tvura

M Posted 4 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

The rapid and widespread shutdown in response to the COVID pandemic in March 2020 necessitated substantial marketing and operational shifts across industries worldwide. While few organizations were truly prepared to do well what was required, the ones that fared the best, quickly embraced the new reality and monitored the changing market closely. 

The impacts of the pandemic were vast and immediate, but rapidly changing market forces are nothing new. They are typically more limited, affecting only an organization, an industry or a small segment of consumers. Even so, if/when your organization is impacted, many of the competencies required to react effectively to a global pandemic still apply. 

The ability to see and understand what’s happening in the market at any point in time and be able to respond quickly and comprehensively is what we refer to as Global Agility.

Use Search to See and Act on Market Trends

Search is, by far, the largest point of entry to online experiences. According to Imforza, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Beyond its scale and reach, search is uniquely informative. Because it is comprised of consumers’ specific inquiries, requests and interests, it provides direct insight into the consumer’s mindset. Taken in aggregate, search data can uncover both simmering trends and rapid shifts in the market.

Whether it is a global pandemic, a new competitive entry in the marketplace, or a cultural event provoking a change in the zeitgeist, change is always happening. Search provides a window into the changing marketplace as it is happening and while it is still possible to capitalize on an opportunity or head off a threat.

The pace of change and the ability to monitor it through search have created a new market imperative. To respond with agility, companies must:

• See dynamic changes as they happen.
• Plan and optimize budgets using real-time macro trends.
• Identify new opportunities as they emerge.
• Coordinate across channels to capitalize on opportunities.

Global Agility in Practice: Supreme Court Rules Against NCAA

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA cannot limit education-related compensation to student athletes. Agile colleges and universities that benefit from the revenue streams delivered by TV contracts and other sources, will have been monitoring related search trends and preparing contingency plans in anticipation of the outcome.

Now that a market-shifting judgment has been made, these agile institutions will need to rethink their approaches to recruiting, including competition for recruits. They will need to account for how, to whom and for how much they award student-athlete scholarships and if or how raising limits for student-athletes will limit overall scholarship dollars for other students. Most importantly, at this stage, even the savviest, most agile organizations are only forecasting what will happen. Search monitoring will be essential to help them reconcile the market’s response with their expectations. As they better understand the reality of the market shift, it will be essential that the key functions that contribute to athletic programs are on the same page and coordinated in their response.

Centralize Reporting and Response

In order to meet the new market imperative, organizations must develop and maintain a streamlined visual of the market. Search data, like any expansive set of data, require translation to understand the inherent insights.

Understanding and responding to search insights requires organizations to:

• Develop targeted intent models – Define for your organization what intents and search behaviors are important (Informational, navigational, transactional, or specific mindsets that keywords represent) and organize the keywords accordingly to help the organization understand the behaviors happening in the marketplace.
• Centralize data visualization – Agility is attainable by even the largest global organizations, but to even settle on the size and shape of a threat or opportunity, everyone must be following the same map. When everyone has access to the same data visualizations, like the examples shown below, the organization can move quickly to action with a coordinated response across channels. 

Global Agility Webinar: Learn how Intel.com Responded with Agility to the Pandemic

To learn more about how to identify trends that matter and operate with more agility, check out the BrightEdge webinar: Activating with Agility on a Global Scale – How Enterprises Remain Agile in Uncertain Times.

Watch Now

You'll learn:

• How global brands such as Intel leveraged data and insights to pivot and activate quickly.
• How to utilize macro search data to fuel faster and more deliberate omnichannel strategies.
• How to tie your actions to outcomes automatically within the BrightEdge platform.

tvura

M Posted 4 years 9 months ago

t 9 min read

Use Competitive Analysis to Rank Higher in Search Results

Competitive analysis is often overlooked in digital marketing strategies, as search marketers instead focus on keywords and backlinks. Without successful competitor intelligence, however, it will be a challenge to really succeed in the SERPs. For your brand to have a strong digital presence, ranking well on the SERPs is nonnegotiable. 

BrightEdge research has shown that as much as 51% of your traffic arrives through organic search. Customers today are online. They have taken control of the early stages of the purchase process, as they have become the ones who go looking for answers, rather than waiting for salespeople to come to them. This explains why 81% of customers and 94% of B2B buyers will perform searches before making a purchase. 

While many brands set out to employ some of the latest SEO strategies to capture this traffic, they neglect a key part of the puzzle. SEO is a zero-sum game. For you to rise in the rankings, someone else must move down. You cannot just try your best to optimize your material without also taking into account what others do in their own online strategies. To really succeed online, you must be able to outsmart competitors and uncover new opportunities to improve rankings. You can use competitive analysis and competitor intelligence to find new aspects of a strong digital strategy that you might have otherwise overlooked.  

Types of Competitive Intelligence to Employ 

There are two main types of competitive intelligence that you will want to use as you build your digital strategy. The first type of competitive intelligence is done on a large scale. It comprises uncovering your online competitor brands and looking at their keyword targets, rankings, and content strategies. You will look at data that might even help uncover competitors you did not know existed, such as an exclusively online seller that does not compete with you at all in the brick-and-mortar sector. With SEO it’s important to think of a competitor as any entity that ranks higher than you for your essential keywords, whether or not it is an organization you traditionally consider a competitor. 

