Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Capturing the economy of scale is a fundamental principle for achieving efficiency within an organization. One example is Henry Ford revolutionizing the car manufacturing industry with his assembly-line business model, making scale possible for the automotive industry. Anyone can appreciate the ingenuity of Henry Ford, and apply the same inventiveness to scale what they’re working on. But to do that, every process needs its parts to facilitate that well-oiled machine. Central to this process is workflow. In this post, we’ll look at how workflow scales SEO, and how you can create your own workflow for in-house SEO.

Why workflow is crucial to scale in-house SEO

A simple definition of “workflow” (via the “New Oxford American Dictionary”) is: “The sequence of industrial, administrative or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.” Workflow can be envisioned as raw materials systematically improved upon through a workforce in a series of specialized processes to produce the final, refined result. With SEO, that raw material likely is data resulting from keyword research and competitive analysis. (For more information about how to do keyword research, refer to Sudhir Sharma’s guide; for more on how to conduct competitive analysis, see Daniel Sitner’s guide, both on the BrightEdge blog). Using these raw materials, your SEO team will perform analyses that ultimately determine the strategic optimization of your site’s architecture and individual page content.

Informed by SEO, your in-house writers will then create content in the form of Web pages, blogs and marketing materials, which SEO editors, content strategists and marketing managers will further refine before publishing. As you can see, each piece that each worker produces must be executed well to create the end product. As an SEO project manager, your job is to oversee and coordinate this workflow in order to scale. This is no small task. Managing the workflow for multiple SEO tasks means tracking and coordinating assignments and project progress of your various in-house teams, all the while keeping in mind:

• Long-term business goals
• Campaigns goals and metrics

A common pain point in SEO project management is a lack of collaboration among SEOs and content due to siloed teams and compartmentalized skills; BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu discusses this in a post he wrote for Search Engine Land. One solution is technology. For example, BrightEdge’s “Content Optimizer,” developed in partnership with Adobe, is designed to bridge the gap between SEO and content teams at the enterprise scale, specifically providing for integrated workflow. Here’s a screenshot showing our Content Optimizer at work: Another common pain point for enterprise-level SEO project management is tracking the seemingly myriad tasks and workflows across your organization – and a whiteboard diagram is simply not going to cut it.

Getting your entire SEO and content team on board in an integrated and collaborative effort requires more advanced tools, such as BrightEdge’s project management platform’s tasks and workflow support technology. Designed for enterprise SEO management, it features dashboard reporting for tracking projects with real-time visibility into their status, and automatically marks tasks that have been completed to save time and reduce duplication of efforts.

Insights from Experian and Microsoft at Share14 on scaling in-house SEO

This year’s Share 14 conference featured speakers representing several global brands, some of which discussed how their organizations tackled the challenges of scaling SEO in house. Experian Consumer Direct’s Ngia Vang (who was also interviewed by Andy Betts here at the BrightEdge blog) addressed the issue of its siloed SEO and content teams. From her presentation is the following workflow graphic, showing how Experian integrated SEO into their content team’s process:

In her talk, Vang reminded the audience that it’s a cyclical process, as the performance of SEO content is measured against business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), these metrics will then inform budget and resource allocation from one quarter to the next, and the process will start over again with fresh intelligence.

Another speaker, Alex Volk of Microsoft, said that when he first started at the company ten years ago, SEO didn’t even exist in-house. It was about seven years ago that he and colleague Derrick Wheeler initiated in-house SEO, facing challenges ranging from internal keyword competition to overlapping content and inconsistent UX, domain and subdomains. He and Derrick developed a “hybrid model” that involved enlisting 14 key people within the company to forge a bond for fueling SEO strategy. 

