ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

The holiday season is a busy time not only for ecommerce brands, but also other sectors, like travel and hospitality. As travelers look for deals on flights and getaways, marketers can gear up by understanding what's driving demand. Check out this infographic that highlights data from recent research BrightEdge conducted on travel and hospitality consumer and search demand leading up to the holiday and winter season. You can download the full report here. 

lpark

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

We are proud to announce that BrightEdge Community Edition has been named a Bronze winner in the Enterprise Product of the Year (Software) category in Best in Biz Awards 2014. The Best in Biz Awards is the only independent business awards program judged by members of the press and industry analysts.

BrightEdge market leading innovation recognized by press and analysts

Winners of Best in Biz Awards 2014 were determined based on scoring from an independent panel of 53 judges from highly recognized newspapers, business, consumer and technology publications, radio outlets, and analyst firms. The panel included contributors such as AdWeek, Entrepreneur, eWeek Channel Insider, Inc. Magazine, Information Week, MarketingProfs, MediaPost, Silicon Valley Business Journal, Venture Capital Journal, Wired, Xconomy and ZDNet.

“We are delighted to have received such a prestigious award. At BrightEdge, we’re deeply committed to supporting the entire marketing community and progressing the future of the industry. This Enterprise Product Award is testament to the fact that BrightEdge is founded on a culture of innovation, enabling us to support content marketers with each technological advancement and trend” -Brad Mattick, VP of Product and Marketing, BrightEdge

About BrightEdge community edition

Understand consumer demand and the competitive landscape for any web content - for free

At BrightEdge, we build technology in lock step with other Silicon Valley innovators like Facebook, Google and Twitter. In order to ensure the lasting success of content marketing as an industry practice, and to show our commitment to the growth of the community, we are making our powerful content technology available to marketers at no cost. Community Edition is a powerful and easy-to-use new product from BrightEdge. Featuring the power of the Data Cube to go, now you can find out where the fish are before you drop your content line in the water. BrightEdge is making Community Edition available for free to help the content marketing community take advantage of our most powerful technology – to go. Community Edition tells you how many people are searching for a topic or what topics your competitors are creating content around. Marketers can use it to:

1. Find high-volume keywords
2. Discover untapped longtail keywords
3. Understand rich media strategies of any site
4. Improve the readiness of the content before it goes live

BrightEdge Community Edition is convenient Chrome plug-in that will make it easy and fast to analyze the page and domain of any site you visit. Due to high volume of demand, BrightEdge Community Edition is being rolled out in phases. BrightEdge Community Edition was one of many market-leading products launched at Share 14. This is an annual investment that BrightEdge makes in the community.

Learn more at Share15

This year, Share 15 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. 

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

A well-defined website structure is key to helping both users and search engine bots navigate your site with ease. When you determine the navigation and structure of your site, you are effectively deciding its topical focus and organizing the content. Your topical focus is where you define your brand and demonstrate its expertise, what it stands for, and what products or services it provides. And, the more content you generate on your site about the topics that people are searching for in your realm of expertise, the more relevant your site will become to search queries – which in turn will result in more search visibility. In this post, we’ll go over the high-level concepts on how to use keyword research to create an optimal site structure when creating a new website or forging a redesign of an existing site.

What is site structure?

Simply put, site structure is the way you group and organize the content on your site. Individual Web pages become directories and sections of your site when linked to one another in a SEO-savvy way. (To learn more about linking, refer to part 2 of my BrightEdge post on basic SEO concepts). For users, a well-defined site structure helps them easily move from section to section on the topics they care about or wish to explore further, helping them readily find the information they seek. For search engines, it helps them better “understand” your site’s content, and builds authority and topical relevance in the eyes of the bots.

How do keywords play into site structure?

There are many ways you might choose to design your site’s structure and navigation, and this depends upon your business and website goals. For now, we’ll focus on how your keyword research can indicate the types of topics that should comprise your site’s content, which you can then group into the “themed” sections of your site – ultimately defining its navigation. As I mentioned in my basic guide to keyword research here on the BrightEdge blog, the final step in research can be using your keyword categories to create a site structure. As a refresher, at the close of your keyword research. you may find you have a group of keyword terms related to “X” product or “Y” service. Once you’ve determined your keywords’ search demand, you can assign keywords to corresponding pages of your site that build out those important sections related to X product or Y service.

How to use keywords to create navigational site structure: an example

At a minimum, most online businesses have a services or product page, an “about us” page, and perhaps a “resources” page. So you most likely already have an idea of what sections of your site will exist. Next, you can begin mapping the keywords to the content you will create to expand upon the sections of your site, thus further defining its navigational structure. Using a San Jose dentist/orthodontist as an example, the practice might provide and have a lot of keywords around different services, such as standard dental care, braces and Invisalign. Your goal would be to create useful content in the form of individual Web pages that correlate to both the services and the keywords for that service. Each of these individual service pages would be organized under a main “Services” landing page. This will help visitors find specific information easily, and help search engines determine that its site is relevant to those search terms. Here’s a visual from a keyword research spreadsheet and the corresponding URL structure. 

