Mark Mitchell

M Posted 11 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Local SEO has undergone a number of changes over the past few years, led by both Google and the overall trend towards mobile search. Among the more notable of local SEO changes initiated by Google is its introduction of Google Places (now called “Google My Business”) and its local “Carousel” - and most recently, its update (“Pigeon”) to the local search algorithm. As a search trend in general, mobile has rushed to the forefront, carrying with it significant implications for local SEO.

First, a brief history: Google Places was first introduced with Google Plus (Google+) in 2011, becoming Google+ Local about a year later, which made it essential for businesses to create Google+ pages and profiles to which to tie their sites’ URLs directly.

The most recent name change to “Google My Business” came in June. Google My Business also integrates Google Maps and the Google+ platform (including G+ reviews) within its local search results. Then came Google’s interactive “Carousel,” unveiled for desktop in June 2013, which proved to be a game-changer with local search listings represented side-by-side at the top of its traditional top-down results, and incorporating details such as review-based scores as well as the physical addresses and photos of local businesses.

Most recently, Google’s update to its local search algorithm in July (dubbed “Pigeon” by Search Engine Land in the absence of a formal name by Google) has meant a shifting local SEO landscape that BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu recently discussed at Search Engine Watch.

The local-mobile connection

Alluding to its “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT) directive, Google states on its “My Business” page (referenced above): “Give customers the right info at the right time, whether that be driving directions to your business in maps, hours of operations in search or a phone number they can click to call you on mobile phones.” Google elaborates on the local-mobile connection with its November 2013 “Mobile Path to Purchase” study, in conjunction with Nielsen. The report reveals key findings:

Consumers are spending time researching on their smartphones (15+ hours a week), their research starts with a search engine (vs. a mobile site or app), proximity is important (69% expect businesses to be within five miles of their location), immediacy is key (more than half want to purchase within the hour) and mobile influences their purchase decisions (93% go on to buy).

Jim Yu has also discussed the boom in mobile search extensively within the past few months. Citing data from the BrightEdge 2014 Mobile Share Report, he wrote for his Huffington Post column in July:

Mobile is commanding more of the organic search market today than ever before. Smartphones account for 23 percent, and combined with tablets' 12 percent share, mobile now equates to fully a third of today's organic search traffic. And in the coming year, smartphone share is poised to balloon by at least another 50 percent.

Now let’s explore some tips to help you optimize for the best local SEO techniques, and ways BrightEdge’s Local SEO Management tool can help.

Best local SEO techniques

1. Distance from geographic center: having a physical address for your locale matters!

2. Consistency in your business name, address and phone number (N.A.P.) across your website’s local URL and Google My Business pages, as well as within local directory listings, is essential. 3. Prominence of your business page: To calculate the local prominence of business, Google looks to local “citations,” or Web pages mentioning your business. It gauges the quality of these citations as well as the quantity. Generating user reviews on your “Google My Business” page and other sites (such as Yelp) improves your business’s credibility and in turn, its prominence.

Google My Business optimization

Optimize your Google My Business by considering the following steps:

• Name: Business name
• Categories: Carefully choose the five most important categories based on important keywords
• Description: Contains the business name and keywords
• Additional details: Keywords for products and services, as well as local information
• Business related photos and videos
• Reviews
• Manual verification

On-site optimization for local

You should also perform on-page optimization for any local-focused pages on your site. Check out the following table for tips on how to optimize those Web pages:

Don’t forget about Schema.org markup as well in order to help boost the search engine’s understanding of the content on the page. For contact pages, you can communicate things like address, phone number, hours of operation and so on. Check out the LocalBusiness markup here.

How BrightEdge can support local SEO

Details on optimizing your local Web page and its corresponding page in Google My Business, as well as local competitive analysis resources, are available through BrightEdge’s Local SEO Management. For instance, with Google My Business, you’d be able to generate reports like this using BrightEdge tools. 

Using BestBuy.com in San Francisco, as an example, this report shows Universal Search result listings for all keywords in Google My Business accessed via a Google search on a mobile phone. Digging deeper, the report can break results down by image, video, shopping, Places and Carousel results. This helps you to not only understand which keywords you currently have visibility on in Universal Search results, but also identifies opportunities - for example, how many of your keywords show any Universal Search results that your site is not showing up for at present.

All of the information available through the BrightEdge SEO platform can be tracked easily by creating a dashboard. Among the valuable insights you can glean is identifying high-priority keywords within Google My Business where your business is not ranking. While there is a host of local ranking factors, and what we’ve discussed today still only scratches the surface, optimizing the basics is the very first step in any long-term local SEO strategy.  