For more expert tips from Share 14’s speakers on scaling in-house SEO, you can refer to the liveblogging coverage of the session here at the BrightEdge blog. In sum, you don’t need to be an industrialist to appreciate scale economies, and luckily today, you can access advanced tools to scale SEO within your own organization to take it to the next level.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Newton joined BrightEdge in July of 2014 and is the senior director of marketing demand generation. He manages a team of five and co-manages the inside sales reps with his colleague in Sales. He was the 3rd BrightEdge customer at Netflix 6 years ago. Newton earned his MBA at the International University of Japan and his BA in English from UCLA.  We all want to make effective career decisions that balance our need for growth, opportunity, relationships, the commute, and of course, compensation.

When we first come out of school or when we are in between jobs, it’s easy to fall for the first company that produces an offer letter. However, we should find companies that are a good fit for our personalities and work styles. I’ve worked for a number of notable companies in Silicon Valley, and a few in other countries, so I have a pretty decent sample when I say that BrightEdge is the best company I have ever worked for. I thought I’d share 15 reasons I chose this company.

1. Growth: Growth makes work exciting, stimulating, and fun. BrightEdge adds about 5 people every 2 weeks, so you see evidence of growth all around you. Growth makes small opportunities large and small problems small. Growth is the most powerful accelerant to gaining responsibility faster than your cohort.

2. Opportunity to grow: Company growth means you can grow personally, too. It makes it easier to be a bigger leader when the company has a healthy appetite for new leadership. BrightEdge management hires people who want to be promoted and creates paths for that to happen.

3. Pre-IPO company: The Silicon Valley is the world capital of venture-backed businesses, and being part of a venture company is valuable for future venture opportunities. Every day feels like you are writing a page in the story of the company’s success. The pre-IPO company gives employee-owners access to more chunky income events than regular companies. Our last round of funding was large at $42 million, so we have the resources to expand our aspirations. We are already a global company with offices in London, Tokyo, and Sydney.

4. Industry-leading product: Head-to-head, we win over 85% of the time against our competition because we’re true innovators and provide the most value.

5. The BrightEdge values: Customer success, people success, striving for excellence, urgency, winning; working at BrightEdge is rather consistent with these values. Every day at least one or two of these values drive decision making. It’s real. It’s authentic. It matters.

6. Focus: We focus on the right things: happy customers, the best product, urgent execution, and winning all the way. If you have ever been forced to focus on the wrong things, you will recognize why this is so important.

7. Work ethic: People at BrightEdge work hard and get the job done on time. From the execs to the office manager, people care about their productivity and keeping their commitments.

8. Size. A mid-size company of 300 people means that you get a good-sized portfolio of work and that you can influence the outcome and the market cap. We all matter at this size.

9. B2B company: Most of the top companies in Silicon Valley make money selling to other companies. The planning and development cycles are more realistic and the margins are better than business-to-consumer.

10. BrightEdge beating the odds. Only one in 10 venture companies succeed, and only one in 110 make it to more than $100,000,000 valuation. BrightEdge’s success in terms of valuation has blown those odds away.

11. Numbers-driven rational approach. We manage by the numbers at BrightEdge, so people make good decisions and make them quickly and with confidence. Many of our executives came from Salesforce, the most successful SaaS company in the world.

12. Full of wicked-smart people. There are a lot of bright people here, but everyone does a good job of hiding it. Egos are not outsized, and we all work towards the same goals with mutual respect.

13. Outstanding onboarding program. BrightEdge has the best-organized onboarding program I have come across. Every single employee at every level goes through the same training with the same instructor and comes out the end of the week certified on the BrightEdge product. That consistent experience increases the connections between groups and people.

14. Youthful energy. We hire a lot of people right out of college and lots of mid-career people like me, so we have a fun and energetic environment that leverages both groups.

15. Founder-led company: Founder-led companies have more heart and soul, more passion and a clearer sense of purpose. So, if you like to work hard in a healthy environment full of smart people led by committed founders or if the other reasons resonate with you, apply to join our team at BrightEdge!  

