This is the first post in the BrightEdge Customer Column, a series of SEO best practices shared by thought-leaders among the BrightEdge customer community.

A Quick Intro

I am Kevin Hill, VP of IT and eCommerce for Guardian Safety and Supply (www.envirosafetyproducts.com). I have been an online marketer for a while and have led online strategy for companies ranging from niche retailers to multi-billion dollar businesses. I have even built eCommerce software from scratch! With my diverse experience, I hope to share with you my experience with SEO, Brightedge, and perhaps we can learn a few things together!  

Ads - My Gateway Into Digital Marketing

When I first heard about digital marketing it was from a small company called www.overture.com – and they wanted me to PAY for keywords.  The cheek! The very idea!  On the other side was a bright cheerful woman, who was trying to convince me that I should PAY for traffic that I was already getting for free!  She mentioned that I could pay about 5 cents for a keyword like “Power Tools” and my ad, carefully crafted by their team, would show up in front of many people – and I’d pay for it if they clicked on it.

My suspicious mind instantly thought of schemes and plots to spin these clicks out of control, and pad the pockets of this new company.  But – marketing is always a risk game, and if I could limit my potential “loss”, I perhaps could learn something.  So I handed over my credit card, authorized a $500 charge, and worked with her to put together some ads, decide on where those ads should land, and craft a call to action in the ads, that would convince customers to click on the ads.  Even then, the call to action was “FREE SHIPPING!”  

SEO Was A Lot Simpler Back In The Day

That was my first jump into real, paid digital marketing.  And it’s paid off ever since.  And, during that process, another type of Search engine marketing was already well under way.  How to give the search engines what they wanted to rank you highly for keywords that would drive traffic to your website. Search Engine Optimization had been born – and Title Tags, and Meta Descriptions were all the rage.  Back then, things were pretty simple – no Panda’s, no Florida and the many others that have come since.  Link building was out there, but was not really understood except by the cutting edge SEO’s – and often times, an onsite link building strategy was all that was needed in the wild west of the internet in those days.  

The Tools Of The Trade Are More Sophisticated Now

The other things that have changed over the years, is the plethora of tools that are now available to help aid in SEO.  In 2001, 2002 – there were no Screaming Frogs, or Brightedge – you had to build that yourself (and I did!) and collect data from multiple sources, and often patchy data at that!  Now, we have great tools out there that can quickly analyze a page for the basic, and give you a red, green or yellow warning flag, and show you exactly what does not fit the rules as we assume them to be.

What are my favorite tools today?

1. Google Analytics
2. Google Adwords Keyword Estimate Tool
3. Google Ad Planner
4. Brightedge
5. Screaming Frog
6. Firebug
7. SEO Doctor
8. Microsoft Excel
9. MySQL
10. Xampp/PHP

My Next Post : How I Achieved A Jump In Daily Impressions

What I’d like to accomplish in the following weeks and months of articles with BrightEdge, is to setup experiments that we can all work on together, using the tools above, and perhaps adding more to our understanding of SEO each day. And, I hope, you’ll share in the discussion by posting comments, and emailing me to share your findings and questions.  You can reach me at loneregister01@gmail.com and @CarKevin.  

And here is a little teaser for you.  In early June – I started an experiment in old school SEO that you can do as well.  But, I’ll leave the graph below to pique your interest in how I achieved a jump in daily impressions on Google during these tumultuous times.  

Take our digital marketing quiz to test your knowledge.  

Continuing the recap of our hit industry event BrightEdge Share 11, we'd like to share a fun and informative discussion on the link between search and social. The discussion features some of the most accomplished search marketers:

1. Mark Fiske, Director of Digital Marketing at The Gap
2. Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect at Microsoft
3. Brian Piepgrass, Internet Marketing Manager at Facebook
4. Elisabeth Osmeloski from Search Engine Land (moderator)

The panel discussion is a must-see because the diverse background of the panelists brings up different perspectives on making social work in SEO. The discussion deals with issues such as:

1. The impact of social on  user behavior and search across industries such as retail and B2B
2. Metrics and tools to capture data on social signals
3. Understanding attribution where multiple channels like search and social interact
4. Role of testing in prioritizing social efforts and identifying social channels of opportunity
5. Actionable tips on jump starting social programs to improve search performance with social

