Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Ever look back on your younger years, and long for the simple decisions? Many of them were easily made using “decision tree” analysis.

You have to admire the decision tree’s simplicity. The theory is that with each “yes” or “no” choice on any major decision, you are taken to a branch, each with its own “yes” or “no” choice. Even today with more complicated choices, the decision tree seems a relatively straightforward model for making informed, carefully considered and reasonably objective decisions. After all, we use decision-tree analysis in our everyday lives, whether it’s deciding between car purchase X or Y or moving to Place A or Place B.

However, in business, when it comes to marketing budget allocation, it’s a bit more complicated than a decision tree, right? Maybe not so much as you’d assume. When it comes to marketing dollars, if you consider your SEO initiatives as a branch of the CEO’s decision-tree, then the funds allocated represent the end-point of several weighted decisions.

So the question becomes: How do you shift the weight to your SEO branch of the tree?

Making your case for the SEO marketing money

Whether you’re the CMO pitching to the CEO, or the SEO pitching to the CMO, there’s a veritable soup of acronyms standing between you and your SEO marketing budget – especially at enterprise-level businesses. The issue isn’t a matter of just PPC vs. SEO in the decision tree when competing for marketing dollars; rather, it’s a matter of building a case for the value of your channel of choice – in this case, we’re talking organic search. How valuable is organic search? Pretty valuable to most marketers. In fact, 83 percent of marketers responding to the BrightEdge 2014 Search Marketer Survey stated that increasing content performance by optimizing for organic search in 2014 is “much more important” or “more important” than it was last year.

One of the simplest ways to support your case for SEO is to put on the CEO or CMO hat and school yourself on the following:

• Economics: Identify those website pages that have the greatest potential to perform well with minimum investment in optimization, based on things like conversion rate and ranking potential. This is the low-hanging fruit.
• History: Benchmark where the business and website is today with little to no investment in SEO marketing. Then, look at where it could be in the future with no effort versus what an investment in SEO and content marketing could bring in terms of traffic and leads. Don’t forget to think about how far ahead your competition will be if you do nothing and they do something.
• Mathematics: Today, there’s a seemingly endless stream of search marketing data, and you can take advantage of that by showing the numbers to support your case. For instance, you could show the decision-maker what the projected lifetime value is of a single customer if SEO marketing brought more leads and conversions.

When all is said and done, CEOs care about mapping budget to business outcomes. When building a case for your slice of the marketing budget pie, the decision tree is simple: Will it impact the business’s bottom line – yes or no? For more detailed information on how to make the SEO case to your CMO or CEO, check out how BrightEdge can help.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

The importance of ensuring that you have a detailed SEO strategy in place as part of any site migration cannot be underestimated. As an SEO, and from my own personal experience, the results can be catastrophic. Let me show you why with the following case study.

The beginning: SEO success

Consider this scenario: Company X had a well-structured SEO campaign running very successfully. Among the results, they had a first- or second-place ranking in Google U.S. on the following keyword phrases:

• video over mobile
• low latency video
• wearables and training
• guide to wearables
• wearable areas
• in-body wearables
• field service video
• streaming video field service
• streaming video manufacturing
• reduce AOG

Rankings were earned and key C-level stakeholders were very pleased with the results. These results were achieved by focusing pages on topics, writing blog posts on the topics, on-page optimization, internal linking, and some external linking with another domain run by the company, which had good domain authority. All rankings were tracked for Google U.S., but traffic came in from Google and Bing on those pages from all over the world, including India, Korea and the Middle East. Over a dozen industry-focused topical datasheets, which were provided in pdf, were indexed and ranked. A dozen videos were created, which were also indexed, and showed up in Universal Search results. Traffic was several hundred well-qualified B2B visitors per month, which must have generated a decent volume of leads. And keep in mind that buying the clicks with PPC would have cost $3 to $9 per click.

