement across any of those devices. And new Intelligent Location capabilities allow companies to use GPS and iBeacon data to optimize their physical brand presence.
• Mobile app development. Adobe announced a new mobile app framework that gives companies an end-to-end workflow to manage the complete mobile app lifecycle — from app development and user acquisition to app analytics and user engagement. Also, half a dozen mobile app technology providers are integrating their tools into Adobe Marketing Cloud.
• Ad tech meets marketing tech. Adobe announced a solution, combining a new algorithmic engine and advances to Audience Core Services to unify audience targeting, buying, data and billing in one platform.
• Two new solutions in Adobe Marketing Cloud: Adobe Audience Manager, which provides greater insight into customer journeys and Adobe Primetime will deliver personalized ads across platforms, and ensure that a single user with more than one device doesn’t have to watch the same ad with more than the desired number of exposures.
• Adobe Campaign Standard enables more contextual, integrated, and coordinated emails as part of a real-time customer engagement strategy. This new offering features native integration into Adobe Marketing Cloud and a new mobile-friendly user interface, allowing marketers to create and manage email campaigns across devices.
• Adobe Analytics has several new features including Contribution Analysis to help marketers understand the reasons for anomalies in millions of data points as well as Customer Attributes, a new feature that imports data from CRM systems or any other source of online or offline enterprise data that includes a unique customer ID.
• Accenture and Adobe have expanded our alliance with Accenture Customer Engagement, a cloud-based managed service that simplifies the development, execution and measurement of digital marketing.

And the winner of the drone is: Besides learning about our products and grabbing some swag, booth visitors entered into a drawing for a Parrot AR2.0 Drone, which includes a live HD video feed to your phone. I’m happy to announce that C. Moore of U.S. Bank was the winner and will soon have a whole new perspective of his neighborhood.

The BrightEdge team will be heading up to Seattle at the beginning of June for SMX Advanced,  and we hope to see you there. And, we are actively planning for BrightEdge’s Share15 event, which will be in San Francisco September 21-23 and have an open call for speakers. You can nominate yourself or someone else on the Share15 speaker nomination page.

Yulia Kronrod

M Posted 11 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

Geotargeting challenges and tips

One of the biggest challenges with SEO for multilingual and multinational websites is to ensure that searchers in various countries find your locally-relevant content. In this blog, we’ll talk about geotargeting – the practice of customizing content to a specific market based on the geographic location of potential customers and, most importantly for SEO, ensuring this content is findable in local search.

Structuring multiregional websites

Companies targeting customers in multiple regions have the following options to structure their international sites:

• Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) tied to a specific country, e.g. site.fr for France and site.de for Germany
• Subdomains or subdirectories on generic top-level domain (gTLD) such as .com, .org, .net:
  • Subdomains – fr.site.com, de.site.com
  • Subdirectories – site.com/fr/, site.com/de/
• URL parameters (generally, not recommended), e.g. site.com?loc=de, site.com?country=france.

Geotargeting signals

Google uses many signals to identify target audiences for country sites – ccTLDs, server location, the use of local language and currency, local phone numbers and physical addresses, Google My Business listings, and links from other local sites are among them. Webmasters can also set a country target in the International Targeting section of Google Webmaster Tools for country subdomains or subdirectories on generic top-level domains. Unfortunately, those signals may not be sufficient for Google to properly map your international sites to your target countries and display relevant content to searchers. Many companies prefer to host international sites in subdirectories of a single domain, some country sites may not be translated from English, B2B sites lack pricing information, physical addresses, and local business listings, and many websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so Google tries not to rely on any of these signals alone.

“Which one should I pick?” Google is wondering

For lack of sufficient geotargeting information, Google may present local searchers with results that are not actually targeted at them, which leads to lower click-through rates from natural search, higher bounce rates, and poorer user experience and business KPIs. Consider a few possible scenarios where site are facing geotargeting challenges:

• Global English (generally, US) pages are exposed in local search – google.co.uk, google.com.au, google.ca – where UK, Australian, and Canadian sites, respectively, should be ranking instead
• Global English pages outrank localized content for branded searches (i.e. company brand and product names)
• Multiple sites in one language compete with each other: for example, a company’s German site is beating Austrian and Swiss German sites in local search, and the French site is outperforming Swiss French and Canadian French – for both branded and non-branded queries.

This may be happening for two main reasons. For one, your global English site (or the predominant site in a group of same-language sites) is inherently more authoritative with more inbound links, which are a very important SEO ranking factor. Another reason is that Google treats same or similar content available on different URLs as duplicate content and therefore assigns lower relevancy to the duplicate pages and ranks them lower or, worse, stops displaying them in search results.

Duplicate content warnings in Google Webmaster Tools

You can validate if Google treats your international pages as duplicate content by checking your main Webmaster tools account (site.com) for duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions in ‘Search Appearance > HTML Improvements’ section. In the example below, French-language sites for Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and France are viewed as duplicates:

GWMT Duplicate Descriptions

Once hreflang annotations are in place, you should see Google remove duplicate title and duplicate meta description warnings – they will no longer be treated as such after you’ve made it clear for Google that they target different regional audiences.

HrefLang to the rescue

To help webmasters identify the correct URLs to serve to regional searchers, a few years ago Google introduced an amazing protocol to achieve desired geotargeting results: hreflang tags, also referred to as rel-alternate-hreflang or country and language annotations. These annotations can be placed in XML sitemaps, HTTP headers, or on-page HTML link elements. Google provides detailed hreflang instructions in Webmaster Tools help, so we won’t cover them here. Instead, we’d like to present the results from our own implementation. In a related post, we provide a few tips and touch on common misconceptions and mistakes.