 

Starting this week, we will take an occasional walk down memory lane to re-visit our immensely successful industry event BrightEdge Share 11. The event featured amazing thought-leadership from the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe and Gap. Much of the content dealt with the fast-changing nature of digital marketing which should strike a chord with marketers trying to make sense of the changes in user behavior and the resulting response by companies like Google, Facebook and Bing.  Every other week, I'll share a couple of sessions from the heavy-weights at Share 11 including:  

 

Jim Yu's keynote on the future of digital marketing

The keynote by our CEO Jim Yu discusses the trends in digital marketing that call for an integrated approach to managing sites, search and social media. Jim talks about the tectonic shifts in search, the phenomenal rise of social signals, and how these present opportunities for marketers. Personally, I find the keynote quite prophetic given the recent spate of search engine algorithm changes like Google's Search, Plus Your World and introduction of Google+ Local. Hope you find this keynote useful. If you do, please share using the buttons below!  

Here is an update about our participation as a Golf Sponsor at SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 5 and 6, 2012. As promised in the title, this post is in pictures and words are used only sparingly to describe the said pictures!  

Pre-event networking event Meet & Greet sponsored by BrightEdge

Clearly, there was a lot of networking

'Twas a fun evening hanging out with SEO leaders

   

Never was a box for storing business cards so classy!

A well-deserved ocean-side dinner at sunset

  

Great Activity At BrightEdge Booth

We promised lots of demos and we kept our word

Our booth was quite popular, evidently!

Yes, we DID say 'optimize your laptop'!

These innocently looking chargers got a lot of attention....

   ....and strong endorsements!

   

A proud Cliff Karklin of Fathom celebrates his victory in the Great MacBook Air give-away

  

Customer Dinner With Who's Who Of SEO

Dinner with 100+ SEO leaders in our customer community

We are at SMX Advanced this week on June 5 and 6, 2012. We are excited to rub shoulders with some of the leading minds in search marketing and technology. We are a Gold Sponsor and are proud to be associated with one of the most stellar events in the search space. As always, SMX features a star-studded lineup of search marketing visionaries including Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google and Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President of Bing’s Search Program Management team. See the complete agenda here – agenda for SMX Advanced at Seattle on June 5-6. Don’t miss this event! 

Come visit us at Booth 18 – get to know us better!

While you are at SMX, we welcome you to visit us at Booth 18. Whether you are a BrightEdge customer or a search marketing professional looking for more information about BrightEdge S3 or simply want to say hello to our cheerful team, please swing by. We are happy to walk you through our solution and/or answer any questions you may have about our platform and company. If you need additional information you'd like to read at leisure or share with your teams, we have tons of resources you can take back with you. You may even take a shiny MacBook Air back with you - we are giving away two MacBook Airs in a raffle. You can register at our booth to enter this raffle. Good luck! Don’t miss the SMX Meet-and-Greet networking event

We are a proud sponsor of the SMX Meet-and-Greet event on June 4 between 6 PM and 7:30 PM at Bell Harbor’s Rooftop Plaza. This is a great opportunity to connect with fellow attendees, speakers and guests in a very informal setting. Apart from the networking aspect, an evening at the Rooftop Plaza is a great place to get breathtaking views of Seattle by the bay. We hope to see you, meet you, and greet you at the SMX Meet-and-Greet! Birds-of-a-Feather - "Boosting Organic Search via Social" We are excited to host the Birds-of-a-Feather during lunch on Tuesday, June 5 between 12:15 and 1:45 PM at Table 14. We all know that search is becoming more social. Based on conversations with our 2000+ brand customers, partnerships with Twitter and Facebook, and our own market research, responding to this trend i.e. driving SEO using social is a huge priority for search marketers. We have shown significant thought-leadership in this area and we are happy to share best practices and case studies. We would love to talk to you at this event and welcome you to join this interactive discussion. Again, we are very excited to be at SMX Advanced and interacting with the search marketing community. We hope to see you in Seattle soon!