The loss: a site migration

In early October 2014, the company redesigned its website without the help of an SEO or an SEO platform. Of the keywords listed previously that the company was ranking for, none of the words rank today. In fact, none of them are even indexed because they took the topical blog pages down. The blog is gone and has been replaced by another press-focused blog, which does not have the same topical value or SEO value. The industry pdfs are gone, the videos are gone, and so is the traffic. In this case, Company X may have wanted to move away from the positioning strategy that led them to produce the original content about those topics. However, the content pages ranked and generated traffic and now the pages are traffic are gone.

Can You Have a Totally Successful Site Migration? The answer is yes. Keep in mind that in any site migration, even when done well, there’s a chance of a slight traffic dip for a period of time, or at best, everything stays the same initially, and then results grow from there. Mark Munroe of Trulia, director of SEO and a BrightEdge customer, shared an interesting site migration case at the Share14 conference earlier this year. In this instance, it was an integration of two sites, where one existing site became a subdomain of another. After carefully moving the site, the result was a 129 percent increase in traffic – a total success. You can watch a video of his session here, which illustrates the power of a strategic website migration.

Bottom line: you need the right people and tools in place for a site migration

Companies undergoing site migrations or redesigns must have an enterprise SEO platform and a success manager in place. Companies that are likley to lose traffic opportunities. Company X that we spoke about earlier could have refocused the website and still maintained the SEO value they developed through proper implementations, like 301 redirects. But today, any links they had now generate a 404 "not found" message. This haphazard approach to site migration destroyed any content equity, rank, link equity and free traffic that the company had. In sum, you would not consult an architect after you rebuild your house, so don’t forget to include an SEO manager and appropriate benchmarking and tracking resources when you plan your site updates, redesigns, and migrations.  

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Keyword research and discovery is the fundamental first step towards optimizing your website content so it ranks for keywords, captures organic search share and generates leads. When conducting keyword research, it may be tempting to focus on those highly competitive one- or two-word terms used by most in your industry’s vertical. While these terms definitely should be part of your long-term SEO content keyword strategy, they should also be balanced with less competitive, “long-tail” keywords built into your site’s content. Long-tail keywords are more likely to capture searchers’ specific intent – yielding greater search visibility for your optimized content and higher conversions. I explain the rationale behind using long-tail keywords in another post on the BrightEdge blog:

Marketers spend a lot of time dreaming up the perfect piece of content, and then try to incorporate keywords. To be more effective and use your content to its potential, this strategizing should really be done the other way around. Research long-tailed keywords first, and incorporate them from the beginning of the process, so that your content is shaped around the keywords you need to use. Deciding on which long-tailed keywords to use before producing the content helps to ensure that the content gets seen by the right audience.

So, creating site content with long-tail keywords “baked in” signals search engines that your content is most relevant to your target user’s query, creating greater search visibility and conversions. In this post, we’ll go over si simple ways to discover long-tail keywords.

Resources for long-tail keyword research

1. The BrightEdge Data Cube

If you have access to the huge repository of data stored in our Data Cube, then you’re already a step or three ahead of your competitors in accessing competitive long-tail keywords. By leveraging its “SEO X-Ray” technology (similar to a search engine with a massive data bank of keywords from all the major search engines around the globe), you can readily view your competitors’ SEO management and strategies, including the keywords that are generating results for them that you should pursue as well. Specific to long-tail keywords, you can use the BrightEdge platform for keyword discovery by entering your site’s Web address (URL) in its search box, followed by those of your competitors. This will give you not only a list of long-tail keywords and their respective search performance, but also invaluable competitive intelligence. (Refer to my guide on performing keyword research, noted above, for more details on leveraging the BrightEdge Data Cube).

