Back in April 2002, Google attempted to fool the masses with its PigeonRank technology, just in time for April Fool’s Day. Fast-forward to 2014, and an algorithm run by a Pigeon update is not so far-fetched – at least not by name. The Google Pigeon update (named so by the good folks over at Search Engine Land in absence of an official name by Google) launched in late July, affecting the local search results. In a post at SEL, they highlighted the intent of the algorithm:

Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more. In addition, Google said that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

Early analysis showed local directory sites like Yelp getting a boost in the search results. And Andrew Shotland of LocalSEOGuide.com highlighted the algorithm’s new ability at SEL:

We are really interested in how this update moved Google more in the direction of hyperlocal search. Something that has been flying under the radar on this update is the neighborhood specific location settings that previously seemed to be just a test are now live everywhere as far as I can tell.

But feelings were mixed on the update. Where queries that usually displayed a 7-pack in the local results, there were none, some reports said. And Mike Blumenthal over at Blumenthals.com said the change was merely Google’s response to changing searcher behavior, but the problem was that “we don’t really have the tools to fully understand some of these changes and really measure their impacts on the local business.” In his analysis, Mike says the

Google Pigeon update is able to better understand location on mobile and desktop, and has “drawn smaller radius around the presumed location of the searcher from which to draw the local search results,” and that this is “causing the more dramatic shifts in measurable desktop results.” There’s a nice summary about what marketers are seeing to date with the new local algo here. And at BrightEdge, we’re tracking this change closely within our platform, and will keep readers updated on the findings of our research. Has your business been impacted by the Google Pigeon update in some way? Let us know in the comments below.

Let's face it: Enterprise SEO is not getting any easier. In this session at Share 14, brands like Adobe, Experian, Marriott International and Microsoft share how they’ve built and scaled their in-house SEO when facing complex challenges.

First up is Dave Lloyd (@davelloyd1) of Adobe Systems. [Be sure to catch Dave's interview on the BrightEdge Blog, here.] He says Adobe.com is the sixth most linked-to domain in the world, with over a million pages on the main website to deal with. With that, comes a lot of responsibility, he says. SEO is the most cost-effective, revenue-driving channel, says Lloyd. To use it effectively requires leverage. Be strategic – we hear that all the time, he says, but from an SEO perspective, it means focus on competitors and what the audience really needs, and focus on business KPIs. Be integrated, and align search best practices with major content marketing goals, Lloyd says.

Next, be comprehensive. Make the job of the search engine easy. And, you don’t have to implement all the Enterprise SEO recommendations, but take steps to reduce risk. Prioritize against effort and impact. He’s going to focus the rest of the talk on one area Adobe had had particular success within: Adobe TV. The business issue: The content underperformed, despite it being unique and having a lot of non-branded terms and thousands of archived videos, plus a lot of updated content…but it just wasn’t being maximized, Lloyd says. What Adobe did was expanded the “marketable universe,” which is content linking opportunities. They also had to deal with content removal happening on Adobe.com. Lloyd also took a step back to talk about SEO practices and what they mean.

Adobe focused on the top layer, and did some very tactical Enterprise SEO. They looked at additional keywords they might want to include and found about 168 new terms, specifically chosen for that body of content. Adobe performed some very basic SEO tactics, like:

• H2, bold keyword
• Meta descriptions
• Non-brand tag clouds
• Internal linking from www.adobe.com to tv.adobe.com (suggested content)
• Migrated to new search-friendly URLs

The results? The team saw keyword rankings improve, 48 percent growth in organic visits, and a 50 percent increase in free subscribers over nine months. Up next, we have Ngia Vang (@NgiaVang) of Experian Consumer Direct. [Side note: Check out Ngia's interview for the Brightedge blog, here.] Experian’s SEO goal was to focus on revenue, and they looked to their SEO agency (Rimm-Kaufman Group) to get a list of to-dos that would move the marker. And, says Vang, they needed executive buy-in and resources. It’s not always easy to secure.

Lots of people leave companies as a result of a lack of buy-in and resources, she says. The first step to accomplishing all of this was to create awareness. The “Ice Bucket Challenge” is a great example of creating awareness. Get started by building relationships. Create and implement processes, and then dig into the human aspect of it all, says Vang. One particular challenge was Experian’s content team was working in silos, Vang says, and they had to make sure SEO belonged in the process. 