Google released an algorithm change, called the Penguin Update, during the week of April 24th, 2012. With Penguin, Google intends to reduce the rank of “web spam” and increase that of high-quality content. It penalizes sites that violate Google’s search engine guidelines while encouraging web sites to create content that matters to users. The question on everyone’s mind is how it impacts SEO.   The reputed interactive agency Rosetta examined the SEO performance of 35 of their top clients using BrightEdge S3 (pre-, during and post- Penguin). The findings from this exercise are in this insightful study - Search Engine Marketing: Google Penguin Review.   We like this study above anything else we have seen on the impact of Penguin because:

1. It is based on broad and deep data – Rosetta looked at thousands of keywords for 35 top brands, and analyzed rank, URL structures, back link profiles and competitor performance to come up with their conclusions.
2. It attempts to isolate the impact of Penguin – Measuring what Penguin does to SEO is not easy due to the sheer number of SEO moving parts. Rosetta looked at SEO performance before, during and after the Google Penguin update while also tracking how multiple variables (backlinks, competitions and domain URLs, among others) changed through the Google Penguin update.

We are proud to see a top interactive agency like Rosetta using BrightEdge S3 data to produce such significant research and improve marketing results for some of the top brands in the world!   If you found this post helpful, please feel free to share using the buttons below. Thank you!

A couple of weeks ago, we were in sunny Florida for the Search Insider Summit 2012, exchanging notes with the best brains in search marketing. We had the opportunity to talk about how our customers are using Twitter to get real results. Brad Mattick, our VP of Marketing, did the presentation and the session was quite a hit. On popular demand, we are making the video of his session available for your viewing pleasure! For those of you following our blog, you'll notice that we covered these stories in detail in an earlier post -  Tiny Prints and Feeding America boost rank and traffic with Twitter. The session is not a straight-up rehash of these posts - while Brad does touch upon these success stories, he also gives more context on how it reflects the changing nature of search in general. You'll hear us talk more about that (and often)!   

The million-dollar question - does social media matter in marketing?

The world of social media saw a huge milestone this week - Facebook hit 900 million monthly users. Combine that with 340 millions Tweets per day, 1.6 billion daily Twitter search queries and billions of users across other networks and you end up with a massive opportunity for marketers. Marketers have been quick to respond by engaging users across  these networks but questions about the impact of social media persist. Does social media activity improve marketing results? If yes, how and how much? How can I show ROI on social media efforts? How can I integrate social media campaigns with everything else in marketing, including search? Read this post for answers!   Let’s first dispense with the fundamental question - does social media make a difference to marketing?  

Yes, social media makes a difference - ask Tiny Prints and Feeding America!

You may have seen the MediaPost coverage of the joint study by BrighteEdge and Twitter about Tiny Prints' 47% increase in organic search rankings and Feeding America's 2.5X bump in traffic, both using Twitter. Clearly, social media has an impact and we'll look at best practices to get the most out of social, specifically Twitter, in this post. We will also look at the specific BrightEdge tools that helped Tiny Prints and Feeding America make use Twitter to get real results. 

Many thanks to Twitter for working with us on this study, and to Tiny Prints and Feeding America's marketing agency Performics for choosing to partner with us and giving us insight into their sophisticated marketing capabilities!

Apply basic marketing principles to succeed with Twitter

The Tiny Prints and Feeding America success stories highlight the power of marketing ‘basics’. Nothing is rocket science here and you’ll agree when you see the pillars of their success below:

• Set targeted goals for Twitter activity
• Identify how Twitter will drive rank, traffic
• Uncover page and keyword opportunities
• Deliver the right message through Tweets

 Note: The leading agency Performics manages digital marketing for Feeding America. All the actions and decisions related to Feeding America described below were taken by Performics.

Step 1 - Set targeted goals for Twitter activity

Both TinyPrints and Feeding America were clear about the role of Twitter in marketing. Tiny Prints pursued higher organic rank Tiny Prints wanted to bridge the gap between search and social. It translated this vision-like statement into the specific goal of improving rank for targeted pages and keywords, using Twitter. Conversion rates increased exponentially with rank  and using Twitter to improve rankings  not only made business sense but also helped measure the return on Twitter activity.   Feeding America aimed for greater traffic through Tweets Feeding America, on the other hand, eyed higher traffic because it historically led to greater conversions (donations and volunteer signups). Feeding America’s goal was specific - improve traffic for pages oriented towards specific keywords/trending Tweets.  

