4 Google Carousel Optimization Tips

English, British
News Item Title
4 Google Carousel Optimization Tips
News Item Author Name
Jim Yu
News Item Published Date
News Item Summary

The fragmentation of search results from Google's continual algorithm updates, improvements to personalized search, and changes to the SERP keep practitioners of SEO on their toes in the never-ending quest to optimize earned media. The latest, Google Carousel, presents a new opportunity to appear at the top of Google's search results, but with it also comes some new best practices.

Click Curve Data and SEO Success

<p>Google has made secure search the universal default, meaning&nbsp;site analytics no longer provide user search query data to correlate keywords with site visits, revenue, and conversions. As a result, marketers need to shift to a content-centric approach and manage page performance. While taking a content-centric approach is the path forward, we realize many brands have invested heavily in a keyword-centric strategy. As a transition to content-centric marketing, brands can leverage Estimated Keyword Reporting, a “triangulation" method, whereby a brand can take into account a keyword's search volume, rank, and the click through rate (CTR) to estimate how much <a href="http://www.brightedge.com/glossary/increase-organic-traffic&quot; target="_blank">organic traffic</a> a keyword is driving.</p>

<p>What powers Estimated Keyword Reporting is accurate click curves, which requires insight into keyword data that is no longer available in site analytics. Fortunately, BrightEdge foresaw the market shift and months before the change to 100% secure search, performed analysis across our 8,400 brand clients and web traffic for more than 5 billion web pages, to look at how mobile, tablet, and desktop traffic drives conversions. This comprehensive research was based on exact match keywords with no change in rank or ranked page over the course of one month. This research translated into BrightEdge Customizable Click Curves providing a baseline CTR between desktop, mobile, and tablet.
</p>

<address><strong>The change to 100% secure search means it will never again be possible to create an accurate click curve and accurate estimated keyword reporting. These unique capabilities are core to the BrightEdge platform today.</strong></address>

<p><strong>So what is a customizable click curve? </strong>A click curve allows brands to apply a custom formula or custom calculation to their business that estimates the actual search traffic based on search volume and keyword ranking.</p>

<p><img alt="" height="76" src="/sites/default/files/ctr%20calculation.png" width="196" /></p>

<p><img alt="" height="301" src="/sites/default/files/click%20curve%20big.png" width="679" /></p>

<h2>Mobile &amp; Tablet Click Curve Analysis</h2>

<p>US smartphone adoption grew by 30% in 2012 and continues to increase, yet most brands are left estimating traffic and forecasting with outmoded inaccurate desktop-only click curves. With BrightEdge’s proprietary smartphone, tablet, and desktop customizable click curves, brands benefit from understanding how CTR varies across devices. BrightEdge mobile research finds that the top 3 SERP results capture 62% of clicks as compared to 44% on desktop devices.</p>

<h2>Customizable Click Curves Power Estimated Keyword Reports</h2>

<p>Search marketers that currently manage content performance with a keyword-centric strategy require continuity in their business metrics including traffic, conversions, and revenue as these metrics are necessary to understand the overall health of a program, identify high value keywords that drive revenue, and to justify future investments. BrightEdge has leveraged our best in class rank data, along with our best in class customizable click curves to create Estimated Keyword Reporting.</p>

<p><strong>Estimated Keyword Reporting -</strong> includes estimated traffic and estimated revenue reports, enabling brands to:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Measure traffic and revenue -</strong> understand what efforts drive revenue and focus on these opportunities, measure traffic at the keyword or keyword group level</li>
<li><strong>Comprehensive dashboard reporting -</strong> align your team with in-depth reports which illustrate the state of your program</li>
</ul>

<p><img alt="" height="560" src="/sites/default/files/estimated%20traffic%20report.png" width="692" /></p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>

<h2>Customizable Click Curves Extend Across BrightEdge S3</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Share of Voice –</strong> BrightEdge’s patented Share of Voice allows brands to gain a true understanding of how content performs across all device types vs your competition. Within Share of Voice users can select desktop, tablet, smartphone, or your own custom click curves for an accurate view of Share of Voice across devices.</li>
<li><strong>Dashboard Reporting</strong> <strong>–</strong> BrightEdge customizable dashboard charts provides instant visibility into an organization’s overall content health and detailed analysis of initiatives with scheduled email delivery. Leverage customizable click curves across our flexible dashboard charts.</li>
</ul>

Click Curves are a fundamental part of forecasting for SEO professionals, helping project the volumes of traffic to be expected.

quote

BrightEdge Equips Marketers for Success With Page Reporting

BrightEdge Equips Marketers for Success With Page Reporting

Company Removes the Ambiguity From Secure Search With Comprehensive Solution

SAN MATEO, CA - September 27, 2013 - BrightEdge, the essential platform for content marketing, today announced that the newest addition to its comprehensive S3 platform, Page Reporting, is now available to all customers and is the only complete solution to remove the uncertainty from search results introduced by Google's secure search. In the wake of Google's switch to secure search, Page Reporting allows marketers to transition from keyword-dependent SEO to a content-centric model. Even with keywords removed from the search equation, Page Reporting gives marketers insight into the real performance of their web pages visits, conversions and revenue from organic search traffic.