Lee

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

We often forget how important branded keywords can be for our business. Users that search for your brand terms are often your most valuable customers, or have the potential to be. They can be returning customers, people seeking to learn more about your brand, or people who have previously seen some of your marketing campaigns. The first thing you may be asking yourself is, “Why should I track branded terms in the first place? I must be ranking No. 1, right?” To which I’ll say, “What if you’re not?” In today’s post, we’re going to walk you through how to effectively monitor keywords and track them in BrightEdge.

Before you start: create a dashboard in BrightEdge

Our ultimate goal is to set up and create a dashboard that is meaningful, helps you track your branded keyword performance, and is automatically delivered to you on a weekly basis so you can proactively understand the performance of your branded keywords. The first thing we’ll need to do is add in relevant keywords. At a minimum, we suggest tracking two variations of your brand, for example, “BrightEdge” as well as “Brightedge.com”. A good rule of thumb would be to use 1 to 2 percent of the allocated keywords in your account to track branded keywords. Pro tip: Integrate your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account with BrightEdge to see which branded search terms are driving the most clicks and impressions. Next, let’s dig in and get our hands dirty. Here are the reports we’ll need to add to the dashboard:

1. Trended Rank
2. Table Report (Keyword Details)
3. GWT Clicks and Impressions (filtered by branded terms)
4. Share of Voice (SOV)
5. *Bonus*

Let’s go into a little more detail on each …

Step 1: trended rank report

In this report, we’ll be looking at our set of branded keywords and how they are performing over time, broken down by each page (Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 and Pages 4 to 10). The chart settings for the image below are:

• Full Width
• Ranked on Pages 1 to 10
• Display Data Values (within Advanced Options)

Pro tip: We also recommend giving each chart a unique name that reflects what it contains. What to watch for:

• You want to see all blue. If not, start to drill into the keyword details from the Table Report.

Step 2: table report

In this report, we’ll be looking at the keyword ranking details for your branded keyword set in both Google and Bing. The chart settings for the image below are:

• Select Google U.S. and Bing U.S.
• Show Search Volume
• Sort by Search Volume, Descending

What to watch for:

• You want all of your keywords to rank in position No. 1. If they’re not, do a quick search and see why not.

Step 3: GWT clicks and impressions report

In this report, we’ll be looking at the clicks and impressions from Google Webmaster Tools. We need to first create a “Branded” filter by going to Reports -> Sites -> Clicks and Impressions Report, where you’ll input your brand name or a partial match if there a lot of variations or misspellings. From there, you can add this chart directly into the dashboard we’ve already created, by hovering in the top-right of the data table. These filters will persist once you add this report into a dashboard. If you prefer to sort by something other than clicks, such as impressions or click-through rate (CTR), click the relevant column header to sort by that metric. This setting will also persist. Sample image below: Pro tip: Save your filters to save you time in the future. What to watch for:

• Any CTR that is significantly different from the norm. If so, do a quick search and see why that may be the case.

Step 4: Share of Voice (SOV) report

In this report, we’ll be adding in our Share of Voice charts, which will help us understand what other websites are ranking for our brand terms. This can be very valuable from a brand reputation management standpoint. The chart settings for both images below are:

• Calculate the SOV measuring your domain against the complete competitive landscape.
• Select the appropriate branded keyword group.
• Use the default half-width chart.

What to watch for:

• Make sure there isn’t any negative websites ranking (i.e., pissedoffconsumer.com).
• Monitor which of your other (social) profiles are ranking.
• Look to see if any of your link-building or PR campaigns are showing up in the Top 10.
• There could also be opportunities for external outreach with these domains (partnership development or link-building)

Make sure to save your dashboard, and then close it. From there you can schedule an email for weekly delivery. 

Step 5: bonus reports

There are a few other keyword combinations you can track (Setup -> Keywords) that could be helpful to monitor, such as:

• Brand name + reviews
• Brand name + coupons
• Brand name + careers
• Brand name versus competitor
• Any prominent employee that works for your company, such as the CEO
• Keywords that would be unique to your business, such as a product that only you make

And that’s all there is to it. Enjoy your peace of mind when you monitor keywords for one of your most important SEO assets for on-page copy and video, your branded keywords.