2. Google trends

Google Trends and its related searches feature are free Google resources that give insight into how any given keyword is trending on the Web in terms of search volume, as well as related searches that, when explored, can offer more long-tail keyword terms to add to your keyword portfolio. Google’s 2012 U.S. presidential election example illustrates the data you can glean: Looking at Google’s example, you’ll notice “top” and “rising” stats. Top searches represent the popular search terms similar to the keyword term entered. The “rising” percentages are those searches related to your original keyword term that have shown a significant growth in popularity over a time period that you specify (such as month-over-month). Also notable are the “breakout” terms reflected in the election example (which, in this example, indicate the related search terms experienced a search query growth of more than 5,000 percent over the specified time period). In this way, Google Trends and its related searches can help you optimize for long-tail keyword terms that are immediately relevant, and those that are trending in organic search.

3. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)

Using GWT search queries, you can see the top search queries that return your site pages in Google SERPs. You can also glean insights into your site’s content performance within a set time period of up to 90 days with parameters that include comparative page impressions and click-through rates (CTR). Google provides a video describing its search queries function, here: Note: The 90-day limit on GWT’s historical keyword data can be problematic when creating an informed, long-term keyword strategy. I discuss how the BrightEdge SEO platform solves this analytical gap further on the BrightEdge blog.

4. Google Ads keyword planner

For culling data on long-term keywords, you can also set up a Google Ads account to gain access its Keyword Planner tool. (Note: you don’t have to an ad campaign to use this resource). By simply entering your website’s URL into the first field of the Keyword Planner and selecting “get ideas,” you can readily discover more long-term keyword terms.

5. Google Analytics site search

Connecting your site’s search functionality to your Google Analytics is an effective way to gauge site-specific search intent and identify the long-tail keywords used by visitors. This article by Google’s Avinash Kaushik outlines five key insights you can gather from site search, like what info users are seeking and conversions resulting from on-site search. He elaborates on how you can deepen your understanding of search intent with internal site search analysis in this YouTube video.

6. Google’s autocomplete

Besides the resources describe above, Google also has an “autocomplete” capability built into its predictive algorithm that “suggests” search query terms for users. Drawing on the example of the “2012 U.S. presidential election” above, before completing the query into Google’s search engine, it displayed the following: So by experimenting with Google’s autocomplete feature, you can see long-tail keyword suggestions that might be of interest to your target market.

7. Google’s related suggestions

A second, related functionality of Google search that can offer long-tail keyword ideas is its “Searches Related to…” information at the bottom of its SERPs. (Note: this is distinct from its trending and related searches resource described above). Using the same search query of “2012 U.S. presidential election,” here is what Google lists at the bottom of its SERP: Again, viewing the auto-generated related searches on Google’s SERPs – this time, at the bottom – you can discover other long-tail keyword terms that are closely related to yours. When it makes sense, they can be added to your keyword portfolio. Happy hunting!

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

The terms around SEO analytics can be confusing. You’ll often see “SEO tools” used interchangeably with “SEO software” or “SEO platform.” In this post we’ll clarify the distinctions among these three SEO analytics terms, giving a basic overview of the concepts as well as what they mean to you as an analytics user. 

SEO software and SEO tools

SEO tools are also known as SEO software applications designed to help users perform specific SEO tasks or a range of tasks. For instance, a spreadsheet system is application software. While it’s true that all applications are software, not all software is an application. SEO software refers to the programs that instruct your computer or mobile device on how to run SEO applications or tools. It is the basic operating framework that underlies and supports SEO tools. SEO software is only as functional as its applications or SEO tools. In turn, it is dependent on a platform to support it in order to be operational.

SEO tools and SEO platforms

Enterprise SEO platforms today enable SEO and content marketing professionals and their clients to achieve a higher ROI from their campaigns by focusing attention on workflow, optimization, collaboration and overall increases in productivity and efficiency. For this reason it's important to distinguish between a tool and a platform.