"Change is a constant in digital marketing, especially when it comes to search," said Jim Yu, CEO and founder at BrightEdge. "Our top priority is our customers' success and we are constantly innovating to ensure that our customers stay one step ahead as the search marketing landscape evolves."

Google is the leading search engine, with 67 percent market share, according to ComScore data. With Google's transition to 100 percent secure search, marketers can no longer rely on site analytics to provide visitor search query data or correlate keywords with site visits, conversions and revenue. This long foreseen development is a response to increasing consumer concerns over online privacy. BrightEdge has anticipated this positive change and has been investing in its platform for the past two years to facilitate the shift away from keyword-centric SEO to content-centric SEO.

"While our competition may see 'the end of SEO' as a result of Google's recent secure search changes, we at LendingTree believe that this gives us a competitive advantage," said Lowell Orelup, Vice President of Marketing at LendingTree. "For months, as Google has been stripping out more and more keywords, BrightEdge has helped us move our focus to a content-based approach, placing us ahead of the curve. BrightEdge's latest announcement offers a clear path to proactively manage SEO at the level of revenue, conversions and traffic."

Google's switch to secure search makes Page Reporting an integral part of the BrightEdge suite and a necessary tool for any digital marketer. It offers in-depth reporting, as well as prioritized recommendations that allow users to uncover the highest impact opportunities to increase their search performance. Its customizable recommendations target unique parameters that cater to each user's specific business needs. When used in concert with BrightEdge's patented Share of Voice capability, and Page Manager, the tool set offers essential competitive intelligence on competing web pages, allowing brands to understand not just their content performance, but that of their competition. Harnessing these tools, marketers have a comprehensive and fully integrated technology solution at their fingertips giving them a true competitive advantage.

Customer success is the driving force behind all BrightEdge innovation. With over 8,400 brands that rely on BrightEdge technology, the company has an unmatched pulse on what matters in marketing and a progressive vision to deliver groundbreaking innovations that fuel customer success.

About BrightEdge
BrightEdge is the essential platform for content marketing. It transforms online content into tangible business results such as traffic, revenue and engagement. BrightEdge's S3 platform is powered by a sophisticated big data analysis engine and is the only company capable of web-wide, real-time measurement of content engagement across all digital channels, including search, social and mobile. More than 8400 global brands including 3M, Microsoft, Netflix and Nike leverage BrightEdge technology. The company is based in San Mateo, CA with offices in New York City and London.

Visit our website: www.brightedge.com
Read our blog: www.brightedge.com/blog
Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/seoplatform
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brightedge

Press Release Date

Page Manager

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Dashboards & Reporting

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Google's Secure Search is Here

Jim
Jim
M Posted 12 years 11 months ago
t 9 min read

Dear BrightEdge Customer,

As a savvy digital marketer, you are probably figuring out ways to address the recent Google announcement on making all searches secure, as part of the Hummingbird update. I wanted to take a minute to discuss this change, explain how BrightEdge customers are already set up to make the most of this change and give you an overview of the BrightEdge Secure Search Release that allows you to respond even more effectively to secure search.

Secure Search transforms SEO

Starting in October of 2011, Google began making secure search the default for authenticated users. This shift signaled to the market that the existing model of keyword-centric SEO, a holdover from PPC bidding, was undergoing major change. This week, Google has made secure search the universal default, meaning that 100% of searches are now secure and site analytics will no longer be able to provide user search query data to correlate keywords with site visits and conversions.

You are already set up for success

The secure search update in Google Hummingbird is a huge opportunity for marketers to focus on a content-based approach to organic search and manage performance at the page level. BrightEdge customers are uniquely positioned to make the most of this opportunity. In the words of Lowell Orelup, VP, Marketing at LendingTree:

 "While our competition may see "the end of SEO" as a result of Google's recent Secure Search changes, we at LendingTree believe that this gives us a competitive advantage. For months, as Google has been stripping out more and more keywords, BrightEdge has helped us move our focus to a content-based approach, placing us ahead of the curve. And BrightEdge's latest announcement offers a clear path to proactively manage SEO at the level of revenue, conversions and traffic."  