Step 2 - Identify how Twitter will drive rank, traffic

Tiny Prints recognized that sharing pages through Twitter is good for SEO and they were clear about the chain of events that would potentially lead to higher rankings for targeted pages and keywords:

• Tiny Prints would engage users by Tweeting relevant content (see next section) related to its pages and keywords
• User engagement would trigger social sharing through Tweets and Re-tweets
• The sharing would result in higher rankings for those pages and keywords

Feeding America believed Twitter sharing leads to direct site traffic Feeding America had a similar idea of using Twitter engagement to achieve its goals. The difference was that Feeding America had an eye on site visits directly through Tweets and not necessarily through search engines.  

Step 3 - Uncover page and keyword opportunities

TinyPrints and Feeding America both recognized that engaging users through Tweets presented opportunities. They also understood that discovering these opportunities amounted to identifying the site pages and keywords that influenced the content of the Tweets. However, they had a different approach towards identifying opportunities. Tiny Prints scanned competition to uncover opportunities and they uncovered opportunities through competitive analysis :

• It zoomed in on pages which could potentially outrank competition through Twitter activity for the pages, using BrightEdge S3.
• The key was to look for those pages which were similar to competitor pages in every way aspect except the number of Tweets.
• The example below shows the West Virginia Mountaineers merchandise page on the sports merchandise site Fans Edge. This page is ranked 10 on Google and is similar in most respects to the pages ranking 1 through 9 (not shown). However, it has no Tweets and increasing Tweets for this page presents an opportunity.

Feeding America looked towards user interest for new opportunities Feeding America saw opportunity in discovering topics that matter to users and Tweeting about them:

• It sought to identify the hunger-related topics that mattered to its users and for which it has high-quality site content.
• It used the Twitter Keyword Volume tool in BrightEdge S3 to identify trending Tweets containing keywords that Feeding America tracked.
• The Twitter Keyword Volume tool also automatically identified pages on Feeding America's site that were already oriented towards the trending topics.
• Now, Feeding America knew the topics that mattered to its audience as well as the pages on its site which were right for promoting on Twitter.

Step 4 - Deliver the right message through Tweets

The key outcome of the previous step for both Tiny Prints and Feeding America was knowing which pages could be promoted on Twitter and the keywords that mapped to these pages. The next step was logical - reach out to users through Tweets which contained the following elements:

• Target keywords or keywords related to trending Tweets (Feeding America)
• The URL of page which was related to these keywords

Results

The Twitter activity achieved the desired results for Tiny Prints and Feeding America.   Tiny Prints saw a 300% rise in user engagement which, in turn, improved the average rank across keywords for targeted pages by 47%. This was over a four week period. Feeding America's users responded positively to the Tweets since the content of the Tweets ( keywords and pages) matched their interests. This resulted in a 2.5X improvement in traffic for the pages mentioned in the Tweets.

Needless to say...

Here are some guiding principles that Tiny Prints and Feeding America religiously followed - very basic but so critical to their success that calling them out is worth it. Let data be your guide as both companies took a close look at data at every step of the way:

• Tiny Prints scanned the competitive environment to identify pages which stood a good chance of outranking competition through Twitter activity.
• Feeding America took a close look at their users to identify topics/keywords that were relevant to them as well  its own cause.
• Both companies kept  a close watch on the correlation between their Twitter activity and rankings/traffic.

Use technology to enable you Technology is not the be-all end-all of digital marketing. But it does enable you when it presents the right insight - so you can spend time on making the right decisions driven by data without relying on guesswork.

• Tiny Prints used BrightEdge S3’s competitive intelligence capabilities to identify pages that could benefit from Twitter.
• Feeding America used Twitter Keyword Volume tool within BrightEdge S3 to identify trending Tweets and spot the best pages oriented towards those keywords.
• Both used BrightEdge S3 for monitoring success of their efforts by correlating Tweets with rankings (see chart below) and traffic.

