Bradley Smith

M Posted 12 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

This is a guest post in the BrightEdge Customer Column, a series of SEO best practices shared by thought-leaders among the BrightEdge customer community. This post describes how leading agency Relevance™ increased Rackspace traffic using BrightEdge's powerful competitive intelligence capabilities, and is written by Brad Smith, Inbound Marketing Consultant at Relevance™. Over the past year, Relevance has utilized the BrightEdge platform to help Rackspace execute a strategy that focuses on user experience. Fortunately, the BrightEdge platform allows any marketer to scale efforts from just a few to thousands of keywords. In the case of Rackspace, Relevance focused on improving natural search traffic for a great number of keywords. We used the associated keyword data to test, measure, optimize and refine specific campaigns related to Rackspace and achieve massive traffic gains.

How we use BrightEdge to win for Rackspace

Relevance uses the BrightEdge platform in many ways to inform each keyword campaign’s strategy. We have discovered that the BrightEdge platform allows us to not only monitor rankings, but also analyze what to do to create a better user experience. Here are seven powerful ways BrightEdge powered the Relevance/Rackspace strategy.

Rank tracking

Having a historical record of a keyword’s performance is helpful, but this is just the starting point. Understanding a keyword’s ranking is most helpful for competitor analysis.

Dashboard creation

Creating dashboards is helpful for snapshot reporting. It allows a marketer or marketing manager to see a quick snapshot of historical or competitive performance. Relevance also grouped keywords by related Rackspace product, created dashboards based on groups and set up each dashboard so that it can be emailed to the associated Rackspace product manager on a weekly basis.

Share of voice

BrightEdge reports up to the top 25 competitors for each search engine results page (SERP) based on keyword group. This allows Relevance and Rackspace to keep their fingers on the pulse of each competitor. The share of voice report also identifies what keyword(s) each competitor rank(s) for in that group.

Earned media overlap

BrightEdge identifies earned media opportunities for any tracked keyword. It also identifies which opportunities have multiple competitors. The key takeaway here is that if more than one competitor shows up on any particular opportunity, Rackspace may have a higher chance of also earning a placement on that same opportunity.

Keyword discovery

BrightEdge tracks keywords input into their system; they also identify competitor-targeted keywords that have not been entered into their system. Relevance utilizes this feature to help make suggestions for future keyword targeting campaigns.

Page-specific optimization

BrightEdge identifies all pages related to any targeted keyword. From there, BrightEdge creates natural search specific recommendations to optimize the on-page architecture for any page and associated keyword.

Competitive analysis

For any targeted keyword, BrightEdge will tell you the top 10 competitors in search for that keyword and will also identify each of the top 10 competitors’ on-page elements that impact search. This allows Relevance to supplement recommendations with related competitive analysis data.

Shifting focus to user experience

When it comes to natural search, rankings serve as a leading indicator to traffic. So, it’s no surprise that many mid- to high-level marketing managers focus solely on achieving higher rankings for each keyword they are targeting. In the end, however, rankings fluctuate from week to week and even day-to-day. Fluctuating rankings are one way for Google and other search engines to quickly determine if a Webmaster is attempting to game the search engine. For this reason, the focus to improve natural search traffic must be shifted from simply achieving rankings to creating a better user experience. But how does a marketing manager make that shift? The answer lies in understanding what Google and all other search engines pursue for their own platforms—and for their users. If a search engine continuously serves inadequate results to a user, that user could find another search engine that will provide him with the results that satisfies his search. Ultimately, each search engine must supply what the user demands: a better search experience.

Satisfying your users, not their search algorithms

When a marketer focuses only on rankings, the most common mistake made is catering the site only to search engines. The point of failure here is when the search engine ranks the marketer’s site higher in the search engines. Sure, the site begins receiving visitors, but the visitors can’t find what they are looking for and ultimately leave the site (bounce rate metric). Google and other search engines actually measure visitor satisfaction through on-page interactions. They can do this regardless of whether the marketers have the unique search engine analytics package installed by measuring on-page metrics.

When on-page metrics are low, Google and other search engines must lower the site’s rankings for related keywords to continue satisfying their user base. But when the focus is on user experience, the marketer innately caters to the user. The site’s on-page metrics may perform well and, because of this, search engines know they can satisfy their users’ search queries by sending visitors to the site whose on-page metrics perform consistently well. When user experience is the marketer’s focus, optimizing a site’s content and architecture each receive the appropriate amount of attention. From here, the marketer can utilize data—and yes, this means rankings—to make informed decisions that will help execute a well-planned marketing strategy. This post lists just seven of the powerful ways Relevance utilizes the BrightEdge platform to help Rackspace make informed decisions on creating a better user experience—and this in turn boosts natural search traffic to the Rackspace website.

