ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

You’ve likely heard of XML Sitemap generation, but do you know what it is, and why it is so critical that you have one? Simply put, an XML Sitemap is a way to list your website’s pages in a file using XML tags (XML stands for “extensible markup language” schema, which is far more precise than HTML aka “hyper text markup language” code). Once submitted to Google (and other search engines), this list of your site’s individual page URLs informs them about the organization of your site’s content. This, in turn, enables “Googlebot” (and other search engine “spiders”) to crawl your website more accurately and index its content in the search engine results pages (SERPs) more quickly.

Google introduced Sitemaps in 2005, followed a year later by Yahoo and Microsoft (now known as Bing) in a rare collaborative initiative known as the “Sitemaps Protocol." The good news for webmasters is that, as a uniform standard supported by the largest (U.S.) search engines, you only need to work on one XML Sitemap generation. In this introductory guide, we’ll discuss best practices and share resources for optimizing your website’s search performance with XML Sitemap generation.

Creating your sitemap

As Web crawlers work by following links, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) guidelines recommends the creation of Sitemaps if your site:

• Is really large or relatively new
• Contains pages that are not linked well within your site or are otherwise “isolated”
• Uses rich content (video and/or images)
• Contains content featured in Google News

Even if your website doesn’t meet any of these criteria, it is still a best website optimization practice to build and submit a Sitemap to ensure that all of your site’s pages are crawled and indexed in the SERPs as quickly and accurately as possible which also helps create a good bounce rate. Both GWT and the Sitemaps Protocol (referenced above) offer specific examples of how to apply XML tags to your website’s pages.

Rich media XML sitemaps

As with written content, building Sitemaps for your site’s videos and images ensures they are found and indexed by Web crawlers, which can improve visibility for your site’s rich media in Google’s image and video search results. For both types of rich media content, you have the option of creating a separate Sitemap or adding the information to your existing website Sitemap using the appropriate XML tag “extensions,” according to GWT. Details on how to use XML tag extensions for images are available via GWT here, and for videos, here.

As a side note, another way for ensuring your images are visible in search is by following Google’s image publishing guidelines, which urges webmasters to use highly descriptive file names for images to assist Google in identifying their subject matter. And you can also check out Google’s video best practices that include details on how to use schema.org to mark up video content within Web pages, as well as how to create quality “thumbnail images” to be displayed alongside your video pages in its search results. Google also addresses how to create XML tags for mobile. You can find that here.

XML sitemap troubleshooting

There are several issues that commonly occur with XML Sitemaps. GWT (and others) note that one of the most typical snags occurs with contradicting website URLs. This occurs when a webmaster submits a Sitemap for a website recognized as “http://www.mysite.com” in its search engine’s webmaster tools account, but submits an XML file with page URLs that do not include the “www” preface (i.e., “http://mysite.com”). Besides this obvious oversight, other typical issues involve broken links that haven’t been addressed and “301” redirected pages that haven’t been updated to reflect the new website page URL, as Ben Goodsell explains at Search Engine Watch. Fortunately, there are also several tools for troubleshooting XML Sitemap issues.

GWT’s “Crawl Errors” page offers information on how to detect both site-level and page-level errors. Other resources include “Fetch as Googlebot,” which allows you to see content and links that Googlebot can’t crawl. If you have multiple sites to manage, GWT offers detailed tips for simplifying XML optimization. Well, there you have it: a basic introduction to XML Sitemaps, which are a best practice for every brand that owns a website and wants to ensure its content is found in the search results and even in the Google answer box!

Mark Mitchell

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Pinterest, the visual social network launched in March 2010, has evolved far beyond its humble scrapbooking and recipe-sharing origins. Advancements such as “Rich Pins” and cross-platform sharing in Twitter and Facebook, plus the explosion in visual marketing in general, has dramatically increased Pinterest’s viability as a marketing tool, and transformed it into a powerful social referral engine.

Pinterest’s social traffic referral share grew a quantum 48 percent in the first quarter of the year and is now second only to Facebook in total social media traffic referrals, according to Shareaholic’s 2014 Q1 Social Media Traffic study. In this post, we’ll look at who uses Pinterest, and five ways to create a Pinterest presence and work on your Pinterest SEO for your brand, plus some bonus tips for engagement.

Who uses Pinterest?