• SEO tools: Most tools serve a single purpose and are specifically designed to help with one specific area of your business or SEO reports, for example, keyword research, link analysis and analytics.
• SEO platforms: Platforms are built for enterprise scale. A platform provides a holistic solution to a number of client and business needs by offering a suite of integrated technologies that includes monetary, productivity and workflow systems. SEO platforms are all encompassing, integrating the software and tools for SEO management. SEO platforms like the BrightEdge S3 platform are also known as enterprise SEO software because they can integrate data and processes that span departments or teams (often including access to an API).

Below are a few of major characteristics of an SEO software that distinguish it from SEO tools.

1. Designed for enterprise scale. A platform has deployments with deep modeling capabilities -- geo, BU, catalog category. Enterprise SEO software should be able to track billions of keywords and pages, large volumes of location-specific data and social signals to give you the right analytics to make informed decisions. Jim Yu recently wrote at Search Engine Watch about how the role of enterprise technology platforms, like BrightEdge, allow operations teams to scale their campaign reach and focus. Platforms allow businesses to scale their operations. While a one-person operator (for example a small agency) may use a few free tools, growing businesses and large companies (with multiple departmental owners, digital and operational teams) need enterprise-level technology to function and scale efficiently.

2. Secure and reliable. Marketers now have access to unprecedented amounts of important data that is vital to their and their clients' business results. Enterprise technology providers are trusted guardians of this data. In fact, in many geographies, you have a legal obligation to safeguard this data. A few examples are;

1. ISO/IEC 27001 standard compliance for greater data protection
2. Government level encryption
3. Flexible password policies
4. Compliance with European Union and Swiss Safe Harbor guidelines for compliance with stringent data privacy laws

3. Customizable and flexible. Platforms need to meet specific business processes. As businesses scale, so do requirements from SEO teams, cross-functional teams and management teams. Platforms are highly adaptive, and different workflow paths can be set that feed into customizable, powerful reporting dashboards for senior management and stakeholders alike. For example, platforms allow you to:

• Report via role
• Utilize workflow capabilities to move from understanding to action
• Set clear KPIs and maintain organizational alignment
• Streamline process in terms of how tasks are executed
• Gain real-time visibility and transparency
• Close the loop on ROI initiatives
• Build executive relations and gain buy-in

4. Seamless integration. Platforms should integrate with existing investments via open standards-based APIs. Enterprise SEO technologies gather data acquired through partnerships with trusted data sources. By integrating data from multiple sources, organizing it and analyzing it, SEO platforms provide serious competitive and industry insights that "standalone" tools can not provide. A great example of integration is one of the world's first secure search solutions, the BrightEdge integration with GWT data. In sum, if you want your SEO operations and business to scale in an ever-growing competitive marketplace, enterprise SEO platforms are a necessity. Ensuring you have the right technology in place sets you up for success. BrightEdge is the essential SEO software and content marketing platform that helps more than 8,500 global brands including 3M, Microsoft, Netflix and Nike leverage SEO and content marketing for success. 

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

In this age of Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird, ranking for your keywords in the search engine results pages (SERPs) requires both strategic SEO intelligence and a systematic approach. SEO is very much alive and well -- when done correctly -- and is integral to a winning organic search content strategy. With that in mind, we’ve distilled seven essential steps you need to take to rank for your keywords.

1. Keyword research

Keyword research lays the foundation for optimizing your site. Beginning from scratch, the fundamentals for keyword research and discovery are:

• Build a keyword portfolio, starting with a core keyword list (aka “seed list”). Organize your research in a spreadsheet (for instance, Excel or a Google Drive sheet) that includes keyword ideas from competitor sites as well as your own.
• Extract the keywords that drive the most impressions from your site’s Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account and add them to your core list.
• If you have access to the BrightEdge Data Cube, perform a search of your website to discover those keywords you’re ranking for (including which pages), and add those to your list. Next, do the same for your competitors.
• Next, use Google’s Keyword Planner tool for more research to uncover additional keyword ideas.
• Finally, organize and prioritize your keywords into categories in your spreadsheet, such as “products,” “services” and “news.” This step will help you in creating your website structure, which we’ll discuss next.