Learn more about the Rackspace success story

To learn more about the results of the efforts, read the case study which includes the results or attend the Share13 session. Details listed below: Case Study: http://relevance.com/resources/case-studies/

Come see us at Share13

Relevance and Rackspace will be discussing this case study at BrightEdge Share13. Hope you can see us there.

Details are below: Time & Date - August 22 - 4:00-4:50 PM PST Track - Earned Media: Maximize your impact Session Title – Bringing it all together - Search and Earned Media Session Overview - Search, social, PR and blogs have the potential for driving significant business results collectively. Choosing where to allocate marketing dollars and attributing results can be a challenge.

Hear from digital marketers on the earned media mix that delivers the maximum return. Speakers David Whitworth, SEO Manager, Rackspace Marty Muse - Vice President, Client Solutions & Success, Relevance

Andy Betts

M Posted 12 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

BrightEdge are proud have Resolution Media as a premium sponsor at Share13. As part of the Share13 blog series we had the chance to catch up briefly with Alan Osetek, President of Resolution Media as he prepares for his panel presentation on the Digital CMO. Alan is presenting alongside Mike Grehan from Incisive Media, Jeremy Sanchez, CEO, of Global Strategies and Christian Nimsky, VP of Digital, at Consumer Reports.

About Alan Osetek  

Alan Osetek is the President of Resolution Media and oversees the growth and expansion of the brand in the U.S. A digital industry veteran, prior to joining Resolution Media, Osetek was the Managing Director for iProspect’s Boston office, responsible for overseeing all activities for iProspect's east coast operations.

Here is what Alan had to say on current trends and topics in search, social and content:

Digital marketers on the brand or agency side have to learn, grow and hone new skills faster than ever before to keep up with their constantly evolving audiences. This year’s Share13 lineup of topics and speakers will help brands and individuals stay ahead of the competition. I’m honored to be a part of the event and excited about the many critical topics we’ll tackle together.

Not provided

When Google Secure Search began cloaking SEO referring keyword data, it immediately confused and disrupted the day-to-day reality of every SEO professional. But since then it’s been a tale of two approaches, exposing a glaring weakness of SEO shops that leaned too heavily on referring keyword data all along. Those that leaned entirely on referring keyword data have either reinvented themselves or filled the data hole with guesswork and estimations. The best digital marketing and SEO agencies have always treated referring keyword data as one piece of a much larger puzzle of consumer behavior.

At Resolution, we leverage ClearTargetTM to define digital customers and audiences. And referring keyword data from SEO campaigns represents just one fractional component of ClearTarget. By combining digital measurement and research services, paid search and SEO intelligence, Web analytics, and brands’ proprietary CRM insights, we help our clients minimize the damage of “not provided” and we build more accurate customer models with this omni-channel approach to behavioral analysis.

Content marketing

Content has become a key focus of search and digital marketing because it’s an element of everything we do and enables brands to cater to their most important audiences in a cost effective owned media environment. The brands that best capitalize on content are often the brands that understand their core audience segments and how they behave across a wide range of media channels.

Content permeates everything we do - From understanding how audiences consume content and what key types of content a brand may be missing to actually brainstorming, copywriting and optimizing content, not to mention ad copy, landing pages, product descriptions and more. Today, the best search agencies understand that every service they deliver relies on content marketing expertise. And they build every content marketing effort on the foundation of a core understanding of the audience and its behaviors.

The rise of earned media

The best brands aim high for converged media – the elusive media that is owned, paid and earned. A piece of controversial research, for example, can start out as owned media – for example a report or a video. But brands that can identify the owned media with high potential turn to paid media to extend reach. With broad enough reach content can go viral through online shares or editorial media coverage. Advanced software such as Kenshoo Social (another great sponsor at Share13) provides the ability to identify the best performing owned media and further promote it with paid media (ads) so it eventually becomes earned media. Best practices in this arena change often and brands should be seeking out partners that bring the scale required to keep them ahead of the competition.

Measuring performance across sites, social and search

We start with client goals, measure the performance of content according to those goals and then do all we can to improve performance. In social, this approach is still in its infancy, because it takes a combination of sophisticated software packages (such as Brightedge) to measure the performance of owned social media (learn more about social media metrics). For some marketers, clickthroughs or shares might matter most, but in a lot of instances, it will be softer metrics like time spent with content or even page views. The most important element is creating a logical connection between goals and optimization, making sure the content deemed most effective is the content that best helps the brand meet its campaign goals.

Mobile search best practices

Like commerce, payment, direct response and so many other disciplines, mobile has completely upended search, because people have access to unprecedented knowledge resources at hand any time, any place, and in any situation. The best mobile search marketers have applied comprehensive solutions to solve the mobile puzzle, unleashing apps, mobile sites, mobile social campaigns and separate mobile paid search campaigns. Even today, many marketers still struggle to embrace Google’s enhanced campaigns, and this was one of the most fundamental and publicized changes in mobile search ever.