Citing demographic data from Pew Research, MarketingCharts shows that users are predominantly educated, affluent women between ages 18 and 29. They tend to live in the suburbs rather than cities, and are also generally active on Facebook. For brands targeting this particular market segment, optimizing for Pinterest is a no-brainer. Digital marketers in general should find Pinterest a compelling social media platform, given the overall Web trend towards rich media - images and video – as BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu recently wrote for Search Engine Land. While Pinterest isn’t appropriate for every sector, e-commerce companies and those organizations that lend themselves to visually appealing marketing campaigns will find Pinterest an ideal venue for showing off their brand’s products or messaging (think grassroots non-profit social causes, for example). Let’s go over best practices for leveraging the Pinterest platform for your brand.

Five steps for your Pinterest SEO efforts

1. Create and verify your business profile

The first step for businesses wanting to leverage Pinterest is to create a corporate profile. Once you’ve created your brand’s profile, you’ll then need to verify your website. Doing so adds a “check sign” icon to your site’s images that shows Pinterest has officially confirmed your site. This can be done easily from your account’s settings page.

2. Add Pinterest buttons to your website

Next, you’ll want to add the “Pin It” button to your site’s product pages and those landing pages that lend themselves to image sharing. You’ll also want to add the Pinterest “Follow” button to these pages, so your site’s visitors can readily track your Pinterest boards. Pinterest walks users through a simple process for uploading all of their buttons to your site’s pages via its “widget builder.”

3. Create and optimize Pinterest boards

You can think of Pinterest boards as virtual bulletin boards, each displaying a separate category of pictures aka “Pins” that represent your brand’s information or products. As Pinterest’s Kevin Knight recently wrote on the company’s blog for businesses, you can approach boards either as a source of content distribution or as a destination for your content. No matter your approach, a best practice is to create several boards focused tightly around specific topics for more targeted engagement with your followers. For instance, rather than just a “clothing” board, you would want to narrow it down to “work fashion” for one board and “casual fashion” for another. You’ll increase both search visibility and user engagement by enriching the board titles themselves, adding keywords to the titles and repeating them in board descriptions (within reason – avoid “keyword stuffing”).

Elaborating on your boards’ descriptions make them far more compelling, as well. Simply illustrated, a board title of “Healthy Recipes” with the description of “Deliciously healthy recipes that make trying to lose weight a little less miserable” conveys specific product benefits (and is far more search savvy) than a title of “Recipes” followed by a description of “Mmmmm … dinner.” In his post, Knight offers three examples of brand boards demonstrating best practices:

• Madewell’s Malta / Spring 2014’s board, “offers a mix of inspirational images next to products those images might inspire you to buy.”
• REI’s The Chef features “a collection of delicious camping dishes and the supplies you’ll need to make them.”
• Etsy’s Etsy Weddings “combines beautiful wedding images with specific ideas.”

4. Optimize your images

First and foremost, start with good, quality images that are clear and represent your brand well. And, just as with Pinterest boards, a best practice is to optimize individual Pins by adding keywords to the image file name and description. Other image optimization tips include:

• Make Pins Twitter-friendly by adding a hashtag (#) to the image’s alt attribute (and further encourage cross-platform sharing by checking off the “Facebook” box as well).
• Add a URL back to your site or specific product pages, depending on the image and what it represents.
• Limit the length of the image to 5,000 pixels (although there is no limit to the size of images, those longer than 5,000 will require users to scroll down)

5. Leverage rich pins

"Rich Pins" are designed to make your business stand out from your competitors on Pinterest. If you’re in the ecommerce biz, you may consider employing Rich Pins so users can see the price and availability of a product right on the Pin itself.

Rich Pins work by including extra details on the Pins from your website. There are now five category (“board”) types supporting Rich Pins: movie, recipe, article, product and place. There are three steps to enabling Rich Pins for your site:

1. Add Meta tags to your website (such as Schema.org or OpenGraph)
2. Test your Rich Pins
3. Apply to get them on Pinterest

More detailed information for website developers can be accessed by links provided on the Rich Pins page.

Bonus: top seven tips to increase engagement from Pinterest SEO

Just like any social network, you need a consistent publishing schedule to create an engaging experience. And, you need inspiration to do so. Here are seven tips to get you started:

1. Add Pins weekly from a variety of sources, and include new Pins and re-pins from Pinterest. Do a Pinterest search to see what people are pinning, and get ideas for what you might pin or re-pin.
2. Focus on creating Pins that empower users and facilitate re-pinning. How-to guides, DIY activities and recipes are most likely to go viral if you’re in any of those sectors.
3. Create contests that engage your online visitors via Pinterest. Read up on the guidelines for contests here.
4. Find out what people have been pinning from your site, and learn which of your products or content is most popular. To find your source page, go to: pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com
5. Browse the popular feeds to see what Pins are trending on Pinterest, then tailor what you offer on your website or blog.
6. Follow the “Pinterest For Business” board for new ideas.
7. Review Pinterest case studies to see what’s worked well for successful users like Etsy.