The Experian SEO team then created a report card, and they reported on how the program was performing over time. This helped the team secure additional resources as needed for the SEO projects. Enterprise SEO grows slowly, but surely, Vang says. Since ramping up SEO in-house, Experian has seen a huge boost in impressions and clicks and from a “one hit wonder” to a relevant, growing program. Parting advice? Integrate, but give people room. Drive motivation and momentum, and focus on the user.

Next is Michael Jozaitis (@mjoza) of Marriott International. A major issue with Marriott International and its SEO was that many hotels were going with different SEO agencies, says Jozaitis, so the online experience was different across the board. Now, they manage about 800 hotels in-house with a team of 30 professionals in their Marriott Digital Services business. Hotels within Marriott International are not required to join the in-house SEO program; the digital team essentially runs as a non-profit and every dollar taken in needs to be reinvested into the program. Marriott Digital Services has very specific goals with its SEO, says Jozaitis: organic visits, booking room nights, and driving revenue for hotels. The Enterprise SEO team knew that social was critical for SEO success, Jozaitis says, but how do you scale that for 800 hotels? Here’s how they tackled it.

Empower the hotel staff:

• Create a strategy/approach for all hotels, tweak as needed
• Train hotels to do the day-to-day
• Give advice on strategy
• Promote best practices
• Keep guides up-to-date, as social changes fast

Deliverables:

• Audit
• Consultation
• Optimization
• Interaction Guides
• Content Calendars

Employee-generated content:

• Wealth of local knowledge
• Bring “concierge” to social
• Inspire content

The takeaways? Jozaitis says the following:

1. Start with the goal
2. Process is your friend (if you have to push something back a month to get the process right, do it)
3. Divide and conquer (don’t think you need to do everything)
4. Always be planning

Alex Volk (@alexvolk) of Microsoft is the final presenter. When he first started at Microsoft ten years ago, SEO did not exist within the company. It was about 6.5 years ago that he and Derrick Wheeler founded the practice within the company. The challenges Microsoft faced were overlapping content, inconsistent UX, domains and subdomains, multiple product versions and internal keyword competition, says Volk. How do you get the structure you need with all these challenges? You can’t control everything, he says, so the hybrid model is to find key people within the organization to try to create a bond that fuels SEO strategy.

Here’s how the Enterprise SEO team tackled the challenge:

• Designated an SEO lead
• Defined and reported SEO targets
• Categorized list of keywords
• Prioritized technical opportunities
• Adopted social sharing
• Onboarded staff with BrightEdge’s SEO platform
• Found an agency of choice; Microsoft uses iCrossing

Tactics you can use to support Enterprise SEO strategy include storytelling:

• Fear: Think about examples of things hat have gone wrong that have caused traffic drop historically, Volk says, and take screenshots. Keep it in a booklet, and save it for the moments when someone is about to do something bad, like not having a redirect strategy.
• Opportunity: For example, look at Share of Voice in BrightEdge. Contrast branded with unbranded keyword opportunity, and see where you stand. Use imagery to bring opportunities to life, Volk says.
• Cadence: And, cadence matters, he says. If you’re trying to perform storytelling, think about how to tell your story in multiple formats like email, face-to-face and so on, and know which mix of tactics are effective at your place of business.

Did you feel that, too? Earlier this month, Algoroo and other SERP monitoring services reported significant volatility and flux in the search engine results pages (SERPs) starting August 7 and continuing through Friday, August 15. The degree of volatility was similar to that experienced in the Panda 4 update in May, leading some to speculate it was another Panda refresh, but Google has neither confirmed nor denied a major algorithm update.

We looked into this issue, and checked BrightEdge data collected during the period of the flux you see in the Algoroo chart above. We searched for instances of major fluctuation where a large number of keywords had an average rank change by more than 10 positions, week-over-week. According to our data, we didn’t see a higher-than-average number of websites experiencing significant fluctuation (and we looked at thousands); in fact, the number we saw affected is smaller than average based on a similar sampling we did from three other weeks of the year. Once we weeded out false positives from our sample of impacted websites, we were left with an even smaller sample to explore. If this were a major algorithm update, we would expect more websites to have experienced a bigger shift. At the end of the analysis, it looked like some of the samples we took had already reverted back to what they had been the week prior, which leads us to believe that Google had been performing aggressive testing. The following screenshots show a couple of websites that took a dip due to the fluctuations. The keywords that dropped off seem to have returned to previous ranking, for the most part. Next week’s data should confirm whether that return persists.