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

As people come to understand the value of doing quality SEO, it becomes obvious that time and resources should be devoted to doing SEO. What people might not realize, however, is that real success comes when all departments are working together for SEO help. SEO marketing efforts should not be left solely to a digital marketing team because huge advances can be made when other departments are utilized and kept in the loop. Chances are, though, that departments apart from a digital marketing team don't really know how much effect they can have on SEO. While virtually all corporate departments can assist in SEO, several facets of a company, including the PR team, web developers and a content team, can directly influence SEO in a big way. 

PR team for SEO help

PR practitioners mainly focus on raising awareness of the company and building quality relationships with others. This can happen in a variety of ways, whether it be through articles written about the company, in speaking at events, or some other way of getting word out about the company. What PR reps might not realize is that these are great opportunities that can be capitalized on to get huge SEO benefits. When articles are written about the company, they will most likely be published somewhere on the internet (and if not, that should change).

There are a few things good PR practitioners can do to better optimize articles for SEO; using effective anchor text somewhere in the article will make the digital marketer's job much easier. Show your PR reps the importance of a backlink to the site and how to know which URL it should point to. When speaking at events, the speaker representing the company needs to optimize their presentation deck with the right links and then share it. Depending on the subject of the presentation, there are a number of places online where a presentation can be shared to get the most SEO benefits as possible; consider slideshare.net and social media platforms.

Web development team for SEO help

As web developers make changes to the company's sites and working on side projects, it's important that they know how to optimize their projects for SEO. There's a lot that goes into this, including understanding how to use title tags, creating effective UX design that contributes to SEO, taking care of 404 errors, as well as the differences between 301 and 302 redirects. You can even teach them about canonical meta data to improve link and ranking signals.

There's a lot they can do to help in a company's SEO efforts, but ultimately the more they are aware, the more they will be able to do before it even gets to the digital marketer's hands. Having the web developers work on these elements of web design from the get-go will streamline the entire SEO process and perhaps save the digital marketers some time in the process. Essentially, there are many different ways to code a website to strictly function properly and to provide for a secure search; webmasters need to know how to make them SEO compliant. The key is to get the marketers and web developers on the same page so that the web developers will know the best practices for utilizing SEO.

Digital content team for SEO help

It's been said that “content is king,” and while this is a heavily debated topic, it can be agreed upon that good content has an effect on SEO. First pick topics that are trending and have a high likelihood of being shared and discussed. Boring, unoriginal and irrelevant content will do little to further your SEO efforts. Make sure that those producing content for the company know what long-tail keywords to include in their posts. Also teach them about internal linking so that they know to which PLPs they should be linking for which keywords. Share the content in places where it's likelihood of being picked up is high, and the optimized content will do its work.

If a company isn't really sure on how to best integrate other departments into the SEO process, BrightEdge has a tool that makes achieving better SEO success as a collaborative effort possible. This project management tool streamlines time and effort spent managing SEO projects and helps make the SEO process more of a team one. So while it's true that digital marketers can work on their own, the results will be different—and not as good—as what could be accomplished should all the departments work together. Real success will come if everyone is on the same page when it comes to SEO practices.

Jim

M Posted 11 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

In the wake of Share14, our premier marketing event and the largest of its kind in the industry, we’ve experienced exceptional growth and innovation. As we head into the fourth quarter, we’d like to take this opportunity to give you, our customers and community, an update on BrightEdge and where we’re headed. We have reached an exciting point in the evolution of our company and a tipping point in the industry.

BrightEdge has raised $64 million to invest in product innovation and business growth to fuel expansion, which has enabled us to deliver more than 81 product releases to date. This is largely why we’ve seen more than 60 Fortune 1000 customers upgrade to our technology. We are honored to serve so many exceptional companies and proudly boast a rich roster of more than 1,000 direct customers - up from 650 at this time last year.

What’s more, BrightEdge is now working with the Top ten largest online retailers, nine of the Top ten largest hotel groups and eight of the Top ten technology companies. Our company has come a long way since its inception in 2007, and there are no signs of slowing down. Our continued success is in large part due to the core values that BrightEdge was founded upon; a culture of innovation and a commitment to making customers our No. 1 priority. We firmly believe that it is this very innovation and customer focus that sets BrightEdge apart from other solutions, and enables us to not only thrive, but also consistently delight and support our customers.

