ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 7 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 7 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.  

Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 7 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 7 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 7 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 7 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 7 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!