 

Here at BrightEdge, we’ll continue to monitor the issue. We’re looking at a set of keywords daily to track the intraweek changes to validate further. The results of this analysis aren’t to say something isn’t on the horizon, but we’re not seeing a pattern or evidence of exactly what that is yet. Do you have anything to share about the SERP fluctuation? Tell us about it in the comments if so.

Ken Shults is the managing director of global consulting at Global Strategies. Ken leads the company’s developments in analytics, and relies on his rich experience in mass customization technology platforms, marketing programs and predictive algorithms to provide essential guidance to his customers. Share14 kicks off today, and I sat down with Ken to discuss the changing face of SEO, and how content factors.

The SEO landscape

Andy Betts (AB): How have you seen the SEO landscape change over the last year?

Ken Shults (KS): A lot of the “rules of the game” are different after this year. It was a pretty pivotal one for the search community. With the advent of secure search — and Google removing keyword level data for paid search as well as organic search access to keyword level data in web analytics is essentially gone. While not catastrophic, it’s definitely something we’ll have had to get used to. We occupy an information-hungry industry, and having to adapt to getting that insight in a different way is changing things up for search professionals across the board.

AB: What change in the industry has had the biggest impact for you and your clients?

KS: Google’s move to secure search has definitely had a good size impact from a workflow perspective. It’s tough — how can we continue getting valuable insight into how people reach our content without the power of leveraging keywords? “Keyword unavailable” really shook things up, but Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) has become the best alternative for keyword data. The interesting thing about it is that it’s heavily sampled. For one of our largest computer clients, we used to be able to identify four or five million keywords, while GWT only offers the top few thousand keywords for each account. Secure search has really shrunk the scope of our knowledge. With some creative configurations, I can expand that information given through GWT, but there are some pretty large limitations: I can’t export keyword data at the page level at the kind of scale necessary for some of our clients and I lose all engagement data at the keyword level.

AB: How do you see search evolving over the next year?

KS: For Global Strategies clients, we approach our consulting efforts with a “we’re your conscience” kind of attitude with natural search. SEO is not a verb, as we like to say, and I think this rings true for everyone. It’s something that happens when you do everything else right. As shifts in algorithms move toward penalizing content that isn’t high quality or that associates with bad neighborhoods, the focus is on quality content that is more likely to be shared and liked, and that’s where a big source of authority and reputation will come from. We want to help organizations shift their mindset, and help them understand that SEO is a product of creating quality content and optimizing it for the search landscape. Things will continue to move this way. We have to think in terms of semantics, and put content first.

The content marketing shift: optimization, measurement, performance

AB: Speaking of content, how are you aligning content and search optimization efforts for your clients?

KS: Well another big evolution recently has been the creation of the Panda and Penguin algorithms. They’re putting greater emphasis on quality content, are doing things with upstanding web citizens and are staying away from bad neighborhoods. As a natural search consulting firm working with large global enterprise clients, that works in our favor. We haven’t been willing to accept the kind of risk that has come along with spamming, paid linking or content farming activities that would’ve put us at risk with Panda and Penguin. We’ve always felt like content should be the star, and making it easy to find and share is truly the end goal. If we take that as the philosophy, any shifts in these algorithms will actually benefit our clients in the future. Google Hummingbird definitely comes to play in the convergence of search and content as well. As search engines evolve, we’re seeing a move from piecing together strings of text to actually being able to understand relationships between entities and queries. It makes things easier in a way from a search standpoint — especially with natural search, where Google can effectively match pieces of content with a large variety of specific queries. Now, creating quality content is rewarded with SEO results.

About Share14

AB: Tell me more about your session. Can you give us a preview of what you’ll cover?

KS: This year, I’m presenting on the impact that secure search has had on what we do everyday as search engine optimizers and content creators — and how companies can navigate these areas of impact. We use insights from search extensively and our ability to go about that has been impacted by the insights that are available now, after the secure search move. We now have different tactics to get information and pull insights, and I’ll talk about those. In other cases, we’ve lost the ability to see certain information and answer questions about audience, so I’ll discuss that too.

AB: Why Share? Why do you attend?

KS: There are several search-oriented conferences out there, but what’s great about Share14 is that we all have a platform in common. The vast majority of attendees use BrightEdge technology on a daily basis, so we have this shared experience to work off of. We’re all working off the same toolset, so when meeting others at Share, we have this common ground already established. We are using the BrightEdge platform to accomplish the kind of goals we likely share.

About BrightEdge

AB: What do you love about BrightEdge?