Adobe HrefLang case study

Adobe has 60 regional sites in 30+ languages. We started off with a pilot covering the top 15 product pages for 10+ regional sites and focused on the UK site to measure the impact. About 10 days after the sitemaps were submitted to Google, we saw a spike in SEO visits to UK pages. In fact, the increase in daily average entry page SEO visits to the UK pages was a whopping 720% and average daily revenue grew over 400%.

The BrightEdge SEO Platform helped us track how rankings were changing – UK pages started replacing US pages in Google UK:

Shortly after Google rolled out Quick Answers globally, we started seeing not only US pages showing in Quick Answers but also regional URLs displayed in regional search engines – yet another sign of proper hreflang implementation:  After the pilot, we rolled out hreflang sitemaps to all major lines of businesses and have consistently seen strong results.  

Bill Fergusson

M Posted 11 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

In a recent post, we shared the lessons we’ve learned about employee training that works. The hallmark of our training process includes an intensive week-long learning session on SEO concepts and our SaaS platform. In this post, we follow up with a checklist for onboarding new hires that we’ve refined over time to help integrate new hires fast, so they can be more productive sooner. This approach includes a combination of both a dedicated training program and an onboarding approach that goes beyond the initial classroom and into the work environment.

1. If you have a dedicated training program, ensure you have a dedicated instructor and training room on site and that tech support is available in case of a breakdown.
2. Closely related to the point above is to provide trainees with a binder that assembles everything they need to know about the subject matter and company. If you have a software product like we do, give students access to a demo account, so they are intimately familiar with it.
3. Don’t make the training materials overly difficult as the goal is for new hires to achieve a thorough comprehension of your company, its values and customer offerings quickly.
4. Ensure new hires are thoroughly trained in all of your products and services, even those considered outside of their purview.
5. See to it that new hires are familiar with your brand’s website, especially where it concerns their team.
6. Once the new hires are in the workplace, include cross-training with closely related teams, so they can help support connected strategies.
7. Help keep your new hires focused on learning in the first couple weeks – or even the first month; avoid distracting them with work before their training is complete.
8. Another key to the new employee’s success is understanding the corporate culture, from how to best handle a problem and whom to talk to if anything is needed to the everyday of how things work. Make sure you get them up to speed here.
9. Ensure that new hires understand your company’s overall goals for its future and their stake in its success.

As observed in this post about onboarding here at BrightEdge, the sooner new hires are ramped up, the sooner they’re productive. So rather than leaving new employees to figure stuff out on their own, a better investment in both their and your company’s future is to take the time to facilitate integration.

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

In a new, free-to-download, thought leadership paper published today, BrightEdge and SAP share their insights, best practices and experience. “The Three Essential Elements of Content Performance Marketing” supports marketers as they navigate the rapidly-evolving content marketing landscape.

The content battleground

Seventy-nine percent of marketing departments hold capital budget for marketing technologies, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2015. These technologies attempt to level the playing field as marketing departments vie for budget and prove content’s worth. Today, marketers operate on a content battleground where they fight for their content to be heard above competitive noise. In order to win, marketers need to produce content that resonates with their audience, wins consumers’ attention and converts. It is increasingly important for marketers to understand the performance of their content within the context of the broader marketplace. Marketers know they need a better approach for understanding the performance of their content. For example:

• Campaigns need to be planned and funded based on the actual performance of content. Gone are the days of guesswork and basing campaign plans on first-party data alone. Historically marketers have been forced to rely on first-person data, which gives them an incomplete view of how their content is performing.

BrightEdge provides marketers with complete sets of data, so they can understand the complete landscape of competing content across the entire Internet. With this understanding of the content battleground, marketers can increase the effectiveness and business impact of their campaigns.

• Ecommerce marketers need to understand how content performs as it relates to the factors that drive conversions for ecommerce. Offers, calls to action and promotions are great examples here.

Unfortunately, most marketing teams don’t have the resources, technology or know-how to efficiently and accurately measure and analyze the sheer volume of data that exists around their content or competitors’.

Where content marketers are getting it wrong

Marketers spent over $135 billion creating new digital marketing content in 2014. However, this content has limited value unless it is actually found by users, optimized to achieve maximum impact and measured to assess business results. This is the challenge many brands now face — a challenge to find the content marketing sweet spot that enables them to understand demand, optimize content and measure results. Brands recognize that connecting content efforts to ROI is essential to success. In fact, 78 percent of those surveyed for the most recent BrightEdge Search Marketer report state it’s either “more important” or “much more important” to connect content efforts to ROI.

SAP, BrightEdge and the content performance marketing solution

SAP is one brand that has succeeded when it comes to establishing a robust and impactful content program that prioritizes data-driven optimization. In this paper, SAP shares experience from the field and provides best practices on how to develop content that delivers performance.

“We are constantly creating and refining our content,” says Jung Suh, Vice President of Digital Marketing at SAP. “With the right tools and processes, this is more exciting than daunting. We can see where our content is falling short, identify gaps, and zero in on emerging opportunities. Content performance measurement is absolutely key. Otherwise, how would we know if our money is well spent?”

As the market leader in content marketing innovation, BrightEdge understands the fundamental flaws in existing marketing technology. This paper provides unique insight into the evolution of the industry, the competitive landscape and market demand for a new approach to drive content marketing into the future.

The three essential elements of content performance marketing

In this thought leadership paper, BrightEdge and SAP highlight some of the key content marketing challenges that brands and marketers face while sharing insights, tips and a simple three-part process to guarantee future content performance marketing success and investment. Technology and its corresponding data-driven insights are the keys that unlock Content Performance Marketing’s potential. Demonstrating content and performance in an organization requires a well-defined, continuous-loop strategy containing three key elements:

• Targeting Demand
• Optimizing Content
• Measuring Results

Download your free copy today and learn how to win on the content marketing battleground!