Jim

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Share15: September 21 to 23, Westin St. Francis, San Francisco

Following the outstanding success of Share14 and a record-breaking year of growth and marketing innovation at BrightEdge, I am delighted to announce Share15. This year, the industry’s leading, brand-driven, peer-to-peer content marketing and SEO event takes place on September 21 to 23 at the Westin St. Francis, right in the heart of San Francisco. 

Share15: the brand-centric, must-attend event of the year

This year at Share15, we are setting the industry bar even higher with a larger venue, multiple tracks, visionary keynotes and numerous networking events and opportunities that only a Share conference can provide. We expect more than 1,000 people to attend this year, and already have speakers lined up from the world’s largest brands. The organic content marketing industry is booming, and at Share15, global brands, qualified practitioners, and market thought leaders will join forces with technology pioneers to exchange insights into performance marketing strategies that shape the industry.

Building on the success of our peer-to-peer community at Share15

Share14 set a new standard in the industry event space. Over the course of 2 days, a community of more than 1,000 digital thought leaders, search and content marketing practitioners, and technology titans shared insights, case studies and visionary tales while making invaluable peer-to-peer connections to help power their success. At Share14, more than 60 experienced professionals from leading brands such as Macy’s, Adidas, 3M, Hilton, Marriott, Time and Experian shared the stage with search powerhouses Google, Microsoft and Bing, technology leaders like Adobe, and social titans Twitter and Facebook. Attendees and speakers discussed topics ranging from content to global and mobile marketing, scaling SEO, understanding the future of search, and much more.

“It’s confirmed my decision on pushing my company in this direction. Inspired to deliver performance for my company” -Thomson Reuters

Announcing the Share15 program

This year, Share15 will bring together the brightest minds, the biggest names and the best brands alongside the industry’s largest technology innovators. Over the coming weeks, we will be announcing key speakers, sharing key themes, adding new innovation-led tracks and unveiling some A-list keynote speakers. Share’s program content is developed in conjunction with our partners, client brands and industry thought-leaders. Our focus is not only delivering inspiring content, but also ensuring that every session is jam-packed with information, case studies, best practice guidance and actionable takeaways for peers.

Why Share15?

The Share program is built around three core principles that are fundamental to BrightEdge:

Inspiration and Innovation

Keep pace of change, stay ahead of the curve and help shape the future of your industry. From the latest trends to industry and product announcements, be the first to hear from an A-list of inspirational speakers at Share15. If you want to stay one step ahead of the innovation curve, then Share15 is a must attend.

• At Share15 practitioners learn not just from their peers, but also from leading search and content platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube.

• Share15 is where news is made and shared. Leading analysts, publications and reporters across the digital, content and technology space come to Share to hear the latest from the BrightEdge community. Check out this event coverage here:

VentureBeat: BrightEdge Offers Free Plug-In Access to Its Data Repository  ClickZ: How Can Brands and Agencies Succeed Together? 

Community and Collaboration

Share15 brings together the highest concentration of brand marketers, thought-leaders and technology executives in this industry, and is the only event in the industry that focuses 100 percent on peer-to-peer learning and collaboration. Our networking events are where valuable conversations are had, business alliances are formed and new, innovative ideas are shared. Share15 is an investment that BrightEdge makes in the community. We are committed to delivering insights at scale, and with quality top of mind.

"The passion of the speakers plus the great networking conversations brings value you're hard pressed to find at some of the broader industry conferences" -Lauren MacPhail, Director of SEO and Organic Content, Macys.com

Insights and Action

No other event in the industry offers this level of insight for brands to implement ideas right away at their own companies. That’s because Share focuses on practical, hands-on insight, not theory, targeted to the challenges that your brand faces. You’ll get tips from big brands just like you that have experience and results implementing strategy. This is different from other events that put just “personalities” on stage. All content created at Share15 is objectively driven with a “zero tolerance” policy for subjective material. All content must be backed by results, data and valuable tips for practitioners in the audience. Only the best brand speakers are accepted to speak at Share15 with zero sales pitches allowed.