KS: SEO is a tough arena to navigate, and BrightEdge is a platform that makes the process easier. You know what to prioritize, where to work, and can rapidly identify issue areas to work from. While you can’t expect it to do the work for you, it’s a powerful resource that provides some essential insights. At Global Strategies, it’s been valuable having BrightEdge on our side to help our own clients. Now we have this convenient, automated platform to hold data together in one place, making it easy to examine and evaluate. BrightEdge technology has been a big help to us from an operational standpoint.

It's exciting times as Share14 kicks off tomorrow at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco tomorrow!! As part of our series connecting with leading brands and marketers ahead of Share 14 I managed to catch up with Binti Pawa, Head of SEO for Time Inc.'s Affluent Media Group. Binti is speaking and sharing insights on the "SEO Best Practices Makes Perfect" session at 10:30am - 11:30am on Friday 22nd August. Below are a few extracts from our conversation.

Andy Betts: How much has the SEO landscape changed over the last year? 

Binti Pawa (BP): As marketers, our jobs should be to adapt to the ever changing landscape, learn, and move forward. That said, the landscape has changed in the last year with ‘keywords not provided’ and the on-going algorithm updates for Panda and Penguin to the most recent changes with Google dropping authorship images from their SERPs (although it does not affect rankings directly it does affect CTR for sites). These changes are not the end. There will be more to come. What has not changed, is the way we SEOs optimize sites. The old school SEO will always be the same—things such as optimized title tags, keywords, original content and links.

AB: What change has had the biggest impact for you and your company? 

BP: The biggest impact for us has been the loss of keyword data. For many SEOs in the industry, including myself, this forced us to look at our strategy, and, more specifically, how we report our metrics. A lack of keyword data meant we had to look at alternatives of finding trends, new measurements for non-branded growth, and low-hanging fruit. It forced us to look at GWMT tool query data (in addition to other tools) and page-level metrics more than ever.

AB: Tell me more about your session?

BP: I will be speaking on “Best Practice Makes Perfect – SEO Success Stories”. This will be my first time at Share and I’m very excited to present how we drove organic search success for our Time Inc. brands, Travel + Leisure and Food & Wine. I will discuss the challenges our websites faced and our solutions, in addition to our results-driven approach. I will also include tips on how attendees can do the same.

AB: Tell us more about how you use BrightEdge and how the platform helps you achieve your business objectives?

BP : We use BrightEdge for measuring and reporting our SEO success.  The Data Cube and social signals are great features for content targeting and competitive analysis. Our editors use Data Cube to discover, assign and write content on topics that will drive higher engagement and referral such as localized content. One of my favorite things about the platform is that it’s easy to use and the dashboards are simple yet very efficient.

AB: What do you love about BrightEdge?

BP: I love the speed at which BrightEdge adapts to the evolving search landscape. The company has come along a long way since I started working with them in 2010, when there were only dashboards, keywords and basic analytics. Today, the BrightEdge platform provides marketers and editors with full capability and features to run an in-house or agency-side campaign. The Data Cube, so far, has been one of the best feature additions to the platform.

About Binti Pawa Binti Pawa is a Digital Marketing and Search Engine Optimization veteran with over ten years’ experience in in-house leading performance-driven growth for both start-ups and corporate heavyweights. She is presently the Head of SEO for Time Inc.'s Affluent Media Group, working on such brands as Travel + Leisure and Food & Wine, where she is responsible for leading, developing, and integrating SEO and content strategies. Before working in Digital Publishing, she was immersed in Travel as the head of Social and SEO for enterprise brands CheapOair, OneTravel and Travelocity. Binti is a graduate of Hofstra University, and lives on Long Island, New York with her husband and two children. LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bintipawa/

About Share14 Share14 is the must attend event of the year for content, search and digital marketers. Hear what search and social titans from Google, Bing, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook have to say on the future of content, search and social. Marketing leaders from brands such as Adobe, Macys, 3M, SAP, HP, Marriott and Hilton share insights, case studies, and best takeaways on how to win with content performance marketing. The full line up of speakers, and links to registration, can be viewed here.  

The past year or so has seen quite a shake-up in the organic search world. Those who were not prepared to proactively roll with the punches find themselves in a confused state of affairs. Can you still increase organic search, despite all the changes? Some would speculate that it’s becoming harder, but it’s truly the approach to your increase organic search strategy that will carry you through the algorithm changes, the search engine initiatives and search trends. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the changes we’ve seen, and how to continue to have a winning organic search strategy by focusing on content and mobile.

