Search Marketing is Fueled by Data

Marketers analyze their search metrics and ask themselves: what positions do I rank in, what keywords are driving traffic, what pages are converting, and how’s my lead volume, revenue and conversions? These metrics inform priorities that impact critical business decisions that contribute to the bottom line. Whether an organization manages a website with dozens of pages or hundreds of thousands of pages across multiple business units and domains, having accurate analytics data is critical to success.

Search and Social is Big Data

So just how big is the search dataset? In a word, massive. Search engines process a tremendous amount of data including: search queries, location specific searches, social signals, and crawls for new content. Behind Google’s search algorithm is a Big Data company that processes over 20 petabytes of data each year. Beyond the search engines, social networks also process a massive dataset, which is an important consideration due to the positive correlation of social signals on search rankings. Facebook processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and over 500 terabytes of data each day. That’s 300 million photos and 2.7 billion Like actions each day. And, Twitter processes over 400 million tweets each day.

The Evolving Search Landscape

In addition to processing massive amounts of data, search engines like Google and Bing are constantly refining their algorithms, and adjusting the search engine results page (SERP). In August of 2012, Google changed the SERP for many pages with site links and rolled out shorter pages with only seven links instead of 10. This significant change impacts numerous industries. Many organizations have seen a decrease in page one rankings, and a decrease in traffic for keywords in positions 8-10, that now appear on page two instead of page one.

As Google makes changes, organizations need technology with Big Data processing power capable of analyzing this massive data stream. Many technologies in the industry query in groups of 100 (num=100) by modifying Google results in order to display 100 results on a single page. This method produces statistically inaccurate data, and contaminates business metrics.

BrightEdge Offers the Gold Standard in Data Integrity

The BrightEdge commitment to data integrity includes crawling individual pages to make sure that the data in the platform is accurate. In addition, with proprietary Blended Rank technology, developed in June of 2012, BrightEdge ensures that as Google evolves the SERP, the search ranking data provided in dashboards are representative of what a user sees. Other technologies claim to measure Universal results, however the actual numerical count and the position on the page do not reflect what a user actually sees. BrightEdge is the only platform to have Blended Rank technology to show actual placement amongst text, image, video, social, and local results.

BrightEdge Data Integrity Methodology

BrightEdge at its core is a Big Data company, dedicating significant engineering resources to create rigorous and high quality set of data streams stemming from a commitment to delivering customer success.

BrightEdge Data Integrity at a glance:

• Largest dataset in the industry — BrightEdge processes over 100 terabytes of data each week, and over 150 billion URLs in total.
• Most accurate data — Unique blended rank technology ensures rank is a true representation of a users experience. Crawls multiple times a week to ensure data accuracy.
• Highest quality data — Platform includes backlink data from Majestic and Moz.

BrightEdge Big Data Innovations

BrightEdge puts Big Data in the hands of business users by processing complex data in innovative ways.

Below are just some of the data intensive unique technological innovations in the BrightEdge platform:

• Crawling internal links
• Duplicate and thin content detection
• Competitive analysis (patented Share of Voice technology)
• Local results (Local Search Management in 141+ cities)
• Blended Rank
• Social Signals: Twitter Trending, and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (exclusive)

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) no longer feature text-based results and have evolved to include image, video, social, and local results. Marketers now need to know the rank of their pages among all types of results including image, video, social, and local. Metrics and strategies based on blended rank and not just text results alone are what marketers really need to succeed. BrightEdge is the first and only content platform to provide complete insight into true blended rank.

Drive True Content Performance Success With BrightEdge Blended Rank

• Measure true content performance — Understand rank among all search results including text, image, video, social, and local results
• Set goals related to true content performance — Pursue the true measure of content performance success - higher blended rank among all search results
• Drive greater results — Devise well-informed and ambitious content performance strategies based on true performance metrics and goals
• Keep abreast to the changing SERPs — Search engines are constantly refining their algorithms, and adjusting SERPs. On desktop search, 7 results are starting to appear on Google page one (instead of the usual 10). As Google makes changes, organizations need technology with Big Data processing power capable of analyzing this massive data stream.
• Measure mobile performance — SERPs on mobile vary dramatically from desktop, and often feature as few as 5 listings on page one. Measure true rank in mobile devices, inclusive of Universal Results (image, video, social, and local results) to gain an accurate picture of your performance.

First Ever Technology With 360 degree Blended Rank Analysis

• Blended rank for all keywords — Measure blended rank for all keywords as well as keyword groups
• Competitive intel based on Blended rank — Track your competition’s blended rank for all your keywords; identify competitive trends in blended rank and take corrective action fast
• Correlation between social activity and Blended Rank — Correlate social media activity such as Likes, Shares, Tweets, and +1s with blended rank while managing social media campaigns to drive blended rank
• Impact of Blended Rank on web analytics — Understand and manage the impact of blended rank on real business results such as revenue, traffic, and conversions

When a company selects software, their selection is based on business functionality, but also technology architecture, as it affects performance, and business continuity. Businesses need to ensure that a SaaS provider can scale with their business growth, and that their technology instance won’t go down if someone trips over a cable.