The second type of competitive analysis will be more granular. As you develop content and optimize it for particular keywords, you will want to look at the pages that already rank highly on the SERPs. With the right insights, you will be able to see what makes this content stand out and rank highly, such as the backlinks going to the content and how often they use the keyword in question. You can then use these insights as you write and optimize your own material, looking for weaknesses in the other content that you can capitalize on to drive your own material higher up on the SERP. 

Both types of competitor intelligence are important in the creation of a successful online strategy. Understanding where competitors are, and how they pursue their SEO strategies, must be considered every step of the way. For more guidance, download the BrightEdge eBook, 4 Proven Steps to Competitive Analysis. 

Putting Keyword Gap Analysis to Work 

Perform large-scale competitive analysis against some of your known competitors. Look at their overall success online. Through the BrightEdge platform, you can obtain this information in the Data Cube score. 

You can then perform keyword gap analysis to see if there are keywords for which they rank well that you do not. Use this information to enhance your tracked keyword groups and get new ideas for your content teams. Take baseline metrics to see how well you rank compared to others on your main keyword groups. Perform high-level analysis to see how well you rank on the keywords that matter the most to your organization. 

On the BrightEdge platform, you can easily use the Share of Voice feature, which allows you to see how much of the digital space you occupy for groups of keywords, as well as how well other websites perform. Look at individual keyword rankings and the securing of rich snippet space, such as Quick Answers. The clearer the picture you can obtain, the better your understanding of your progress will be. Look at the overall strategies of your biggest competitors. 

You want to focus on your online competitors, which means that if you found any new ones while looking at the Share of Voice metrics, make sure they also have a place in your analysis. Look at their content strategies, such as their Quick Answer placements, local 3-pack rankings, and image search placement. This will help you gain a firmer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in their digital efforts, so you can find your own areas to improve. On BrightEdge, this can all be done through the Data Cube. 

Look at the top ten pages ranking for your targeted keywords. Once you have outlined your competitive analysis and you understand the keywords you will target, begin by looking at the top ten pages that rank for these keywords. Look at information such as the backlinks pointing at the pages, where and when the keyword appears, and the quality of the content. Look for gaps that you can use to advance the ranking of your own material. 

Put Competitive Intelligence to Work 

Start by building off the competitive gap analysis. Create high-quality content that fills in the gaps left by competitors. Target your content towards your audience. Remember that competitive intelligence can help you create a superior strategy, but the basic principles of SEO still hold true: your content must be created primarily for those who will consume it. Engagement and traffic will impact how well your content brings in customers, and therefore revenue. 

When you are creating content, your primary goal should be to create interesting and useful content that aligns with the consumer’s search intent. Incorporate essential keywords in a natural and relevant way and be sure on-page SEO – the structural elements of the page are up to snuff. Here is an on-page optimization checklist for additional guidance. Finally, before you publish content it’s important to audit those pages to ensure that they are properly optimized and provide the best performance for the end user. With Google now ranking against technical measures such as page speed and core web vitals, the right content can still perform poorly in the SERP if the page’s technical performance is poor.  

From a competitive standpoint, you will want to ensure that the content and landing pages that you are publishing load faster and provide a better user experience than your competitors. Focusing on technical elements and UX elements of your landing pages, and how they compare to competition, will help your website get a leg up in organic SERPs.  

Use a hybrid approach with your paid search team to boost your visibility in challenging keyword groups. If your keyword gap analysis uncovered keywords that have a high level of importance for your competitors, but the top ten ranking sites have high levels of optimization and you struggle to gain SERP placement against them, incorporate your PPC strategy to maximize your presence. 

Using your PPC and organic channels together in a complementary way will help you get tangible results on a larger, more competitive list of keywords. Like any SEO effort, track your results as you progress with your competitive efforts. Look for improvements in your rankings and traffic, increase your Share of Voice for important keywords and see how this correlates with site revenue. Track spaces where you have overtaken your competitors outside of just rankings as well, such as rich snippets. 

As you create a lasting digital marketing strategy, you must remember that there is more to succeeding in the SERPs than following only standard SEO best practices. You must also consider what your competitors are doing and how you can out-maneuver them. In the competitive space of digital marketing, your success will be limited if you don't incorporate competitive analysis. 

dmcanally

M Posted 4 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

We had a great time hosting our webinar around SERP analysis last week. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, myself, Monique Johnson and Doug Antkowiak discussed how search engine results for a keyword reveal what Google understands about the intent behind the keyword.

Micro-Moments provide an easy framework to quantify what these intents are, and if you organize your keywords in this fashion, it provides you with powerful insights into the type of content audiences are looking for in a given moment. We provided some findings from research on these micro-moments across different industries and demonstrated a simple workflow you can use to create a dashboard for micro-moments in your own industry.
 
There were some great questions that we felt deserved some attention, so I’m going to address those here. 