Mobile marketing

“There is a new phase of content development forming with in-app and mobile experiences. Content is being developed and tailored for device types that fundamentally improve the overall experience. It’s surprising to still see people just digitize content, but not actually tailor it for mobile.” - Darren Pleasance, head of customer acquisition at Google.

Indeed. According to comScore data reported by Rebecca Murtagh at Search Engine Watch, mobile use surpassed that of desktop early this year, forever altering the digital marketing landscape for brands and businesses. Coupled with comScore’s latest (June 2014) smartphone subscriber figures, which forecasts smartphone penetration (in the U.S.) to reach 74 percent by the end of the year, marketers have every incentive to adopt an informed mobile solution for their content.

This surge in mobile use followed Google’s June 2013 announcement that it’d be rolling out ranking changes in its mobile and smartphone search results for sites that provided a poor user experience. According to Google, the two most common mistakes in website configurations for mobile are faulty redirects and smartphone-only errors. Looking for more information on mobile marketing and solutions? Data from The BrightEdge 2014 Mobile Share Report provides insights into the growing mobile search traffic revolution and proper mobile SEO optimization. Also, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu has written extensively on the subject, including:

• The Mobile Boom Is Here: Deliver the Best Experience, No Matter the Device at The Huffington Post. Jim notes that “just because you’re ‘doing mobile,’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it right,” advising brands to optimize for the boom in mobile organic search by choosing their best “mobile path” as determined by the relative performance by of their Web pages by device.

• Going All Responsive Is Not Always “One Size Fits All” With Mobile at Marketing Land. Citing data from the BrightEdge 2014 Mobile Share Report, Jim states that 27 percent of the websites studied made mobile configuration errors that resulted in an average loss in smartphone traffic of 68 percent. Based on BrightEdge’s Data Cube research, he also cautions that the responsive design (recommended by Google) doesn’t necessarily mean higher search rankings for your site as compared to the other two mobile solution options.

• Mobile Site Configuration 101: How to Choose at Search Engine Watch. Jim outlines the three mobile site configurations supported by Google, and advises brands to consider their goals and the Web traffic insights culled from their analytics when deciding upon a mobile solution.

Content & semantic search

“This past year will be remembered as the ‘Year of Content.’ [There has been] so much conversation around how important content is, people moving budgets towards content efforts and so on. And yet, for all that talk and action, content has always been important.” – Duane Forrester, head of the webmaster program at Bing.  

As the digital marketing mantra goes, “content is king.” Brands have learned that they must embrace Google’s directive to provide users with the best experience and quality content since the Panda algorithm first arrived on the search scene in 2011. Now, it’s an integral part of Google’s algorithm, rolling out on a continuous basis. Combined with its Penguin update, which targets link schemes, massive guest blogging networks and other attempts to pass PageRank, Google has made its zero-tolerance stance towards such shortcuts clear. “And as if content weren’t enough, more and more companies are starting to hear the message around marking up content, and taking an action towards it. This is a future-proofing tactic that will serve websites well,” Duane notes.

The transition to semantic search, evidenced by Google’s rollout of its “Hummingbird” algorithm as well as improvements to its “conversational” voice search and Knowledge Graph, ushered in a new era of SEO and content development. Coinciding with the search giant’s move to 100 percent secure search, Google unveiled Hummingbird at its 15th birthday celebration in September 2013 (although it quietly rolled out the new infrastructure the month before), marking the beginning of the end of traditional, keyword-driven SEO and content optimization.

As Duane alluded to when he spoke of “marking up content” as “future-proofing tactic,” semantic search is most effectively leveraged when you use Schema.org to markup your digital content. Simply put, Schema.org helps the search engines to better understand your content and what a web page is about, allowing them to deliver better results (think “rich snippets”) to the user. For more information on how semantic search works using the Knowledge graph and structured data, check out these resources and articles:

• Use Structured Data for Rich Search Results at Google Webmaster Tools Help. A comprehensive, how-to guide on structured data and rich snippets.

• Google Hummingbird & The Keyword: What You Need To Know To Stay Ahead at Search Engine Land. BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu discusses Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, and what it means for marketers. Coupled with Google’s eclipse of keyword data, Hummingbird represents an improvement in semantic search, allowing Google to better interpret the searcher’s intent and the context of the words used in a query.

• Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, Not Strings at Google Inside Search. In a detailed explanation of the Knowledge Graph, Amit Singhal describes it as the “critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.”