"I really like how Share provides real examples and stories that anyone in this industry can either leverage or relate to." -Ngia Vang, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Experian Consumer Direct

You can find out more about the information you’ll learn from our live coverage of sessions in 2014, and our interviews with speakers, here. And check out videos and presentations from Share14 here.

Stay tuned!

Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing further information with regards to:

• Registration and pricing
• Sponsorship opportunities
• Speaking submissions
• Speaker announcements

Venue Details September 21 to 23, 2015 Westin St. Francis, Union Square, San Francisco Find out more about Share15, here. Hope to see you there.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Hummingbird, Panda, Pigeon, and Google Penguin. If these words speed up your heart rate and get your blood pumping, you're probably an SEO. Every Google update strikes some fear into the hearts of SEOs and digital marketers, and Google's most current update is no exception. The current threat is Google's Penguin 3.0 algorithm, which rolled out mid-October and has been targeting sites that violate Google's guidelines about linking. Staying safe from Google Penguin 3.0 means, for the most part, sticking to quality link-building aka “link earning,” and shying away from anything that even could be in violation of Google’s guidelines.

While digital marketers purchasing links in the not-too-distant past have been hard-hit by the Penguin updates, many of them have cleaned up their acts by cleaning up their backlinks. However, digital marketers sometimes aren’t even aware that they are participating in bad linking practices, because sites can be hit simply by linking to the wrong websites, unbeknownst to them.

As the dust left by the 3.0 update has settled and started to clear, certain sites, including Ebay.com and quite a few Australian domains, have come out as winners. What seems a little funny, however, is that these sites were barely hit by past Google Penguin algorithm updates, so why is it that they are seeing increases in rankings when they weren't hard hit in the first place? Some speculate that one reason could be that this is a slow-rolling update, and that the after-effects will continue to manifest themselves for days and weeks after the initial update release.

Another reason could be that Google is testing the effectiveness of this update and is planning to refresh one more time before the end of the year. It's also possible that as SEOs and digital marketers worked to get rid of bad backlinks, they also got rid of some good ones, thereby losing overall link profile value..

Staying safe from Google Penguin 3.0 and future Penguin updates means the following:

1. Build only high-quality links. Buying, renting, or trading links, whether publicly or privately within a network risks getting hit and penalized big time. Using networks to exchange links or content—or influencing ratings in some other similar way—is also frowned upon.
2. Diversify your tactics. Using only press release marketing, article marketing, and/or guest blogging to get links could penalize your website.
3. Spread out the amount of you links you build in a given time. Controlling how many links you build in given time period can be seen as “working the system,” and Google will hit you for it.

The bottom line is that Google rewards quality link building and frowns upon anything even remotely spammy or Black Hat. For more information on how to deal with Google Penguin, check out this post on backlink analysis.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Understanding and incorporating analytics in your search engine optimization strategy is integral for getting the most out of your efforts. One of the best ways to do this is by making good use of Google Webmaster Tools for SEO, a free tool that helps users make smart, informed decisions for the best possible performance in search results. In this post, we’ll discuss pro tips for making good use of GWT to improve your SEO efforts. For help in setting up Google Webmaster Tools, see our article on Google Webmaster Tools Best Practices.

Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

SEO, content, and digital marketers who use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO know how invaluable of an analytics tool it is. Brands ultimately have a better chance of increasing rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) by using a tool that is aimed at search results performance. GWT helps in the following SEO areas:

• Optimizing keyword SEO by relaying data on the most-searched keywords in Google for whatever industry you choose to search. Use this information in your inbound and outbound SEO marketing.
• Analyzing valuable SEO metrics relevant to your marketing campaigns.
• Understanding the crawl and indexing of your site.
• Increasing link building's efficacy for both incoming and outgoing links.