For a detailed description of the keyword research steps outlined above, you can refer to my guide to keyword research at the BrightEdge blog.

2. Site structure

Your keyword research will help you build an optimized site structure (aka navigational framework) that helps the search engines understand what your site is about, and allows your users to navigate with ease. Organizing your site’s structure around targeted keyword categories, or themes, will help the search engines understand that your site is relevant to a user’s query. With your keyword research spreadsheet as a guide, your next steps are to:

• Clarify your website’s overarching themes, incorporating your more general keywords.
• Define your website’s main categories and subcategories with more specific keywords, again informed by your keyword research.
• Optimize individual pages with even more refined keywords, including “long-tail” keywords (discussed below) specific to that page. This is where you can “move the needle” by making small tweaks that result in drastic improvement in your pages’ SERP positioning (what we refer to as “striking distance”).

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu provides an overview of these concepts in his article for the BrightEdge blog.

3. SEO content audit

While this is an optional step, conducting an SEO content audit is recommended, as it helps you assess what content on your site is performing well versus what is falling flat in terms of search rankings and ROI. Establishing this initial benchmark will help you inform your content strategy going forward. There are several tools you can employ for gathering the data you’ll need to conduct an SEO content audit, depending on your needs. For enterprise-level firms and larger websites, the BrightEdge SEO platform has both analytics and reporting tools that measure organic search and revenue performance for individual pages as well as site categories and subcategories.

• As with keyword research, you’ll want to export and organize the data you’ve culled from your content audit into a spreadsheet. Some of the key SEO metrics to analyze are pageviews, organic visits, bounce rates, conversions, and page speed.
• Focus on the performance of website pages that are central to your business, such as key landing and sales pages.
• Your blog requires measuring social metrics such as Facebook sharing, tweets and re-tweets, Google +1s and shares, as well as the quality and quantity of backlinks that search engines use to gauge the authority and credibility of your content (which in turn influences your blog’s search ranking).

For further reading on how to conduct an SEO content audit, see my post on the BrightEdge blog.

4. Content creation, optimization, and on-page SEO

At this stage, you’ll need to create content for new site pages and/or optimize existing ones with the relevant keywords gathered from your research. The guiding principles here include:

• Strive for a good word count that makes the content feel complete (no less than 250 words, depending on the topic and purpose of the page). Optimize with keywords that are relevant to the page topic, but avoid keyword “stuffing” or adding unnecessary text. Also, make sure that written content is immediately visible to viewers near the top of the page (don’t make ads the first thing they see).
• Guard against duplicate content, which can be a result of inadvertent mistakes such as replicating pages’ Meta information (discussed below).
• Create Meta data unique to each site page to inform search engines of the content’s topic via a page title and description. This is also the “clickable” information displayed in the SERPs, and factors heavily in search ranking performance.
• Rich media, such as images and video, also require written titles, descriptions and tags so search engines can understand their contents. Optimize on-page rich media so keywords match that in the corresponding text and Meta data.
• Structure the page content headers and subheads using an hierarchy of heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to help search engine bots better understand what the page is about, and to assist readers in scanning your page.
• Use internal links to connect individual site pages to each other, as applicable. Search engine robots read Web content by following links, so providing an internal, connected structure helps them – as well as your site visitors – navigate your website.
• Create and submit an XML Sitemap to search engines to further inform them of your site’s individual page content using the Web “robot” code of XML tags. For very large and/or new sites, as well as sites with large archives of remote content pages and/or use rich media, this helps “Googlebot” and other search engine robots to “crawl” and index your site in the SERPs more quickly and accurately.

I provide more details of these on-page SEO principles with Part 1 and Part 2 of our Basic SEO Guide at the BrightEdge blog. You can also check out the blog on XML Sitemaps in non-technical terms.