1. Is there a way of doing this type of research without Data Cube? 

It is certainly possible, but it will require significantly more work and manual effort to filter through results. First, you’ll need a tool to do a mass pull of keywords and variations. This tool will need to show you search volumes as well as the presence of universal results appearing for the keywords.   There are point solutions that can do this, and depending on which one you use, you may need to do multiple pulls and compile keyword lists to get a comprehensive view of the market.

Data Cube understands semantic relationships and how keywords are related, so it eliminates a lot of that manual process. Data Cube also lets you combine filtering to create groups of keywords based on the characteristics appearing in the search result. If you are doing this manually, be sure that as you are pulling keywords, you’re filtering out those that could skew your results. For example, in the webinar, we were looking at school supplies. If you’re looking at keywords manually, you’ll need to scrub out irrelevant terms in your analysis (i.e., “Office supplies”). Once you have this research, you’ll need a place to track against the keywords over time. In the BrightEdge environment, you can create keyword groups and the platform will track the keywords, produce a share of voice analysis on them, and derive traffic and optimization insights automatically. Manually, or using a point solution, you would either need to write a script to repull the data or do it yourself.   

2. Where can I see micro-moments in the BrightEdge platform? 

There are a few ways you can dissect the moments. In the workflow we described, you would create keyword groups based on the universal results for each keyword. For example:

• I want to go moments – Keywords with a local 3 pack 
• I want to know Moments – Keywords with Quick Answers, People Also Ask, Knowledge Graph 
• I want to do Moments – Keywords with videos or images
• I want to buy – Keywords with shopping or carousel results

Once you filter and create a group for these (be sure to name and describe them accordingly), they are available in a number of places in the platform. You can look at share of voice across each moment in Competitive Analysis, individual keyword rankings and performance in Keyword Report, and forecast visibility lifts against each moment in Forecasting. The keyword groups designated to the micro-moments will also be available to you as dashboards via Story Builder. So, depending on how you need to view the data, once the groups are created, you’re able to configure however you need!

3. How could we understand the different moments across different industries?

If you are a BrightEdge customer, the good news is you may very well already have the data to help you do this! You could start with the keywords you’re already tracking and simply create new groups for them arranged by the universal results appearing for each (keywords can live in multiple groups). If you’re starting from scratch, you can begin your research by starting with head terms related to your business. For example, if you are an additive manufacturer, start with a broad term like ‘additive manufacturing’ or even ‘manufacturing’ and begin filtering by universal results to understand the moments that customers in that space are in. Your BrightEdge Customer Success Manager is standing by to help you discover more about the mindsets your customers are in!

4. Is it possible to analyze keywords by “I want to” moments instead of rank?

Absolutely. In fact, you can do this entirely within Data Cube without creating a keyword group. The easiest way to do it is filter by the universal elements that correspond to the moment you are interested in. As we mentioned in the webinar, you can combine filters so you can have multiple universal results represented in your result.

Data Cube will break down which keywords by competition and you can differentiate them by long tail and high value. Furthermore, you have the option of creating a dashboard view of these keywords (in my example, if I wanted a laser focus on “I want to go” moments related to school supplies, I could add them to a dashboard and track volumes over time). In this workflow, we’re not even factoring in where your website ranks. This could be particularly useful if you’re analyzing a new market where you have yet to build content and need to see what kinds of mindsets and moments audiences are in to guide what type of content needs to be created.   

5. For share of voice for micro-moments, can I configure different engines?

Yes! When you create a keyword group out of Data Cube, you’ll have the option to select which search engine (by location) you’d like to use. In fact, you can even use Google’s intent algorithm to discern the moments you want and then use another brands’ search engine to track rankings. You’ll be taken to this screen after you click “Track” which gives you a range of engines that can be tracked.

If your locale and engine you want to track is visible, you’ll be able to see Share of Voice Results for that keyword group.

Micro-moments have been a concept in search for a while, but they are as important as ever when we think about the mindsets behind search. We’re really excited to continue evangelizing them and find new and unique ways to use them to understand customer mindsets. If you’re interested in learning how BrightEdge could help you use search to understand your customers’ mindsets, reach out today to schedule a live demo.

gregalbuto

M Posted 4 years 10 months ago

t 9 min read

Distance learning searches saw record highs in March 2020

Distance learning searches saw a decline beginning in October 2020

Between September 2020 and October 2020, queries about virtual or distance learning saw a steady decline. As it was apparent some schools were remaining closed during the 2020 year or others were going back with new sanitation guidelines for cleaning classrooms, less people were wondering about the virutal learning topic. Below you can see the decrease in searches around the same keywords that saw a surge in March 2020.

So, what are users searching for as it relates to school? Vaccinations. College students and their parents are inquiring about vaccinations for university students. It would benefit all universities to add vaccine-based information to their websites. Below you can see the immediate increase in vaccine-related searches beginning in November 2020.

• Optimized how-to videos and demos on how to fill out application forms, financial aid forms, or how to sign up for courses online
• Virtual hangouts with advisors or counselors

Using video to connect with users and generate traffic and views