And, for more information on leveraging Pinterest for your brand, check out its business and Web developer pages, as well as its business blog.  

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Auditing your website’s content is much like undergoing a physical exam. You may dread it at first, but it’s a smart practice that uncovers where you need to focus in order to improve your health, and helps you understand what’s working in your approach and what isn’t.

As an enterprise-level company that devotes valuable time and resources to every marketing channel, you know how essential it is to budget and plan for results. An SEO content audit will help you accurately assess the return on your website’s content investment, and formulate an informed strategy looking ahead. In this post, I’ll discuss how to benchmark your site’s content based on key SEO metrics for both your main Web pages and your blog.

The SEO content audit: getting started

Starting from “ground zero” in an initial content audit, you need the right tools, then you need to define metrics and gather data around those metrics. Once you’ve delved into the data and interpreted what it means, you can then set goals for your site’s content performance based on those insights.

The tools

There are several resources available to assist you in extracting all the data you need from your website to perform website audit and SEO content audit, including BrightEdge’s SEO platform, Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider and Majestic. Each of these resources has their own set of features designed for different needs. For those operating at scale, BrightEdge’s SEO platform offers analytics and reporting tools measuring organic search and revenue performance at the individual Web page level and for groups of pages.

Creating your SEO content audit

Regardless of what tools you’ll employ, all data should be organized well and exported into a spreadsheet (such as Excel), with the columns designating the specific metrics tracked and the horizontal rows showing the individual page URLs to be audited. Here’s an example of what the spreadsheet may look like, with columns showing key metrics like:

• Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed -- repeated views of a single page are also counted.
• Organic visits: Shows how many visits came from the organic channel.
• Bounce rate: How many people came to the page and immediately left without interacting with it?
• Page speed: Gauges how fast or slow a page loads.
• Conversions: Whatever your conversion goals are – form fills or product buys – how many are happening as a result of that page?
• Word count: The total number of words on a page.
• Code-to-content ratio: How much actual text content exists versus code?

Every metric tells a story. The next step is figuring the “why” behind the metric data, and then putting together some next steps. For example:

• Would adding more content on the page help lower the bounce rate?
• If you have a low word count, does that result in "thin content" that could be deemed "low-quality" content?
• How about images and video -- would that help improve conversions?
• What if you’re showing a slow page load time – would that be from the video or images on the page?

SEO content audit: main web pages

For your main website pages, you’ll want to collect all the data, but focus on the Web pages that are key to your business. On a spreadsheet, you may organize those key pages so they are positioned below one another; that way you can see the metrics for each page and how it fares against other important pages in that group. The most important pages of your site typically represent the “core” of what you do. For instance, your home page, and key information-rich pages or landing pages likely would be priority for scrutiny in your audit. That said, your most important pages might not necessarily be the best-performing pages. Findings such as this underscore the value of an audit, informing both your strategy and resource-allocation decisions for the site. By simply knowing which Web pages need bolstering, you can then focus your SEO efforts on them for the coming months. You may also choose to do a second-tier prioritization of your Web pages. Identify, based on what the data is telling you, which pages you can make small tweaks to that will move the needle drastically (at BrightEdge, these seemingly minor yet quantum content optimization opportunities are referred to as “striking distance”).

What about your blog?

While pageviews, bounce rates and time on site are all important metrics to gauge the success of your blog content, in today’s current Web environment, you’ll need to measure social signals. These will indicate how (or if) people are engaging with your blog content. By examining the number of Facebook shares, tweets and Google +1s, for example, you can not only determine what is resonating with your readers, but also what direction you should take your blog overall. For instance, if you discover your blog is receiving more engagement from how-to pieces versus interviews, you may choose to include more instructional posts. An obvious “red flag” is if your blog content is not being shared at all. In that instance, you need to examine ways to improve upon that, such as creating a more solid community around your brand or ensuring that the blog is set up well technically for social sharing. Using BrightEdge, you can get a picture of your engagement metrics in the “page report,” as shown in the following screenshot:

You’ll also want to consider backlinks as part of your blog metrics. These show a vote of confidence that your content is likable and sharable. Blogs with a lot of quality links show “credibility.” Your own social media metrics can be informed by a relatively quick secondary audit of your main competitors, their backlinks and social engagement metrics. This type of analysis can be used to come up with similar ideas in that niche. For example, during a recent SEO content analysis of UPack.com, I noticed that this content had a lot of backlinks as compared to the site's other pages. If you were a competitor, or even as UPack.com, you might want to create similar content around something like an “ultimate checklist for after you move.”