At the end of the day, brand marketers consistently tell us there are just too many changes happening too quickly for them to stay competitive without help. This truth also extends to agencies today; we leverage technology partnerships to keep brands positioned to capitalize on new opportunities and strengthen bonds with their audiences regardless of technology, platform or device. Thanks to changes in mobile search, identifying the right technologies and partners may be a more important component of digital marketing than ever before.

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23 Share13 is the industry’s premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13  

Andy Betts

M Posted 12 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Share13 has hit new heights with over 500 senior level executives and practitioners offering attendees an opportunity to hear from industry thought leaders and interact with highly accomplished marketers and brands. Last week I managed to catch up, alongside my colleague Nag Patta, with Dave Lloyd from Abobe.

About Dave Lloyd

Dave Lloyd is Senior Manager of Global Search Marketing at Adobe Systems where he leads a global team delivering Organic & Site Search strategies. The team’s charter is to deliver industry best practices, drive KPI-focused goals, integrate with all marketing & web disciplines, and alpha test Adobe Marketing Cloud products. In his prior role, he oversaw Cisco’s Global SEO Strategy and previously worked at Apple, Openwave, NetSuite, Palm, & Handspring. He is Google-certified, with 12 years in Digital & Search Marketing, and a Business degree from U.C. Davis.  

You were a speaker at Share last year. What made you come back?

Everything BrightEdge does is first-class and innovative and as a result they attract smart, sophisticated, and thoughtful marketers in a casual and intimate environment. Looking at the agenda, every session has the potential for valuable takeaways for any enterprise-level search marketer. Compared with last year, the emphasis is shifting toward the future of the Digital CMO, the role of Earned Media, and the growing emphasis on Social, Content, and Technical strategies. The high caliber of the presenters will help deliver that message.  

What was your favorite experience or session at Share12?

The keynotes last year gave me a clear view of the company’s vision and where the industry is going.  Any veteran of conferences also knows that a few shared experiences and nuggets of wisdom in the hallway can be invaluable – I had numerous experiences last year like this.  My two favorite moments last year were hearing the caliber of questions & responses asked during every session and then during lunch when a half dozen of us challenged each other on the latest innovations in search and which were worth prioritizing.  

What is your advice for new attendees at Share13?

Meet people and follow up - Bring 20 business cards and make it a point to get 20 back – and then find a way to develop a connection.  This could be through a LinkedIn connection, sending valuable articles, inviting them as an outsider to a team call, or sharing valuable contacts and insights. Ask questions - Take advantage of lunch and downtime between sessions to follow up with speakers and attendees on your specific use cases. Debate issues - Few things in enterprise web marketing are clean cut and often best strategies come through thinking through all viewpoints.  You’ll find a great opportunity to engage with attendees. Take action - Keep good notes, summarize relevant points for you, and integrate into your future plans.  Knowledge is truly only power when it’s acted upon.  

What sessions are you looking forward to this year?

Our team regularly looks to the future to find ways to share the Search Marketing message better with executives so I’m very interested in the The Digital CMO Wednesday panel and Search Engine Opportunity Friday panel. Given our data-driven focus & alignment to business goals, I’m expecting the Search Forecasting and Business Impact session to be useful.  And knowing the work & sophistication of my Adobe colleagues, I’m planning to attend the Metrics & Analytics, Bringing it All Together, and Aligning Content and SEO sessions.  

You have a session on global and mobile SEO. Can you share a preview of what you will be discussing?

I’ll be sharing a strategic framework to perform better against global & mobile challenges. You can read more detail on the Strategic Innovations and SEO post of the Adobe Digital Marketing blog. 

The premise is understanding why customers are coming to your site – what unique tasks are global and mobile users trying to accomplish? Once core markets are understood, it’s critical to define your team & company’s unique value to deliver to those markets. From there, it’s about maximizing opportunities through developing resources & capabilities plus strong stakeholder engagement. Lastly, how best to maintain competitive advantage – this could be through developing distributed teams, innovation in strategy and process, expanding team capability, and create synergy through better business partnerships.  Throughout the session I will share select case studies with specific global or mobile application.  

The focus on global and mobile SEO is driven by growing personalization of search results. How should marketers deal with this challenge?

There are many practical solutions.  Some include customer-driven Content Marketing to create relevant content, alignment with Social teams to enhance synergy and extend Authorship markup - testing & targeting on your domain to improve visitor personalization - and clearly sharing results to account for personalization.  Also important is how you continue to train people on practical tips and communicate context to key stakeholders interested in personalization.  Like with many issues in Search, it’s a question of what do you control vs. influence – and picking the right battles. In this case, though personalization is here to stay, I believe it’s best addressed long-term through identifying those levers where a search-driven solution has the most influence possible and then controlling for personalization & testing further on your corporate website.  

