Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 7 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 7 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.

jan

M Posted 11 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Hello I’m Jae An, Information Security Manager at BrightEdge, and I’m excited to share an important security upgrade. Before I do, I’d love to walk you through a brief overview of BrightEdge’s InfoSec program. When I joined BrightEdge earlier this year, what I found was a technology company that had already taken great strides in building a secure platform. Typically, a company with ~300 employees would just now start thinking about implementing security policies, however BrightEdge has been committed to building customer trust since the beginning.

In 2007, BrightEdge built SaaS technology with security as a guiding principal, choosing to meet the most stringent security audits – similar to those audits that companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce undergo.  Our information security program and BrightEdge SEO Platform security features are far more advanced than those of our competitors.  We’re proud to say that BrightEdge's security processes have been validated by dozens of security audits from the largest global financial institutions and technology companies (these leading brands are now BrightEdge customers). We recently have renewed our ISO 27001 security certification based on the new ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standards that only a few companies around the world have achieved such newest credential to date.

What’s new – Google Analytics upgrade to OAuth

BrightEdge is committed to protecting the security of your most important data: revenue, conversions, site information, and competitive insights. Today, as part of our commitment to the security and privacy of your data, BrightEdge is upgrading the integration between our users BrightEdge accounts and Google Analytics (GA). In line with Google’s move to secure search, BrightEdge is increasing the security and privacy of your data by upgrading all integrations to OAuth, an open protocol that is industry standard and recommended by Google.

How to upgrade your security settings in BrightEdge

Existing customers will need to make a small change in their BrightEdge account in order to continue to see Google Analytics data in their reports and dashboards. At BrightEdge, we’re all about self-service - we print our boarding passes in advance, select concert seats online, and fly through the self-checkout line at Home Depot, giving us more time to focus on weekend DIY projects. And, we’ve likewise empowered our users with a self-service integration wizard to setup their Google Analytics integrations. We’ve recorded a quick video that walks users through a simple five-step process to upgrade their Google Analytics accounts to OAuth. In the video Sudhir, BrightEdge’s Senior Manager of SEO demonstrates how BrightEdge upgraded our own BrightEdge account to OAuth.

To learn more about our commitment to enterprise security please visit our webpage, and please check out our blog post to learn more about our customizable self-service security settings.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

To get a truly competitive edge as a digital marketer or advertiser, it's important to understand and use the concept of share of voice. Share of voice is about how much of the pie you're getting; what percentage of the digital space is yours?

Even if you've heard the term before, you may have only heard it as applied to a traditional model. In a digital environment, there are multiple competitors and marketing channels to consider.

A study done by Millward Brown found that brands that increase their digital SOV are more likely to increase their market share over time. In this study, Millward Brown looked at over 4,000 brands from 28 countries in 56 different categories.

For each brand, they measured the brand's overall share of voice (both digital and traditional) and digital share of voice. They computed the changes in the SOV scores from 2009 to 2010 and compared them with the changes in the brands' Consumer Value scores during the same time period. (Consumer Value is an estimate of market share that is highly predictive of actual share.)

They found that the correlations—r=0.29 for overall share of voice with CV and r=0.22 for digital share of voice with CV — were statistically significant. Clearly, digital share of voice has a significant relationship with market share growth.

Businesses who measure their success and their share of voice tend to profit quite a bit more and do better overall than those that don't.

American company New Belgium Brewing Company makes it a point to measure their share of voice, and that of their competitors, and then to use this information to their advantage.

In 2013, the company found that its Facebook fans were bringing in $50.7 million annually, a great return on investment since they had spent just over a quarter of a million on social media as a whole.

These figures again drive the point that the digital marketing world is considerably more convoluted than that of traditional marketing, so it's important that you make share of voice a part of your strategy.

BrightEdge has a great tool for measuring share of voice that will help you not only measure your share of voice, but will help you discover share of voice of your competitors.