Every SEO content audit tells a story

Consider your SEO content audit as the outline for a story. The more you dive into the data, the more rich the plot and honed-in the characters become. Slicing and dicing this data is one of the important jobs of a technical SEO, and one of the ways technical SEOs inform a brand’s organic search content strategy. Once you’ve established your own site’s “once upon a time,” you can continue to use content audits to provide a feedback loop to the content strategy that has been implemented, as well as testing out those tweaks and changes you’ve made as part of your optimization plan.  

Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

The latest findings from the BrightEdge Data Cube released not too long ago show SEO content marketing efforts are paying significant dividends for B2Bs, as measured by both Web traffic and revenue. Specifically, insights from our data repository show that as of August, organic search leads as the primary channel for website organic traffic, driving 51 percent of searchers to sites:

From our report:

All non-organic search channels combined – paid search, social, display, email and referred – don’t stack up to the impact that organic search alone commands across all industries. Search’s dominance may come as no surprise. After all, search has become the dominant user interface to discovering content on the Internet.

Here’s the breakdown of the industry verticals we studied: retail, media and entertainment, business services, technology/internet, and hospitality, and we compared the performance of organic versus non-organic search channels within each sector:

Of the five major industry sectors studied, we found that organic search led in all but one in revenue performance.

As we noted in our report, although organic search clearly drives the most traffic overall, our data support a hybrid approach of organic and paid search for achieving optimum ROI.

B2B brands and SEO content

“Today's business buyers do not contact suppliers directly until 57 percent of the purchase process is complete.” Those words were uttered by Google in its “B2B’s Digital Evolution” article, and they offer real motivation “to influence the 57 percent of the sale that occurs mostly on the Web,” the article states. But it does seem that the B2B sector increasingly embraces not only content marketing, but also content for the organic search channel. According to our findings, the business services (B2B) sector showed organic search was the primary driver of traffic and revenue – above and beyond other sectors studied. And according to other data, like research coming from the Content Marketing Institute’s 2014 B2B Content Marketing report, 93 percent of B2B brands indicated they were implementing content marketing , with 81 percent saying they used articles on their websites and 76 percent indicating they used blogs. The report also highlighted the fact that B2Bs are creating 41 percent more content, with 32 percent citing “significantly more,” than the previous year:

The B2B content marketing challenge

In the “B2B's Digital Evolution” article, Google cites one of the biggest challenges brands face is “matching customer need with channel,” noting the “fragmented approach” most B2Bs take with their content creation efforts. Alluding to its “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT)  initiative of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, the article states that the “challenge for marketers is to be present in these channels at all times with content that educates buyers and helps guide commercial decisions.”

Indeed, Google’s ZMOT is a challenge. As BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu wrote for Marketing Land:

If you’re taking a true content marketing approach, your content should be fueled by data about topics and your audience, then created with a laser focus on relevance and expertise. Distribution of content should be done across multiple channels … Those approaching content marketing without a background in organic search may not understand what it takes for content to compete in what’s arguably among the most profitable online channel.

A future-looking approach to B2B content marketing

Mobile-friendly Web design, semantic markup and rich media (e.g., images and videos) should be content marketing priorities going into 2015. Let’s go over a few of those now.

• Mobile search: Be prepared for the surge in mobile search traffic. The mobile channel is ideal for reaching busy executives and other key decision-makers who often use their tablets or smartphones to research products and services on the fly. 
• Semantic search: When Google’s webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, announced the end of its authorship experiment (covered in detail here), he wrote: “Going forward, we’re strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.” Google’s dedication to semantic search means that adopting structured markup will be essential for your brand’s organic search visibility.
• Rich media: Our Data Cube research (cited above) discovered that rich media – images and videos – amplifies search visibility and drives Web traffic. More compelling still is our finding that videos and images elicit a 13 percent higher click-through rate than written content alone.

As BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu concludes in a recent post for Marketing Land:

Content for the organic search channel has staying power. It can build authority for your brand, and help B2Bs remain a relevant part of the customer’s purchase journey, which often starts with search. As the research shows, B2Bs are embracing content for organic search, and seeing great results. What comes next is refining those strategies, and optimizing the content plan for maximum results in the coming year. 