What has changed most since you started out as a search marketer?

I often say a great search marketer must be a strong business person first, a marketer second, and a search professional third.  This hasn’t changed and though common sense, it’s not always common practice. The biggest changes to me are: 1. The pace of change 2. The necessity of search marketers to strategically align & communicate regarding business unit and product team objectives.  Change is the only constant and as customer behavior changes, and therefore algorithms, so must the role of search marketers.   We must become more aligned with business strategies, more attuned to overall digital marketing levers, and better at reporting and storytelling in order to clearly convey our value.  Adapting to change becomes a question of leadership & business-savvy in order to partner well with key stakeholders to drive transformative SEO plans.  

In general, what is your approach to managing the dynamic nature of the search landscape?

Keep learning, stay nimble (use Agile), go first to build & influence key relationships, and practice ruthless prioritization always. Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23 Share13 is the industry’s premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13        

Nag

M Posted 12 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

We are a few days away from Share13, the industry's premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Things have been hectic at BrightEdge as we give finishing touches to but we did get a minute to catch up with Simon Heseltine, industry thought-leader and Director of Audience Development at AOL.  

Simon Heseltine is currently the Director of Audience Development for Huffington Post Media Group within AOL Inc. In this position Simon and his team are responsible for planning and implementing SEO projects and trainings for many well known sites across the HPMG / AOL brand portfolio.   Simon will be part of a panel discussion on how to make the most of the search engine opportunity in the light of the dizzying change that the industry is used to. Here is a quick transcript of our chat.  

BE: Tell us about your session at Share13.

SH:This will be my first experience of the Share conference, and so I’m looking forward to expanding my network with industry leaders I haven’t yet met, sharing ideas, and talking about topics that affect all of us.  I’ll be speaking on the topic of “The Search Engine Opportunity”, basically discussing where we can, in today’s world, still get good, quality traffic to our content.  

BE: What are your thoughts on the impact of “not provided” on search marketing?

SH: It makes search marketing much more challenging. Sure we can talk about how following best practices is the way to go, but as “not provided” continues to increase, the data becomes less and less statistically significant. Some sites now have >75% of their traffic in this hidden bucket. How do you know what’s working? You don’t. Sure, you can look at page data to see which pages are getting the traffic, but then thanks to the ios6 tracking issues there’s another chunk of data that’s missing. It’s all rather depressing, really. Or to look at it another way, it’s a challenge, a challenge that anyone in the search marketing industry now has to deal with.  

BE: How has content come to be the focus of search and digital marketing?

SH: As far as I’m concerned, content’s always been a focus. Without the content you’re not going to achieve your goals, whether it’s to get people to buy something on your site or just read your articles. Now I will say that social has changed the focus more to the content side. With search engines, if the content can’t be found, can’t be crawled, or is just poorly targeted, the chances are you’d not show up when someone searches for you. With social, that’s not the case. Someone shares your content once, and it shows up in their friend’s feeds, where they can discover and share to their heart’s content.  

BE: How do you view the rise of Earned media and the relationship between Earned and owned vs paid media?

SH: As most of the sites I work with tend to be on the newsy side, we’re usually the place that people are hoping to earn links and articles from. The recent Google crackdown on advertorials is going to move people away from native advertising and towards trying to earn rather than pay for articles.  

BE:What is your approach to  publishing content and measuring performance across channels like site, social, and search?

SH: We have lots of different sites on different CMSs, but we’ve basically determined what the metrics are that matter for us, and we measure every site against those particular metrics.  We have a dashboard that provides those key metrics to stakeholders in an easy format for them to quickly determine the health of a site, and it shows the different traffic-generating mechanisms across that site.  

BE: How important is mobile search in 2013?

SH: Mobile search is continuing to grow and therefore can’t be ignored.  You need to make sure that you have your mobile strategy buttoned down and in place (although if it’s not in place by now…why not?).  Mobile device and tablet usage are both continuing to increase, so plan for it.  

About Simon Heseltine

Simon Heseltine is currently the Director of Audience Development for Huffington Post Media Group within AOL Inc. In this position, Simon and his team are responsible for planning and implementing SEO projects and trainings for many well known sites across the HPMG / AOL brand portfolio.   Simon is a frequent public speaker at conferences around the US, and the UK on all manner of topics related to online marketing, and has published articles for various online industry sites over the years.

Simon will also be teaching a Search Engine Optimization class at Georgetown University this Spring. Simon has worked in online marketing for over 6 years, with over 7-1/2 years in the local search industry (including several years as a developer), and he has experience working with SEO, Social Media, Reputation Management, and PPC. Simon has built up online marketing teams, and has been brought in by several companies, to train in-house online marketing teams in industry best practices.  

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23

Share13 is the industry's premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13