Communicate and collaborate Tiny Prints stated what's in the hearts and minds of most digital marketing organizations -  reaching that elusive integrated marketing utopia. Whether or not this is a stated goal for you, there are synergies in making search and social work together. If you want to explore these synergies, close cooperation between the two teams is essential.  

Summary

Twitter can make a huge difference to marketing. Tiny Prints and Feeding America proved it by achieving a 47% increase in average ranking for targeted pages and keywords, and a 2.5X increase in traffic respectively. It takes careful planning, meticulous execution, reliance on data and close cooperation to get these results. Hope you found this post useful!  

Hot on the heels of receiving our recent patent for the unique competitive analysis technology BrightEdge Share of Voice, we are proud to announce that BrightEdge is now part of the highly-selective Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. We are the only SEO company in this exclusive club, and we are honored and humbled to be recognized by Facebook for our leadership, and unique search and social marketing applicatons (hence, the lens on 'Apps' in badge above).  In this post, we will explain what the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) is all about, why we were selected and how our customers will benefit.  

What is the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Program?

• Facebook aims to help brands succeed in social marketing - The ultimate goal of the Facebook® PMD Program is to help brands get higher return from social marketing. Facebook seeks to enable brands in their efforts to develop social campaign strategies, execute them, and measure and boost results in a data-driven manner.
• Connecting brands with marketing leaders is key - Facebook® PMD Program identifies experts in social marketing and connects brands with them so that brands can lean on their expertise and make social marketing work for them. Through a rigorous selection process, Facebook identified experts proven to deliver solutions in Facebook Page Management, Ad Management, Apps and Insights.
• Facebook® PMD Program enables members - An integral part of the Facebook® PMD Program is to provide members with exclusive access to Facebook APIs/interfaces. Access to this technology will help them develop social marketing solutions that have wide adoption while also meeting specific needs of industries, markets and geographies.
• Close partnership with Facebook lies at the heart of the program - Facebook® PMD Program membership is not just about API access. It signifies a collaborative relationship with Facebook to ensure that brands always have access to the latest technologies as social marketing evolves. In our case, program membership open a new chapter in our already strong ties with Facebook - Facebook uses BrightEdge S3 for SEO, and our innovative marketing solutions BrightEdge Facebook® Social SEO and BrightEdge SocialSite Audit were built in collaboration with Facebook.

Why were we chosen to be a part of this program?

• Recognition of our leadership - BrightEdge is the only SEO company to be a part of the Facebook® PMD Program. Membership in this program is a recognition of our leadership, with the first ever patent in SEO for BrightEdge Share of Voice, $12.6M in series C financing, opening of global office locations, and 400% revenue growth in 2011.
• First to tie SEO and Facebook - We were the first company to address the increasingly social nature of search. With BrightEdge Facebook® Social SEO, we gave brands visibility into the impact of Facebook® Shares and Likes on SEO(shown below), for themselves and competition. We also helped brands boost rankings and traffic for their Facebook® pages through detailed recommendations on optimizing their Facebook pages. We are proud to share that we built these technologies in partnership with Facebook. Learn more about managing search and social together in the white paper jointly published by BrightEdge and Facebook - ‘Facebook for Social SEO - Best practices to drive organic search performance with Facebook’.

• First to enable Open Graph compliance - We recognized early on that complying with Facebook Open Graph guidelines presented a huge opportunity for driving website traffic and conversions through social sharing on Facebook. BrightEdge SocialSite Audit helps marketers easily comply with Open Graph best practices by assessing compliance for entire sites including all pages and page templates (shown below), prioritizing list of issues to address based on the value of impacted pages and ensuring compliance on an ongoing basis.

 

 

What does this mean for our customers?

At the cost of being repetitive, we’d like to reiterate that commitment to customer success is our core value. The litmus test of everything we do and achieve is whether it has a real impact on our customers. We are excited about being part of the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer Program because we firmly believe that it delivers real business results to our customers.

