8%
increase in CTR
15%
increase in referred traffic
THE PROBLEM
As content marketing becomes more important for generating organic traffic, it becomes more important to have a well-defined process for identifying themes, producing content, repurposing content and most importantly measuring the overall gains from multiple channels.
THE SOLUTION
Ali MacDonald, Content Marketing Manager at Seagate approaches content marketing like this:
1) Identify themes
2) Perform keyword research
3) Develop a content plan
4) Create content
5) Measure progress
For MacDonald, the content plan in step 3 includes the marketing objective, the media asset, and the key performance metric (KPI) to measure the performance.
Tracking in BrightEdge
THE RESULTS
The BrightEdge report captures the dramatic improvement in ranked keywords from 5 to over 32, a 6- fold increase. In addition, the volume and quality of traffic was high with a 15% increase on referred traffic on that topic with a 20% increase in new visitor traffic. The clickthrough rate on the calls to action increased 8% and the campaign was regarded as success by management.
BrightEdge has been huge for us, very helpful.
How Adobe Won 66% Share of SEO Voice
B2B software maker took a bigger slice of the organic traffic pie
8%
growth in organic, non-branded traffic
63%
of organic traffic driven from new pages
THE PROBLEM
A few years back, Adobe found that overall organic traffic to their website for non-branded keywords was very low. They had one product page with all of their features on it (more than 30 of them), but no detailed features page. Though the content was completely relevant, Google was unable to apply one theme to the page, which resulted in low or no rankings for any one specific keyword.
THE SOLUTION
Kirill Kronrod, Senior Global SEO Manager at Adobe, was tasked with figuring out how to improve overall organic traffic to the website from non-branded keywords. With so many features, the existing page he had was quite long and very dense. He decided that he would run a pilot creating 15 individual pages for 15 of the features. Each of these pages was specific to not only one feature, but also to one of the non-branded keywords they wanted to rank for. He found these keywords through his analytics platform, Google Webmaster Tools, and the BrightEdge SEO platform. He used BrightEdge’s Share of Voice report to see how his test performed, not only in regard to traffic gain, but also to see if and how Adobe was able to capture a larger slice of the pie from its competitors.
THE RESULTS
In the first year, organic traffic for non-branded keywords grew 8% along with improvement in conversions. Adobe then rolled out individual feature pages for the remaining product features and now 63% of all non-brand organic traffic is attributed to the new individual feature pages. Additionally, the Share of Voice report from BrightEdge now shows that Adobe claims about 66% of the traffic from those non-branded keywords, meaning the 5 competitors they’re tracking through BrightEdge only account for the remaining 34% of volume.
BrightEdge Share of Voice report shows for our set of competitors that we identified... how we were able to establish a really big dominance on non-brand optimization and, based on the findings, how we can expand.
Adobe Case Study 1
Groupon Finds Up to 60% of Direct Traffic Actually Search
Gene McKenna, Director of Search, Groupon does groundbreaking study by deindexing site temporarily
51%
of visitors come from search
75%
of IE traffic misreported
THE PROBLEM
Understanding what traffic came from what channel is easier in digital marketing than it ever was in offline marketing. Digital marketers make rational decisions on the success and failure of campaigns and what to do with the budget based on reliable information from their web analytics tools. But what if the reporting in two of the largest online channels is less reliable than everyone thought? What if 60% of direct traffic which is usually attributed to PR, social, offline, and brand, is actually traffic from search engines with the domain referrer stripped off? That would mean that search’s contribution would be undercounted.
THE SOLUTION
Gene McKenna, director of search at Groupon, set out to answer this question and was willing to take drastic action. His hypothesis was this: If referrers are 100% accurate for direct traffic, then turning off the search traffic by setting a de-indexing command for the whole site would have no impact on direct traffic.
THE RESULTS
What McKenna found was that direct traffic on interior pages dipped in a highly correlated way with the search engine traffic dip. If direct and search traffic were equal, for every 10 search visitors that were lost after de-indexing, 6 direct visitors were lost also. He found that the effect was more pronounced on interior pages with longer URLs and up to 75% of some Internet Explorer browser search traffic was reported as direct. That means that surveys like BrightEdge’s Channel Performance white paper, which found 51% of visitors coming from search (excluding direct as a channel), is still understating the proportion that comes from search engines. Both research studies confirm the significant opportunity most companies have to increase the business value they derive from search traffic. The decreased reliability of query and referrer information makes having an SEO platform more important than ever.
The referrer is a weak link in SEO reporting.