Search query data

There are certain things you'll want to pay attention to as you optimize your Web pages to get more traffic for search queries. GWT can help by showing which keywords are driving impressions for your site’s Web pages in the results. You can use this information to optimize your Web pages for keyword SEO. To access this tool, go to Search Traffic > Search Queries. The click-through rate section shows percentage of clicks made to your content from the SERP based on overall impressions. If the data here indicates a low number of clicks, you'll want to review and improve your meta descriptions as a first step.

Rank tracking

Want to discover ranking information about the keywords you're already implementing? Put your target keywords into the Rank Tracking Tool. You'll see data about your keywords' competition and traffic. With this tool, you can find out which keywords have the greatest chance of driving traffic to your site, and then you can optimize your Web pages with high-performing key terms. Use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO to make informed decisions based off real data. And to gain really valuable insights from GWT, incorporate BrightEdge Page Reporting to gain powerful data about a Web page’s performance.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Back in May of 2007, a sea change swept the search engine world with Google’s introduction of Universal Search. No longer were search results displayed only in text format; now, other types of search-relevant content including images, news, social, videos, blog posts and local listings would be blended together on the same search page.

Soon the other search engines came out with their own versions of Universal Search—referred to collectively as “blended search”—all in an effort to deliver a rich and relevant search experience to the user. But as happy as users are with an all-encompassing search that delivers a smorgasbord of search results all on one page, blended search presents a number of challenges for online marketers.

Before May 2007, back when search results pages were all about URLs neatly arranged in text format, marketers had a fairly clear picture of how sites were ranking. They also knew what areas they needed to focus on in order to boost rankings, such as providing fresh, engaging and relevant content, and building quality links.

With blended search, the ranking game changed

With the addition of images, video, local search results, etc., courtesy of blended search, the standard listings can drop on the results page. In order to counter this rankings drop, Web marketers must now focus on optimizing, not just text content, but also video, image, blog, local, news and other content as well.

While large businesses may already be employing a number of these content types, or at least have them at their disposal, a majority of businesses do not. Even so, industry experts caution that optimizing varied content, such as video, for search engines is difficult to do.

Another challenge of blended search for marketers is that visual images appearing on a search results page tend to break the page up, causing the searcher’s eyes to wander and become distracted by non-relevant or competing engagement objects, because they stand out more.

In addition, more types of results in a search mean more information on the page. But more information does not always mean more relevant information for the user.

Of course, there are benefits to blended search for marketers, as each type of content presents new opportunities for high-profile exposure and market penetration that did not exist before May 2007.

In order to leverage blended search, businesses will need to create and optimize those media formats that both the search engines and customers will respond to. And those companies that can successfully optimize for the different media types stand to gain a competitive edge.

With all of these different types of content results, the challenge for digital marketers will be to determine which areas to focus on and which areas are ranking.

That’s where blended rank, BrightEdge's proprietary technology, comes into play

As part of BrightEdge's suite of features in its SEO platform, the “Blended Rank” report gives online marketers powerful insights into keyword rankings through the ability to measure true SEO performance in the rankings for all search results—including text, image, video and social, and local results.

Armed with accurate SEO performance information, marketers can then set goals and devise targeted strategies to achieve higher blended rank among all search results. To carry out these strategies, organizations require “Big Data” processing power like BrightEdge’s SEO platform to provide comprehensive insight into true blended rank in the search results.

Finally, as the proliferation of mobile continues, Blended Rank allows marketers to measure true rank in mobile devices with respect to blended search results—image, video, social, and local results—to gain a more accurate picture of digital marketing performance.  

The introduction of blended search back in 2007 presented digital marketers with a whole new set of challenges. Blended Rank is a powerful reporting feature that marketers can use to turn those challenges into golden opportunities.