• Innovations that meet your evolving needs - The world of search and social marketing changes rapidly. Being part of a program led by a marketing pioneer like Facebook ensures that we will have a pulse on the shifts in social marketing. More importantly, the membership guarantees a close partnership with Facebook and access to the technologies that address your evolving needs in this area. Know that our Program membership will only make our existing Social and Social SEO solutions even stronger while opening the door for more such innovations.
• Assurance that you partner with the proven leader in SEO - Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer Program membership requires a rigorous selection process to establish expertise in digital marketing as well as thought leadership. Being anointed by Facebook is a huge deal and it really speaks to our stellar record and our ability to deliver digital marketing solutions that help our customers succeed, now and in future!

 

Big news at BrightEdge last week – we were issued our first patent by the United States Patent Office for our immensely popular SEO competitive intelligence technology BrightEdge Share of Voice. The patent is called "Operationalizing Search Engine Optimization" and grants BrightEdge the ability to use its unique method for  measuring Share of Voice in search engine rankings. You probably saw coverage of the BrightEdge patent news from our friend Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost and are wondering what BrightEdge Share of Voice is, why it matters to marketers and why we patented it. Read on to learn more!

BrightEdge Share of Voice is the market share of search

BrightEdge Share of Voice is the market share of search. It tells you how you stack up against your top competitors when it comes to occupying search real estate. BrightEdge Share of Voice is calculated using a proprietary algorithm that factors in variables such as ranking and number of keywords ranked, among others.The chart below shows the BrightEdge Share of Voice for our website www.brightedge.com against our top competitors on Google. 

BrightEdge Share of Voice gives you the most insightful competitive intel

While the math behind BrightEdge Share of Voice is definitely innovative, it's the stunning insight into competitive performance and strategies that makes it one of the most powerful and popular tools in our customers' SEO playbook.  

• Discover who you compete with - Most customers track a handful of known competitors. But it is common that there are other players eating into SERPs without their knowledge. BrightEdge Share of Voice ensures you don’t overlook or miss any competitors by showing you the search share for all the top competitors, including those you don’t track or are not aware of. In the chart above, the good news is that www.brightedge.com does have the maximum Share of Voice for brand terms, which is expected. However, it is obvious that our website is competing with sites such as www.yoname.com and www.bizreport.com. These were not on our radar before we ran the BrightEdge Share of Voice report and it was quite a revelation to see the entire competitive landscape.

• Get granular and segment competition - Companies have different competitors for different products, product categories, services, brands and geographies. BrightEdge Share of Voice discovers exactly who you compete with for each of your keywords and keyword groups, which most marketers map on to specific offerings, brands and geographies. The previous chart measures the Share of Voice for our keyword group ‘Branded’ which consists of brand-related keywords such as 'brightedge', 'bright edge', 'brightedge s3', 's3', 'birhgtedge', 'Sites.Search.Social', 'Sites Search Social'.

• Get deep insight into competition's SEO strategies - BrightEdge Share of Voice allows marketers to dig deeper into  SEO strategies of all your competitors because it collects detailed info on the pages that they are ranking for. How are their on-page optimizations? What is their backlink strategy? What other keywords are they ranking on? BrightEdge Share of Voice gives you all the answers.

• Take real action to outrank competition - Discovering who you compete across products, geographies and brands is great. Knowing how they manage SEO is even better. Acting on this intel to win is, to quote a cliche, priceless! With BrightEdge S3, marketers can translate competitive intelligence into actions that leads to results by viewing recommendations, implementing them using powerful workflow and automatically tracking performance in real-time.

To net it all out, Share of Voice tells you who your competition is for each keyword and keyword group, calculates your search share against them and gives you unprecedented insight into their SEO strategies. Share of Voice is like the market share of search, on steroids.  

Why did we patent it?

We are fortunate to be the global leader in enterprise SEO, with over 2000 brands using  BrightEdge S3 to win at SEO. A large part of our success is due to our technology leadership and innovation. BrightEdge Share of Voice is one of the most popular and powerful innovations in the  platform. Our customers can be assured that, with our patented technology, they have the edge to win at search engine optimization. In addition, patenting BrightEdge Share of Voice educates the market on what Share of Voice in SEO really means and helps marketers see through the layers of jargon when the term 'Share of Voice' is used in this context.