5. Link earning

Simply put, link “earning” means creating content that others want to associate themselves with and/or express a vote of confidence in by linking out to it. These “inbound” links may be to your home page, an internal products or services page, or an exceptional blog post. Inbound links from others on the Web comprise your site’s backlink profile. Search engines factor in both the quantity and quality of your site’s backlink profile when weighing its relative importance, authority and credibility. This assessment, in turn, factors into your site’s organic search content rankings. As with SEO content audits, monthly or quarterly link audits are a recommended best practice to benchmark and monitor the health of your site’s backlink profile. (We refer to this simply as backlink management). You can learn more about how to conduct a qualitative and quantitative link audit using a basic four-step process with my article on the BrightEdge blog. I also share creative (and legitimate) link-building tactics to explore. If you are looking for something to implement in a day, these 10 backlink building ideas could be of great help. If you’re strapped for time and resources, Mark Mitchell outlines 10 simple link-building initiatives that you can accomplish within a day. He also shares best practices for conducting a backlink analysis, and disavowing “bad” links to avoid a Google “Penguin slap.”

6. Social media

As alluded to above when discussing the SEO audit of blog content (Step 3), social media engagement and sharing now play an increasingly significant role in your organic search visibility and content ranking. Given the incorporation of Google Plus social activity in Google’s SERPs, as well as Bing’s exclusive partnership with Twitter for its SERPs, “social SEO” has become a content marketing reality. The explosion of online data over the past few years is mostly due to social media, and there are no signs that this trend will be slowing down. Search engines now use content sharing as a “quality” signal. The synergy of search and social is evidenced by a Twitter case study of Tiny Prints, a specialty online boutique that depends on organic search for its Web traffic and revenue. By leveraging the Twitter platform, it realized a 47 percent increase in organic search rankings for long-tail keywords and tripled its Twitter follower engagement. For more on search and social synergy, check out Mark’s post on social signals and SEO, and Andy Betts’ article on how search and social data work in tandem to produce search ranking results.

7. Track performance

Benchmarking your organic search content performance is the first step towards a smart content strategy. The BrightEdge SEO platform has an array of analytics and reporting tools to help you do just that. Perhaps most cogent to keyword ranking is our content-centric page analysis and reporting technology, referenced earlier in Step 3 (content audit). As mentioned previously, our page reporting tool can measure and report on organic search and revenue performance not only at the individual page level, but for entire groups of pages within your site. Finally, remember this entire step-by-step process is not a one-and-done project. To gain the insights you need to keep ahead of the competition in the organic search content space, you’ll want to revisit each step in a cyclical manner to achieve superior SEO content performance!

Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

The entertainment industry has been fighting piracy for years. Still today, we’re served some pretty serious warnings when watching movies that Interpol (yes, the world police) will come for anyone who dares to make a copy of that movie. With search engines being ripe for picking up free (aka “pirated”) movies and music, Google wants to be sure it stays on the good side of major entertainment groups. Enter Google’s “Pirate” update.

The Google Pirate update was announced in 2012 as a new signal in Google’s rankings algorithm aimed at demoting sites in the results that have a large number of valid copyright removal notices. In late October, Google announced it would be releasting a new version of the Google Pirate update. Search Engine Land speculated that this was in response to a spat over piracy between Google and media giant News Corp. Check out the full list of Google algorithm updates since 2011 here.

The Google stance on piracy

Google stated with the latest release (which rolled out in October) that it refined its piracy signal to “visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites” (referring to sites that receive a large number of valid copyright infringements under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA). Other steps Google took with its latest release is deleting autocomplete suggestions that return results with DMCA-demoted sites, and highlighting other areas of its search engine results page with legitimate content for what could be illegitimate searches. For example, if someone searches for “[movie/music name] free download,” they might be served with a couple new features in the search results:

1. Ads that show up for legitimate content for that movie or music
2. A sidebar with information on how to purchase, listen or watch legitimate content for that movie or music

Here’s an example of both, courtesy of Google’s announcement. First, an advertisement may pop up when queries for movies include terms like “download,” “free” or “watch”.