In general, you’ll want to reserve the main landing pages for the most “generic,” high-demand keywords (often only one- or two-word key terms). The main landing page is where you’ll introduce visitors to your services, products or topics, depending on your business. Subpages typically support keywords that are more specific, and likely have less search volume that those of the main landing pages’ keywords. Each section of the site would be housed in a website directory, which is created by designating your site’s structural navigation – the URL structure. The result? A well-organized website experience for users that provides topically relevant, easily-navigated content for search engines!  

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Knowing how to optimize your site for mobile takes the right tools so you understand the experience your site is creating today, and how to make improvements for tomorrow. Both the BrightEdge platform and Google make it easy to track performance with a few simple reports. In this post, we’ll quickly go over what those are.

How BrightEdge helps with mobile optimization

BrightEdge takes mobile reporting beyond the webmaster and to the marketer with reporting that helps brands understand their SEO and content performance by device. BrightEdge’s mobile SEO reporting allows users to track and measure mobile device performance with things like:

1. Measuring true rank by device in Universal Search (image, video, social).
2. Visibility into local SEO performance by keywords and keyword groups across cities.
3. Tracking and reporting on keyword trends and rankings across device type.
4. Optimizing mobile campaign performance for ecommerce.
5. Understanding the competitive SEO landscape and “share of voice” for a brand across mobile devices.

The following screenshot shows a BrightEdge report that gives data on rankings and keywords by device (you can set to tablet or smartphone) for a defined time period:

This next screenshot shows a BrightEdge report that offers data on visits and conversions by page and by device: 

How Google Helps with Mobile Optimization

Google’s goal is to ensure websites are easy to use for those navigating on a mobile device, so many of its reporting features let webmasters know how they can improve the user experience. Here are a couple you can access right now …

1. PageSpeed Insights for Mobile

Google Developers created the PageSpeed Insights tool that allows site owners to input a URL and discover how to improve the speed of any given Web page. Remember, Google stated that above-the-fold content for mobile must render in one second or less, and gives tips on how to manage that, here. The following screenshot is an example of the PageSpeed Insights tool in action for the home page of NYTimes.com:

This year, Google added new functionality to the mobile suggestions of the PageSpeed tool with a section on user experience, which looks at criteria like tap targets, legible font sizes and more.

2. Mobile Usability in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)

In October, Google announced a new section in GWT that points out to webmasters any issues that could be hindering the mobile experience for users. Similar to the PageSpeed Insights tool and its user experience reports, this feature looks at things like:

• Touch elements
• Viewport and content configuration
• Flash usage

You can navigate to the report in GWT by going to Search Traffic > Mobile Usability. Hopefully, you’ll see a message like the one that shows here, where no usability errors are detected:

In its announcement, Google gives an example of what a report looks like for a site that needs to optimize its mobile experience, here:

So, there you have it: simple reports packed with a punch from both BrightEdge and Google that give you more than enough data to track how your site is doing from a mobile usability perspective, and to gain insight from an SEO, content and conversion standpoint by device. Now go forth, and be mobile!

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

In yet another tectonic shift in the local SEO landscape, Google ended its local “carousel” organic search results on November 13. To date, it primarily affects listings from desktop searches for restaurants, hotels and related business categories. Gone is the interactive “black bar” of local search results that were displayed side-by-side at the top of Google’s vertical results, which accommodated up to 20 listings. The search giant has replaced it with a “3-pack” display representing the top three local organic search results. When it introduced the local carousel in June 2013 via its Google+ page, Google offered an example of local carousel organic search listings for Mexican restaurants in New York City.

Now Google’s search engine results page (SERP) listing for Mexican restaurants in New York City looks like this: By clicking on the “more” link at the bottom of the SERP 3-pack listing, users will land on a new page of local search results displayed as a vertical organic SERP listing.

The individual results show the business address, reviews and a description of the business, as well as a map to the right of the listings.

When Google launched its local carousel, marketers adapted quickly. In fact, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu discussed a new set of best practices for Google carousel optimization that same year, noting “with 20 results appearing in the carousel. It means your business is competing for attention with 19 other businesses.” However, some of Jim’s tips in that article may be all the more important now, as businesses will vie to be among the top three organic search results of Google’s new local SERP 3-pack. For additional tips on local SEO, you can check out this post by BrightEdge’s Mark Mitchell, which discusses local SEO factors, how Google My Business factors and on-site optimization tips. BrightEdge will be conducting its own research on this new development, and will be sharing the results with you soon. Stay tuned!