Existing BrightEdge innovations already enable page and content centric SEO

At BrightEdge, our top value is customer success, and we innovate to keep customers ahead of the changes in search and digital marketing.  We saw the move towards 100% secure search coming and we have been investing in our platform to address this.  Our platform is already infused with page and content-centric SEO analytics and recommendations that help you win in a secure search world. These innovations include Share of Voice, Page Manager, Site Audit, Total SEO and Content Optimizer.  

BrightEdge secure search release sets you on a path to even greater success

Building upon these features to take you to a more content and page centric approach to search, we recently announced Page Reporting, a new technology that helps brands understand the true value of pages provided by organic search traffic, at Share13. For the first time, brands are able to understand their SEO performance across revenue, visits, and conversions at a page level. Performance can be rolled up into Page Categories/Business Units (i.e. Men’s Apparel, Women’s Apparel, Baby Apparel, etc.) as well as at a total site level. We are pleased to announce the Limited Release of this innovation and this will soon be available to all of our customers. Please feel free to browse  Page Reporting to understand how it helps you address the challenges and opportunities of Secure Search.

Deeper integration with Google Webmaster tools will smooth the transition

The BrightEdge team is hard at work on deeper integration with Google Webmaster Tools, and further enhancements to help brands make the transition from legacy keyword-centric SEO to content-centric SEO.

Rest assured, we are on top of trends

I also want to emphasize that our innovations around secure search are guided by our investments in research and thought leadership so that we catch trends earlier than anyone else in our industry. Last month at Share13, we discussed a new research report showing the impact of secure search across our 8,400 brand customers. You can download the report here: http://goo.gl/Ib9OCP. We actively track the changes in marketing and are the first to address new trends.

Six ways to solve secure search within BrightEdge

How can you address these transformation in search? First, don’t panic! As a BrightEdge customer you have access to data and insight to help you make the transition to content-centric SEO right now. You have the product functionality, the people power to guide you through this change as well as our assurance that we will continue to keep you ahead of changes!   

1. Adopt a page-centric approach to search with page manager

We recommend that customers log in and make use of Page Manager to understand the content-centric recommendations that are available today. Page Manager was designed specifically to help our customers transition from a keyword dependent SEO model to a page-centric model. All of our customers can make use of Page Manager today to see the performance of their site and access recommendations for their pages (as opposed to keywords). 

2. Uncover competitive performance with share of voice and custom click curves

Building from there, you may use our patented Share of Voice capability in concert with Custom Click Curves to gain a true understanding of how your content performs across all device types vs your competition. Feel free to review the ShowMe videos on the page for each feature to get a guided tour. What are BrightEdge’s Custom Click Curves? This capability allows you to apply a custom Click Curve for your business that estimates the actual search traffic based on historical or projected trends. This is a feature that was delivered back in 2011 to help brands create an accurate model of the traffic being driven by search keywords. For more information on this feature, please contact your dedicated customer success manager via support@brightedge.com.  

3. Optimize your contnet from day one with content optimizer

Content is front and center of marketing. To make your content perform better from the time it is published, use Content Optimizer to integrate SEO best practices  with the content authoring process. With Content Optimizer, authors gain access to SEO recommendations right within their CMS so that content is high-converting the moment it goes live!  

4. Align your site with content best practices at scale with site audit

One of the most powerful set of features in BrightEdge, Site Audit helps you automatically assess your entire site for best practices and search engine quality guidelines, identifying  issues across different page types, and of course, telling you how to fix them.  As you pursue a content and page centric approach to search, use Site Audit to grasp how your pages are setup for conversions, across devices.  

5. Gain an understanding of your total SEO performance

The transition to content centric SEO means that it is more essential than ever to gain a 360 degree view of your content performance across conversion metrics, geographies, local cities and devices. Total SEO gives you this understanding and look beyond keyword rank so that you know how your content impacts your business.  

6. Contact us for page reporting

If you would like to deploy Page Reporting, which provides revenue reporting for pages independent of keyword data, please be sure to contact your customer success manager to let them know. We are actively tracking customer interest and working to help as many customers as possible with this transition. If you have an urgent need to understand your page specific revenue data today, BrightEdge Professional Services can help. Please email ps@brightedge.com for more information.

We are focused as ever on making you successful

Now that Secure Search is here to stay, we hope that you will find the innovations that BrightEdge has delivered more helpful than ever. Even in the face of massive changes like Secure Search, with accurate and scaled rank data, page-centric data and features, custom click curves and powerful content marketing capabilities, you can continue to manage your organic search channel successfully at scale. With a customer base of 8400+ brands, we have a strong pulse on what matters in marketing and you have my promise that we will continue to deliver ground-breaking innovations that will fuel your success!

,