And here is an example of sidebar info on Google that could pop up for similar queries. So what can you do about it?

If you’re in the entertainment industry and offering legitimate content, things may be a little harder for those on the other side. At TorrentFreak.com, a site that shares information related to copyrights and file-sharing, reports state that organic traffic has been severely impacted for many of the file-sharing sites that Google Pirate was aimed at. Of course, all Google can do at this time is demote rankings and control the way its results are displayed. This update does nothing for people finding those files though other means.

Still, Google is quick to point out its response rate for legitimate take-down requests, and its thin tolerance for these types of sites in its latest “How Google Fights Piracy ” report:

• In 2013 we received just over 224 million DMCA requests for Google Search results.
• We ultimately removed 222M, which means we rejected or reinstated less than 1% after review because we either needed additional information, were unable to find the page, or concluded that the material was not infringing; and
• Our average turnaround time for copyright notices remains less than 6 hours.

Of course, if you’re really serious about being a part of the solution, you can always do what Disney did and invent technology to address piracy. Recent reports show that Disney registered a patent for piracy-free search, which when used, would only surface legitimate content owned by the entertainment group. 

Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

When it comes to Q4 holiday marketing, most in the industry immediately think “e-commerce” as it relates to Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping deals. However, under that broad category are the travel and hospitality verticals – especially given that the preponderance of U.S. domestic holiday travel occurs over the Thanksgiving weekend. Those in the travel and lodging industry recognize this seasonal uptick by offering airfare, hotel and other travel deals timed around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Many brands specify “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” in prefacing their discounts, smartly optimizing for the season’s trending search terms. For example, Alaska Airlines features a Cyber Monday flight sale:

With nine of the ten largest hotel groups being among BrightEdge’s clients, we wanted to delve into the demand for that sector leading up to the holiday season, so we leveraged our Data Cube for insights into the Q4 travel and hospitality outlook, so you can prepare. Before discussing what we found, a bit of background.

Travel and hospitality search: a journey

Once upon a time and not so long ago, people planning vacations, weekend getaways or business trips online did so exclusively on desktop. Enter the era of mobile devices – tablets and smartphones – apps and video, all within the past few years, and search around travel and lodging has changed drastically. A year ago, when Google published its annual travel study, it found that an increasing number of searchers began their travel plans with online research, planned more family travel, and were more likely to use their mobile device for related information while on their trip: A related “Think with Google” study from March of this year on travel content underscores the role of video (notably, YouTube) as an increasingly popular online medium for people considering travel. According to its report, uploads of travel-related videos grew by 190 percent from 2012 to 2013, exceeding all the other major YouTube categories for video uploads.

This year’s Google travel study (not yet officially published, but Tnooz.com reports it’s received a copy) indicates that over the year, search engines realized a gain of three percentage points, from 15 to 18 percent, as the starting point for research into airfares, and 6 percentage points (18 to 24 percent) for research into lodging. Learn more about travel digital marketing.

BrightEdge Data Cube findings

Our latest Data Cube research into the travel and hospitality industry looked into three major categories:

1. Travel and accommodation
2. Travel only
3. Accommodation only

Using our “Time Machine" technology, we were able to analyze travel search trends over time, and found that overall, online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and TripAdvisor have consistently performed well with organic search optimization, claiming a combined search share of 33.6 percent of the top three “deals and offers” domain listings: While OTAs dominate the SERPs in organic content performance for deals and offers, individual hotels – led by Hilton and Marriott – showed notable success for tourist destinations and landmarks, as shown here: The BrightEdge Data Cube research further uncovered the top ten organic search terms in demand for each category studied as we head into the busy holiday season. BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu recently shared our findings with Search Engine Land readers on this.