You'll be able to find new competitors, perform detailed competitive analysis, find competitive benchmarks, discover trend predictions, and find other helpful metrics.

When using BrightEdge's share of voice you'll find how much of the digital pie is yours, and you'll know where to invest your time and money to get the most ROI on your marketing efforts.

Maybe you find, that as a result of your marketing efforts, that mention of your company on Twitter goes from 100 to 200 mentions per day. This may seem like a win, but what if mentions of your competitors are closer to 1,000 per day? You would be missing out on a large slice of the pie, and you might not know unless you look into share of voice.

There are so many different avenues in which to market online, which means there are a lot of different channels to spend money on.

Before spending a massive budget on different marketing channels, it's best to know what will bring you the greatest ROI. Really understanding your share of voice will help you make better decisions and come out ahead of the competition.

Digital marketing has come a long way in making the craft more measurable, but there is still a lot of room for things to slip through the cracks.

The BrightEdge platform allows you to measure the right metrics to see how well your content and organic search is performing . The massive data repository in DataCube allows business leaders to analyze marketing data to more informed decisions based on maximizing return on spend and increasing revenue from all your digital marketing efforts.  

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

By now most marketers know that content marketing is a huge key to SEO and marketing success, but not everyone gets everything they can out of their content. A good piece of content can go far, but a good piece of optimized content will always go further. This is because optimized content will help content get shared more, linked more, ranked higher, and will indirectly bring more traffic. For these reasons it's beneficial to talk about how optimizing content and using tools like long-tailed keyword research, internal linking and open graph markup is key to making your content really work for you.

Keyword research

First we'll talk about keyword research—not so much how to do it, but why. Marketers know that keyword research is helpful for PPC and SEO efforts, but why stop there? Ranking for the right keywords is integral to the success of your site, partly by not only getting visitors to your site, but by getting the right kind of visitors. Digital marketers can and should apply their keyword research toward content marketing. A lot of the time, 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. Doing keyword research early on also lets you know where to internally link the copy of the content.

Internal linking

Internal linking is not only beneficial because it helps Google figure out your website, but it helps users discover more content on your site. Users will find what initially brought them to the site but also other related content. As your content gets more and more interactions and earned links, it will build up authority for the keywords you initially researched. But to get even more benefits out of your content—and to pass authority on to other pages on your site—make sure to internally link to other pieces of content. If you have the ability to take your piece of content and do internal linking to your landing pages or to other blog posts (and do it naturally), take advantage of that. Use caution when doing this, though, and keep the user in mind; if an internal link is or even just looks unnatural, it may hurt rather than help in the long run.

Ultimately, responsible internal linking is helpful for building the structure of your site and for spreading link juice, but it is also helpful in increasing rankings and making your content more easily discovered. However, to get your initial piece of content seen by more people (and those more qualified), it needs to be optimized. This is where open graph markup comes into play.

Open graph markup

Open graph markup is the part of code found in the HTML <head> tag that tells social media what pieces to pull out onto the webpage when shared. It's likely that you've seen, for example, an infographic on Facebook or other social media platform that pulls the entire infographic rather than just the title section. And you've probably also seen the opposite: a link is shared and it automatically shares just a specific piece of the infographic. Open graph markup is what causes this difference. Of course, adding open graph tags to your website won't directly affect your on-page SEO.

These tags are mostly useful to increase performance of your links on social media, including increasing social shares and interactions. And again, it's true that social media doesn't have a huge direct influence on SEO, but the more times a post on social media is shared, the more likely it is that it will be seen by the right person—the person that will convert. Using open graph markup is the key to getting your content shared and even linked to other influencers. This is what will have lasting impacts on the SEO of your site. It's fairly transparent how these three tools for better content optimization work together to help and support the others, and all contribute to SEO. By effectively optimizing content from the ideation through the publishing of the content, you will earn more links, rank higher for the keywords you want and earn more and higher quality traffic, thereby effectively contributing to your site's overall SEO.