These values are in the DNA of our company and dictate every decision we make. This commitment to our customers — and the marketing community as a whole — necessitates rapid innovation, so we can help marketers navigate a constantly evolving field. Just this year, we introduced a new perspective on content performance marketing, revealed the Content Optimizer and Data Cube, and made our most powerful technology available to the entire marketing community with the BrightEdge Community Edition. This innovation has spurred our own internal growth at BrightEdge, allowing us to expand to six global offices — including London, Sydney and Tokyo — to support more marketers and helping us reach a major milestone of nearly 300 employees.

Despite all of our progress, our job of providing our valued customers with the best content performance marketing technology is far from over. We’re committed to supporting customers by offering not only content insights, but also educational experiences. This year, an incredible 1,500 marketers worldwide became BrightEdge Certified Professionals. These marketers are providing invaluable insight to their companies, and are helping the industry to progress from an era of “trial and error” to one backed by hard metrics and measurement.

At BrightEdge, we’re passionate about marketing. We know how challenging it can be to find success in this industry, and how great it feels when you do. That’s why we’re committed to supporting our customers at every step of the way — and why we continue to stay cutting edge. As we evolve even further, we’ll always remain dedicated to releasing new products and insights that give our customers the advantage in a crowded marketplace. We look forward to continuing our partnerships with such talented, innovative companies, and can’t wait for what the future holds!

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Most marketers know that earning backlinks and link-building tactics naturally is key to maintaining and increasing rankings, but the difficult part comes in figuring out the best ways to get these links. There are a lot of ways to go about earning them, and some are more questionable than others. Begin to utilize these five creative ideas and start seeing quality links pointing back to your site.

Appeal to egos

One great way to earn backlinks is to appeal to others' egos. A lot of the time you can do this through “Top 10” posts; one example of this would be to create an article like “Top 10 Digital Marketers of 2014.” Articles like these are easily promoted and picked up by those mentioned. Tweet at those in the the article to make them aware and to stoke their egos; hopefully, they will mention the article in a tweet. Ideally they will link back to you, if not now then in future articles on their blog.

Interview or be interviewed

Reaching out to experts in a certain field is like appealing to one's ego, but in a more specific and targeted manner. Crafting a piece of content about someone should gain backlinks from the interviewee since it is promoting them or their company. To get interviewed, reach out to someone who is writing on a subject you know well and offer yourself as an industry expert willing to be interviewed. Be sure to do the required homework on the subject and on the blogger or journalist you reach out to.

Host competitions

Giving away free things is a great way to catch people's attention, and a beneficial way to do this is through giveaways and contests. Reaching out to people after hosting a competition will return better results because they will see you a more favorable light and will be more likely to respond positively. Giving away things for free is enticing, and not just for those looking to win; bloggers and others seeking to attract followers and viewers will be more willing to post a giveaway or contest because there is something in it for them.

Craft high-quality infographics

Webmasters and bloggers are always looking for quality content that will get them noticed. Produce and promote original infographics or other high-quality images and share them across different platforms. After the graphic has been published, check to see if it has been republished elsewhere; if it has been, it's likely that the graphic was embedded but that a link pointing back to you was not given. In this case, you will want to contact the website to ask for the link. Finding where the graphic is being published is not very difficult.

Start by getting a copy of the filename where the graphic is hosted. You want the actual jpg or png filename rather than just the URL. To do this, go to the graphic, right-click, and select “Copy Image URL.” Next, go to Google Images and look for the camera symbol. Click on it and paste in the URL that was just copied. Click “search by image” and the results will show the URLs where the image is being shared. Go to these URLs and make sure that there is a link pointing back to your site. If there isn't, reach out to the website owner and ask them to add a link back to the original source.

Make a quiz

Quizzes are especially useful if you are a B2C business—consumers love them. Getting the most use out of them might require action similar to what you do when hosting giveaways or contests; outreach to bloggers to post the quiz with a backlink to you. Producing a quiz also presents a good opportunity to embed code to put on your site, making the quiz easier for people to share. Quality link-building tactics takes creativity and a little bit of time, but the results from quality backlinks are considerable and too good to pass up. Throughout your link-building tactics for campaigns, you should be conducting SEO competitive analysis to make sure your backlinks are the most beneficial for you. Don't forget, you can analyze your site's backlink profile inside BrightEdge platform under Reports and Backlinks!  

Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

A couple of weeks ago, Google formally introduced “structured snippets” as a means to incorporate more Web page data in its search results. In its announcement, Google explained this was just another step in its ever-evolving quest to improve the search results:

Google Web Search has evolved in recent years with a host of features powered by the Knowledge Graph and other data sources to provide users with highly structured and relevant data. Structured Snippets is a new feature that incorporates facts into individual result snippets in Web Search.

