Andy Betts

M Posted 11 years 11 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. 

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dsitner

M Posted 11 years 11 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.