Until recently, marketers faced a dilemma: try to establish a ubiquitous presence across countless different channels, or somehow decipher which avenues to pursue based on guesses as to which would be the most fruitful. Without a crystal ball or any other method to predict results, marketers found themselves in a crippling position with limited resources and too many potential scenarios. Fortunately, in today's digital world, marketing doesn't need to be the balancing act it once was.

As device fragmentation has gathered pace and the penetration of smartphones and tablets has become more significant, forecasting based on click curves has become less accurate. This is because click curves to date have been based on CTR from desktop-based searches; yet for many brands the majority of traffic now comes from tablet or mobile; due to their smaller screen sizes they display different SERP formats. Following up from the very insightful mobile share report, now the folks at BrightEdge have crunched the numbers to develop the first publicly available click curves for mobile and tablet devices.

SEO marketers relish the opportunity to increase spending, but when it comes time to make their case in the boardroom they often get stuck in the weeds. "You are not thinking the way the boardroom is thinking. You need to change that thinking," says Alok Jain, SEO senior manager at Walmart. He encourages his colleagues in SEO to keep their head above water by focusing on the metrics and forecasts that matter to the chief marketing officer. As CMOs and board members make decisions on where to invest finite resources for marketing, they need to be convinced of the forecasted gains in traffic, revenue, return on investment (ROI), share of voice, channel risks, and any outstanding dependencies, Jain says.

Content is king. This phrase gets thrown around a lot, and it's no surprise why. Content is being created, consumed and shared at an unprecedented scale. At a recent industry event, I was afforded the opportunity to engage with marketing leaders about the role that content plays in the digital world. It was energizing to hear about the many innovative ways in which leading brands from around the world are leveraging content to cultivate customer loyalty and deliver substantial business results.

More than 600 senior marketers, 42 speakers, and search and social titans from Google, Google+, Microsoft, Bing, Facebook, Salesforce, and Gap came together last week at the BrightEdge Share13 conference. The goal of Share13 was to connect like-minded marketers and brands and hear from "them" about the future of search and the rise of earned media. Clearly, content has become the catalyst that has driven a dramatic rise in the importance of earned media. The convergence of social, mobile, and search marketing techniques and technology has provided marketers with a huge spectrum of opportunity to shift the digital mindset to embrace change and manage their marketing campaigns more efficiently.

ClickZ took some time at the Share13 conference on Aug. 23 to speak with Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, about the SEO profession, the future of mobile, and why content is so important. "Six years ago when we started I talked a little bit about going up and down the valley and there was only a handful of people focused on earned media and SEO and now there are over a million people six years later. And I think a lot of that is because of the business impact that earned media and SEO are able to drive…That's elevating the community around search and really driving innovation," said Yu.

BrightEdge recently released findings that confirmed what many marketers are dealing with today: Google's "(not provided)" designation in Google Analytics is up. Way up. But it's not the same for all industries. Some experience this nuisance more than others, with the tech industry in first position, according to the study.

Brafton reported in Q4 2012 that 40 percent of searches referring traffic back to websites come in as “not provided” At the time, the metric represented a 171 percent year-over-year increase. More, approximately 81 percent of surveyed companies said at least 30 percent of their traffic carried the “not provided” keyword label. Nearly 12 months later, a new report highlights how Google’s secure search has continued to alter the face of SEO. BrightEdge released a report that found 49 percent of collected queries did not provide any data to webmasters because of Google’s technology. In industries like computer, electronics, software and technology, as much as 56 percent of referral traffic provides marketers with no actionable keyword insights.

BrightEdge has released a report showing that for the 8,400 brands they tracked over the last quarter, 49% of the queries collected did not provide (i.e. not provided) search query data due to Google’s secure search. 49% was the average, in fact, it is higher for the technology industry. BrightEdge said that “56% of traffic to computer, electronics, software and technology sites is coming from Google secure search.” On the low end, such as in the entertainment and consumer services sites, the percentage of secure searches is 46%.