BrightEdge was founded as a truly Enterprise-Grade platform, which includes a principal of Enterprise Security, and a commitment to Data Integrity. BrightEdge S3 cloud infrastructure is architected by seasoned executives that hail from leading SaaS companies such as Salesforce, and SuccessFactors, bringing deep expertise in delivering innovative technology to customers in a secure, scalable, and reliable way.

Multi-Tenancy, Horizontal Scalability & Pod Architecture 

Cloud Architecture allows for an on-demand deployment model, providing customers with easy on-boarding, and automatic updates of the latest BrightEdge technological innovations, at a regular monthly cadency. BrightEdge has delivered tremendous value to our customers, and as a result has grown rapidly. As we’ve scaled, our customers have experienced the same superior performance levels (99.9% uptime). That’s made possible through a horizontal scaling model and pod architecture. When one pod reaches capacity, BrightEdge opens up another pod, ensuring seamless scale and uninterrupted performance.

Why this architecture matters to customers:

• Reliability: Multiple layers of replication in data centers provide redundancy and failover reliability.
• Disaster Recovery: Datacenter backup facility for disaster recovery assurance and peace of mind.
• High-Availability: Third-party validated uptime of 99.99%. Multi-pod architecture scales with customer needs to ensure uninterrupted performance by distributing loads across several pods in different continents.
   

The security of our customer data is our top priority. When BrightEdge was founded in 2007, we built our SaaS technology with security as a founding principle, choosing to undertake the most stringent global security audits – the same audits companies, like Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce undergo. Core to BrightEdge is a foundation of secure, reliable, and scalable SaaS infrastructure security controls. BrightEdge’s commitment to security includes ensuring reliable and continuously available data.

BrightEdge Customer Data is Protected with Enterprise-Grade Security

• ISO/IEC 27001 Certified – Internationally recognized British Standards Institution (BSI) certification
• Total Security - Comprehensive security, including network security, encryption, data availability, disaster recovery, and employee security training
• Flexible Password Policies – Designed to accommodate the most stringent financial password requirements including, password capture history, disallowing recycled password, and enforcing special passwords

BrightEdge Ensures Secure, Reliable, and Continuously Available Data

• High Availability – Third-party validated with 99.99% up-time (unique from other players with a history of down-time)
• Disaster Recovery – Ensures business continuity with multiple data centers with replication in separate locations
• Global Platform – Complete global capabilities with support for 111+ countries, multi-lingual character support, global servers, and multi-pod architecture that distributes performance load
• Third Party Validated – Security standards validated by dozens of security audits from the largest global financial institutions and technology companies (these leading brands are now customers)
• Certified Security Experts – The BrightEdge technical team is comprised of experts with the highest-level security and audit certifications including, Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), and ISO/IEC 27001:2005 Lead Auditor.

Search marketing is like stock trading, except the market never closes. Search is 24/7 and every day means money. Search marketers need to know when their keyword ranking drops on top converting keywords and have the ability to act quickly and avoid/minimize losses, while continually driving performance. This is where daily rank tracking comes in.

As search engines update their algorithms, the search engine results pages are in a constant state of flux with keyword ranking frequently changing. In fact, Google updates their algorithm more than 500 times each year, and in 2012 made 34 separate Panda and Penguin updates. There’s plenty to keep up with as the SERPs continue to change with algorithm updates and new competitors enter the scene, in addition to seasonal variances, new product offerings, new campaigns, and site changes. Brands need to ensure they’re equipped with the rapid feedback on keyword ranking, such as daily rank tracking, necessary to succeed.

BrightEdge Daily Rank Tracking

• Protect critical keywords — Get daily rank tracking alerts to see changes to high-converting keyword ranking and prioritize focus based on seasonality, industry-wide changes, algorithm updates, and website changes
• Quickly adjust campaigns — Immediately see which campaign actions have a positive impact on content performance, to replicate that success, and which campaigns actions are to be avoided and require corrective action
• Track site changes — Track the benefits of positive changes resulting from site or page template changes, and likewise quickly reduce any adverse impacts and restore rank performance from page template breaks
• Comprehensive reporting — Closely monitor critical keywords in customizable dashboards ranging from keyword ranking to competitive performance on a daily, weekly, monthly, and long term basis
• Most accurate data — Refreshed and validated multiple times a day, seven days a week, to ensure data accuracy and avoid false data from temporary fluctuations
• Data you can trust — Don’t get stuck relying on cursory manual checks, resource intensive custom systems, and untrustworthy black hat sources. BrightEdge daily rank tracking data comes exclusively from trustworthy sources including proprietary white hat techniques, Majestic, and technology partners like Facebook, and Twitter.