Structured snippets are relevant bits of information pulled from a Web page into a Web page’s search result listing in an effort to enhance that listing. Google cites a search result for Nikon’s D7100 as an example of how its structured snippets work, stating “interesting and relevant information is extracted from a page and displayed as part of the snippet for the query ‘nikon d7100’:”

Barry Schwartz reported in a Search Engine Land post that “the structured snippet part of this result are the factual elements,” meaning the information specifying the Nikon D7100’s sensor resolution (type), weight (with battery) and display size/resolution. Search Engine Watch noted in its coverage of the announcement that the snippets work by extracting information from data tables on a Web page and “pairing that with an algorithm to help determine the quality and relevance of which data to display in the snippet.”

In other words, structured snippets work by using an algorithm that pulls what it believes to be relevant data from tables featured on a Web page. As BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu recently wrote at Search Engine Land, “The table aspect is perhaps less surprising when you read the announcement [from Google] that says structured snippets is a collaboration from Google Research and the WebTables research team, and Google Search.” Drawing on the Nikon D7100 search result example given by Google in its announcement, Jim showed the original product page from DPreview.com that was extracted by Google to display the snippet:

At Search Engine Land, Schwartz experimented with the types of queries that trigger Google’s snippets in the search results, and with the exception of the Nikon D7100, his queries all returned structured snippets for Wikipedia. It’s not surprising that Wikipedia shows up with structured snippets often; as Jim noted, Wikipedia makes it very simple for the search engine to parse information out easily.

What do structured snippets mean for you?

Some have speculated that the snippets might cause a decrease in click-through rate from the search results even if it means a better experience for users. (That is, if the searcher sees all the key facts he or she needs from the Google search listings, why click through?) Other industry opinions diverge on this issue. In her interviews with SEOs, Amy Gesenhues at Search Engine Land reports on reactions ranging from concern over Google becoming more of a publisher than a search engine to the possibility of correctly formatted (yet poor) content surfacing to no concern whatsoever. As far as next steps go, there are a few considerations. For those in an ecommerce marketing position, Jim’s post at Search Engine Land (cited above) gives tips for e-commerce CMOs and their page-level strategy for creating and formatting product specifications. That includes:

• Deciding what the most important specifications are about a product, and organizing the information in a nicely formatted table.
• Considering the placement and grouping of the facts on a table, and testing to see if placing the most important facts together and first makes a difference in how structured snippets render.

And there could be even more considerations when it comes to responsive Web design (RWD). Keep in mind that because tables have a rigid structure, they’ve been harder to convert to responsive design. While some designers have decided to abandon tables in RWD, this new feature may require a second thought about that, including:

• Re-evaluating and prioritizing the inclusion of tables in RWD. Do you need to do a multi-page redesign now, or can you make small tweaks to important pages within your mobile configuration?

It remains to be seen how Google’s structured snippets initiative will impact search results, click-through rates and mobile marketing; however, it’s safe to say that this new feature will be yet another item to put on the SEO’s page-level optimization checklist – at least for now.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

With Google’s next Penguin update potentially right around the corner, there’s no better time to perform a link audit on your site.

Link audits look at the volume and quality of links in your link profile to ensure it’s balanced, healthy (meaning your website is getting good value from the links) and won’t trigger any unwanted penalties by Google. It’s also important to be proactive with your link audit, meaning don’t wait until the next Penguin update hits.

If you haven’t done it in a while – or ever – it should be the first thing you do before investing in other activities like content creation (aka additional link building). After that, you should prepare to do a link audit every three months to stay on top of your link profile.

Approach a link audit in two ways: quantitative and qualitative, which looks at the number of backlinks to your site and the quality of those links.

While quantitative research usually highlights any unnatural recent growth in the total number of backlinks, qualitative often assess the entire health of the link portfolio.

A 4-step process for assessing link quality

Let’s look at four steps you can take to assess the quality of your backlink profile in a link audit. To pull data, you’ll use tools like Majestic and Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). (Remember, GWT and Majestic integrate with BrightEdge’s S3 platform, too.)

1. Look at link growth by month (quantitative)

Look at the link data by month. You can do this by exporting the data from the tools into an Excel spreadsheet. The following graph shows an example site; the sharp increase in link growth over two month’s time is alarming: The next step of this type of analysis is asking, “Why?” Oftentimes, you won’t find an immediate answer to the unnatural link growth you’re seeing.