Groupon Case Study
Epicor Overcomes Penguin Penalty
Dawn Olsen uses BrightEdge to lead campaign to lift Google manual penalty
23%
jump in organic traffic
3x
increase in competitive share
Epicor Overcomes Penguin Penalty
Dawn Olsen uses BrightEdge to lead campaign to lift Google manual penalty
THE PROBLEM
In June of 2013 Epicor Software found that their site had been deindexed and that their organic traffic from Google had dropped over 90%. Most sites get over 53% of their traffic from organic search and over 80% of that traffic is from Google. A significant source of Epicor’s traffic and revenue had been impacted.
THE SOLUTION
Dawna Olsen, Sr. Director of Corporate Marketing at Epicor started researching the problem. First she looked at her BrightEdge dashboards and pinpointed the day the traffic dropped. After considering possibilities, including a black hat link attack on their China site, Dawna concluded that she had been hit and hit hard with a Google Penguin penalty. She also accessed the backlink database and started reviewing her external link quantity and quality and saw that she had a very high number of links from certain affiliate partners. She examined the links and could see that the quantity per partner was too high and that her affiliates looked like the kind of link farms that Google was punishing with Penguin. She also found problematic footer links that needed to be no-followed. She disavowed unwanted links. She also contacted her affiliate partners and instructed them to take down most of the links and increase the diversity of anchor text they were using. They did so, and one month later she submitted a reconsideration appeal to Google and her penalty was lifted.
THE RESULTS
BrightEdge reports showed rapid organic traffic improvements. Organic traffic jumped 23% and Epicor commanded a 3X increase in share of voice with its competitors. Critical keywords moved from not ranked to Position #8. Within specific key geographies, top keywords went from Rank #43 to Position #3. In this case, having the right tools translated into recovering substantial lost traffic and revenue.
Get the right tools in place... it makes a difference and helps you make informed decisions
Epicor Case Study
3M Captures $300,000 in Organic Value YOY
Craig Berdie, Global Search Marketing Manager, 3M, shows huge potential of SEO across product lines
20%
growth in organic traffic
THE PROBLEM
In 2010, 3M needed to figure out how to effectively manage SEO across 5 major businesses each with multiple divisions (60 in all) in 100 countries and totaling 6000 websites. 45% of 3M’s traffic came from organic sources, so this was a huge undertaking which was not as simple as replicating what worked in the United States across all of the other countries.
THE SOLUTION
Craig Berdie, Global Search Marketing Manager at 3M, was up to the challenge of solving this problem. He knew there were a few things that were already going to be an uphill battle: inconsistency between countries, existing websites were created without SEO consideration, the product set evolves at 35% per year, and a lot of content was locked up in PDFs. To figure out how markets varied, Craig did a lot of landing page testing. He figured out that by testing, he could let the numbers speak and each market would find itself winning pages. To address website changes, he put together an "SEO council" of 5 individuals to start which included IT, data management, UI/UX, and content writers. Using BrightEdge, Craig was able to discover high value keywords to track, develop landing pages around those keywords, and measure the rise in rank. Craig and his team were able to stitch together organic traffic data from analytics with conversion data which ultimately allowed them to calculate how much each organic click was worth.
THE RESULTS
BrightEdge reports showed that 3M experienced large gains in organic traffic for several years. Specifically, they saw 20% growth in organic traffic YoY for 3 consecutive years. That traffic equates to an incremental $25,000 a month in business value for a single business unit on a single topic. That proof, though small in absolute terms, will be significant when rolled out across more of the thousands of products at 3M.
The opportunity to license BrightEdge has been huge for us, very helpful
3M Case Study
How Time Increased Key Search Traffic Over 45%
Page 1 ranking keyword count improved from 620 to 75, leading to a 34% increase in traffic and revenue
3-4
months for SEO success
THE PROBLEM
Time Inc. has 95 iconic media brands that serve 81 million online visitors every month who generate ad inventory they sell to advertisers. Time’s content development effort is vast, varied and complex, so coordinating SEO efforts is extremely difficult. Time’s SEOs face duplicate content, lack of thematic grouping by keyword, non-optimal internal links, and significant crawl and redirect errors. The holidays present a significant opportunity for a media company, but also create narrow time bands in which to enhance and optimize the site for SEO. Travel and Leisure and 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas topics represent 9.7 million+ search query volume.
THE SOLUTION
Binti Pawa, Head of SEO for Time Inc.'s Affluent Media Group, works on such brands as Travel + Leisure and Food & Wine, where she is responsible for leading, developing, and integrating SEO and content strategies. Pawa approached the holiday opportunity by doing a site audit, creating a keyword content model, and using the keyword and content features of the BrightEdge platform. In addition, Pawa resolved over 500 crawl errors. She also executed the kind of fundamental internal link and anchor text recommendations provided by the On-Page Recommendations of the platform. Sitemaps were improved, rich snippets were added, and duplicate landing pages were removed. After doing all the technical work, she found her best keyword opportunities and built content around it. And the results were stunning.