• Knowledge Graph Optimization at Blind Five Year Old. AJ Kohn discusses how brands can leverage the Knowledge Graph by optimizing their website’s connection to it, which can translate into greater search visibility.

“Share of Voice” is a powerful digital marketing feature of BrightEdge’s S3 platform. Providing brands with strategic insights into their global search engine results page (SERP) performance by device is just one of its cutting-edge hallmarks. Here, we’ll go over best practices to leverage SOV for:

• Competitor analysis and benchmarking
• Brand monitoring and reputation management
• Business unit benchmarking
• Content research and development in the SERPs

How Share of Voice works

Share of Voice (SOV) offers insights into your digital marketing strategy by helping you to:

1. Understand the entire global SERP landscape (encompassing over 300 search engines, including Baidu), by device (desktop, tablet and smartphone).
2. Understand your competitors’ strategies with a complete picture that includes research into both direct and indirect competitors (by product, pages and groups).
3. Monitor all of your digital assets in the SERPs (including social media networks Twitter and Facebook), for reputation management and copyright issues, as well as for identifying potential commercial and content partners.
4. See the most accurate global picture of your keyword visibility in the SERPs on a weekly basis.

Four keys for unlocking Share of Voice success

First, to access SOV in BrightEdge, go to Analysis > Share of Voice. In this post, we’ll talk about how to access varying results through different views of the data that is available.

Competitor analysis and benchmarking

Visualizing the full competitive landscape involves both research and benchmarking the competition. By using SOV to its fullest, you can gain these insights. SOV gives an unlimited picture of competitors against your keyword portfolio. This helps you to understand direct and indirect competitors. Move away from benchmarking your SEO performance against just two to three competitors by using SOV to gain insight into the full SERP competitive landscape.

The SOV feature will allow you to identify who your true competition is online, what content gaps exist in your strategy by analyzing the competitor, and understanding the competition’s backlink strategy by page (via the Majestic SEO integration). You can then feed your insights back into SOV to further inform and drive your digital marketing campaign. This is a regularly updated indexed, so these strategies will constantly be refined based on the landscape changes.

Brand monitoring and reputation management

As you know, brand monitoring and reputation management are critical. With SOV, you have the tools to see the global SERPs for your brand and your brand’s extensions, and detect negative listings and copyright issues, as well as “rogue” affiliates.

SOV allows you to track your brand’s keywords by:

• Creating a “branded keyword group” including terms like “[Brand + location variant] reviews” to review your online reputation.
• Identifying which sites and pages are ranking for these keywords.

SOV’s brand reputation management feature lets you:

• Review content to understand what is being said about your business and products online, which enables you to understand positive / negative sentiment.
• Develop appropriate strategies to address concerns like client outreach, and content creation aimed at displacing negative reviews.

Beyond mere competitive analysis, SOV can be used proactively to identify sites to possibly partner with, either commercially or for content syndication purposes.

Business unit benchmarking and global targets

“Average rank” is dead. So SOV is the SEO industry benchmark by which to measure your success! With our dashboard feature, you’ll easily grasp the competitive SERP landscape to set realistic benchmark targets, whether by business unit or for global benchmarking. Many leading agency partners of BrightEdge use Share of Voice to benchmark the success of content marketing campaigns. For example, increasing Share of Voice from two percent to five percent can be a strong sign of success with regards to visibility improvements within the SERP. Additionally, if traffic on a certain Web page or page groups has reduced month-over-month, you can look at the correlation with SOV to understand what’s happening.

Content research and development in the SERPs

The fourth best practice for leveraging SOV is to monitor the digital marketing landscape before you start generating content. This gives a roadmap for content creation that follows input, research and findings:

As the graphic above indicates, SOV will help you understand what matters to your brand before you launch a website, much less generate content. By providing insights into influential sites, competitors and blogs, you’ll be able to create an intelligent content strategy and SEO campaign. We have numerous content writers who will utilize Share of Voice to understand the SERP landscape effectively on new keyword or topic area they want to explore for future content. This can be a good workflow process to help enable the content writers for research, as well as fully understand the competition within the SERPS on the new topical area.

Share of Voice in sum

In conclusion, SOV can be leveraged in many ways throughout the lifecycle of your digital marketing plan:

• Start competitor research and benchmarking.
• Monitor and control brand reputation.
• Use as a primary measurement of success in the SERPs.
• Gain access to informed content development.