If you work in an enterprise-level company, the answer may be even harder to uncover when multiple teams have a hand in the website. Oftentimes, it can be the result of some marketing activity that wasn’t pre-approved or assessed by the company’s SEO team. Perhaps someone paid for links or had sponsored content go live on a large number of publishers.

Whatever the cause, it’s your job as a link auditor to uncover it, and assess if it truly is something of concern.

2. Look at the link's AC rank (qualitative)

“AC Rank” aka “a citation rank” is an important performance indicator in Majestic’s reporting that checks the quality of backlinks. Therefore, AC Rank is a simple measure of how important a particular Web page is. AC Rank assigns a number from 0 (lowest) to 15 (highest), depending on the number of unique referring external root domains.

In other words, it assesses how many backlinks the website has that’s linking to your site. In order for a page to have an AC Rank of 1 or higher, it needs to have at least one external backlink. You can download a report that shows AC Rank in Majestic. In the following example, you can see the majority of the site’s backlinks come from other sites with an AC Rank of 0.

While there isn’t a strict guideline on what percentage of a site’s backlink profile should contain links with an AC Rank of any number, you may want to look at your competitors to gauge a benchmark. And then consider building links with a higher AC Rank. There’s a manual review process involved here as well.

Once you identify the low AC Rank sites, you’ll want to visit at least some of the links and do a quality check to see if the site looks OK, or if it is of concern. Are there too many ads? Too many links pointing out? Create a checklist of how you might assess the quality of the site.

3. Conduct anchor text analysis (qualitative)

Anchor text is the word or words used in the link (the clickable text in a hyperlink). Anchor text helps search engines understand what the page is about that they are going to visit. The search engines used to view anchor text as a strong signal in ranking websites. Because of this, spammers attempted to manipulate search engine rankings by creating a large volume of unnatural links that contained a specific keyword pointing to a site. When the Google Penguin update first hit in April 2012, it essentially put the kibosh on those spammer activities. With Penguin, Google reduced the amount of weight that the anchor text has, and even penalized some sites that had too many anchor text links with the same keyword pointing to them. Let’s quickly go over the different types of anchor text.

• Exact match anchor text: The keywords in the link are the exact keyword you are trying to generate more visibility for in the search engines.
• Partial match anchor text: The links include the keyword you are trying to generate more visibility for, in addition to other words.
• Zero match (or generic) anchor text: Links that don’t include any mention of the keyword you are trying to generate more visibility for. Example: “click here.”
• Branded anchor text: Links with the brand name or URL of a website in them.
• All variations of naked URLs: Such as www.example.com, example.com and http://www.example.com.

There isn’t any rule on the percentage mix for having different types of anchor text pointing to your site. But stay away from emphasizing only one or two types of anchor text. A healthy anchor text profile should be a mixture of all of the above. As a general rule of thumb, branded (including branded naked URLs) should make up four out of your top five anchor texts. In the following image, you can see there were too many exact match anchor text for this sample site (keywords blurred out to protect the brand):

4. Perform a backlinks analysis by IP address

Too many backlinks from the same IP address will not give any value to the site. And, too many backlinks from different domains but the same IP address (when brands own multiple websites, for example) could hint at a possible link scheme network of sites, which is classified as a bad SEO practice by Google.

For more on what Google thinks is a link scheme, see its documentation here. In this step, you’ll want to document all the links coming from a single IP address, and assess whether or not the mix of links is quality. You can do so with Majestic’s reporting. The result of all the steps in this four-step process will show you which domains are “bad” domains to have links from, and then you’ll decide how to handle them next.

How to handle bad links?

You now have a good picture of the volume and quality of your backlink profile – now what? Sometimes this next step in the process can be long and methodical, since you have no control over who links to your site. But, there are a few ways you can go about cleaning up those links you want to get rid of.

1. Contact the webmaster of the site that’s linking to you. Put together a template that you will use for every site’s webmaster, and ask that the link either be taken down or nofollowed, depending on the severity. You’ll want to try this several times.
2. Hire an agency to clean up your links. There are agencies that specialize in link audits and pruning your site’s backlinks for you. This saves you time and resources.
3. Use Google’s disavow tool. Google gives webmasters a tool to use as a last resort to disavow links pointing to their sites. Google was very specific about how and when to use this tool, and you can read the guidelines here.

Here’s a video by Google’s Matt Cutts explaining how the disavow tool works: I hope this link audit process helps you keep your site healthy and your links working to your advantage. Remember, a link audit can be a time-intensive process, but it’s worth the effort being proactive rather than waiting to deal with a penalty that will catapult you into the same process anyway.