​

dsitner

M Posted 11 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

When Google shifted to 100-percent secure search globally, encrypting all search query keyword data in September 2013, it represented the single largest change for SEO and search marketers, forever transforming the way they approached their profession – including how they performed competitive analysis.

As BrightEdge's Mark Mitchell shared in his SES London 2014 presentation, “Spy v Spy: Competitive Analysis Beyond The Keyword in A Secure Market,” this tectonic shift brought new challenges to search competitor analysis, as enterprise SEO companies and brands realized they needed to adapt their approach to this branch of their research within this new “keyword not provided” landscape. In this post, we'll look at how to perform an SEO competitive analysis using some of the tools in the BrightEdge platform, as well as some of the tips Mark shared in his SES London presentation.

A new market, new approach

Ever since 100 percent secure search, the new center of the SEO universe is the Web page, not the keyword. This evolution of SEO and search also means a new approach to competitive analysis.

With SEO now measurable and scalable – and becoming a primary revenue driver for many companies, CMOs are seeing the results and are getting involved. SEO is no longer a standalone position or department; rather, it has become integrated into the larger organizational digital marketing team. Similarly, competitive analysis is no longer limited to simply viewing what your competitors are up to as an independent SEO function, but instead has become a larger digital marketing responsibility.

A 4-step framework for SEO competitive analysis

Given the formidable amount of data that an enterprise-level brand may need to analyze competitors, start with defining which pages or areas within individual pages lend themselves to a cost-effective SEO competitive analysis, focused on which content actually drives revenue. Here, you can see those metrics in a BrightEdge report:

Once you’ve defined your priorities for SEO competitive analysis, the BrightEdge framework consists of four key steps:

1. Discover the Competition
2. Analyze Keyword Insights
3. Analyze Page and Content Insights
4. Create an Action Plan Based upon Insights

1. Discover your competition

Of course, the cornerstone of an effective SEO competitive analysis is to know your competition in search. With scale efficiencies in mind, we recommend understanding your competitors by page groupings, as shown in the BrightEdge Share of Voice graph below:

It’s also critical to understand and benchmark your competitors across multiple page groupings to gain comparative insights.

2. Analyze keyword insights

Next, take the plunge, diving into what and how your competitors are doing on the search engines globally. Here, you’ll want to assess rank data not only in terms of how your competitors position in the various search engine results pages, but how they’re performing at the Universal Search level – including images, videos, and local – to determine the sources of their search traffic.

When analyzing Universal Search results, it’s important to note how your competitors are appearing in the search landscape overall, and optimize for those keywords, pages and content types where they have universal results that your brand doesn’t.

Conversely, it’s essential to reinforce optimization where your brand is showing higher visibility relative to your competitors in Universal Search.

A key point in performing this deep dive is to note how visibility compares by volume according to device, such as mobile versus desktop. Ask: Does this keyword/page behavior differ by device?

3. Analyze page and content insights

Having discovered your competitors’ search positioning and performance, it is now time to investigate their content strategy and spot opportunities:

• What pages are ranking and for which keywords?
• Are these keywords relevant to your business?
• Where are the gaps: how does their Web presence and profile compare to yours?
• If an opportunity is found, track and optimize for those keywords!

It’s important to find backlink opportunities by tracking the number and quality of your competitors’ links as well.

Ask the following questions:

• Do you have enough high-quality links compared to your competition?
• Who is linking to your competition?
• What is the authority of these domains?
• Is the lack of quality backlinks the answer?

Drilling down further still into your competitors’ content and linking strategies, the following are three critical areas to identify:

1. High-value link targets (identify link hubs that are driving rankings for this market segment)
2. Link strategies (classify links based on type, such as blog, news, PR, partnerships, social, etc.)
3. Discover backlink opportunities (do you have links of each type to these hubs and domains?)

4. Create an action plan based upon insights

Next, create an action plan gleaned from your competitive analysis. Essential to your organization’s plan of action is education, which is up to you to start doing. Who else is going to be able to support you in this effort within the company? How will you take these insights and scale them across the organization? Finally, the success of your competitive analysis hinges on having a monitoring strategy in place that will allow you to quickly and easily scale your performance versus that of your competitors. Monitor your "share of voice" at regular intervals in BrightEdge for a picture of success.

All of the tools needed for an in-depth competitive analysis are available within the BrightEdge SEO platform and Data Cube. If you’re already using BrightEdge, dig into your next SEO competitive analysis project with the steps outlined in this post. I hope you’ll find it helpful.