THE RESULTS
In the 4th of July season Time improved its Page 1 Food & Wine 4th of July rankings from 2 keywords to 7, which led to a 30% gain in organic traffic vs. 1 year earlier. Overall Food & Wine Page 1 ranking keyword count improved from 620 to 757, which produced a 34% increase in traffic and ad inventory. Travel and Leisure keywords ranking and traffic increased 45%. Pawa found that tracking, tools, timing, and planning are critical to capture the significant seasonal search volume and that 3-4 months is the appropriate lead time required for SEO success.
Keywords are still important. You have to know what keywords you want to go after. We did so much research and took so many approaches and BrightEdge has really helped us do that and monitor our success”
Time Inc Case Study
20%
increase in overall traffic
THE PROBLEM
Seagate is the premier hard drive and storage technology leader in the world and where Ali MacDonald is in charge of content marketing. As content marketing becomes more important for generating organic traffic, it becomes more critical to have a well-defined process for identifying themes, producing content, repurposing content, mapping to the customer journey, and, most importantly, measuring the overall gains from multiple channels.
THE SOLUTION
“SEO is important for Seagate because one of the ways that we explain to people what Seagate does is through creating great content that they’re looking for. Through SEO we help our customers find that content by understanding what their behavior is, how they search for things, and making sure that it’s easy to find on the website. One of the great things about BrightEdge is the fact that they integrate our existing analytics, so we can actually tie the dashboards that we have in BrightEdge back to the real data that we’re pulling out for other sources and other verticals in our markets.”
THE RESULTS
“We’re focused on making sure that we’re providing the right content and information to the customer and through our partners at every level of our journey - from awareness to loyalty. We’ve seen a 20% increase in our overall traffic growth, and we’re seeing consistently steady increase in new visits to the site.”
We actually switched from a competitor of BrightEdge because of their advanced capability and technologies.
Seagate Case Study - Traffic
Cabela's Masters Content Performance Marketing and Organic Traffic
Jesse Farley leveraged BrightEdge for analytics and performance and elevated SEO as well as his function
THE PROBLEM
Cabela’s is a national physical and online retailer of hunting, fishing, and camping gear. Jesse Farley, Cabela's online marketing strategist, wants to develop and deploy content that guides customers through their journey to purchase and the user experience they sought. With a large catalog of products, Cabela’s needs to prioritize where to put the content marketing focus to maximize results.
THE SOLUTION
“At the end of the day it’s going to be sales, what drives the dollar. We leverage the BrightEdge platform to look at all of the steps to get to that sale from keyword placement to SERP results, to traffic, and then to sales.
The Data Cube has been phenomenal. It allows us to look at where are we in the mix, where we stack up against our competitors, and informs decisions on, frankly, getting ahead of them.
BrightEdge has been really good at providing us with the statistical data that allows us to drive the business forward. Some of our KPIs are our rankings, traffic and then, ultimately, sales.” See Jesse's Cabela's Testimonial video.
THE RESULTS
“Using BrightEdge allowed us to think outside of ourselves. We want to be able to create unique experiences for our customers that make them feel comfortable and focused in the content they’re consuming.
"BrightEdge enables us to show our executive leadership what we can do and put the metrics behind that that they didn’t necessarily think we would have. So, they hear content marketing and they don’t necessarily know how to monetize that and BrightEdge has allowed us to help get that into their minds. With the BrightEdge platform we’ve been able to communicate the effectiveness of content marketing from the C-Suite up to the board of directors," says Jesse Farley.
"The BrightEdge platform has allowed me to take basically one analyst and treat them as five. It condenses it all into one area to where we can ask the same questions and give the same answers from one platform.”
BrightEdge has given me the ability to elevate not only my program but my career. I’ve been able to really demonstrate to the enterprise how powerful content marketing can be.”
Cabelas Case Study
AIS Media Secures Local 3-Pack & Grows Monthly Visitors 60% for Client
Over 2 year, FUNtastic Dental increased page-one results by 175% with the help of AIS Media and Brightedge
60%
increase in organic traffic
175%
increase in page one results
THE PROBLEM
Proud of his website, Dr. Stella wanted to dramatically increase the volume of new patients at his Long Beach, CA practice. Dr. Stella recognized that parents today primarily use search engines to research and find new doctors. However, after the new website was built in 2014, FUNtasticDental.com was receiving virtually no traffic from search engines. So, Dr. Stella hired AIS Media because they use BrightEdge as an enterprise-level tool to develop a comprehensive SEO plan.
THE SOLUTION
AIS Media Inc. did a thorough audit of FUNtastic’s existing website with Data Cube and identified which pages would be most useful for their defined group of 50 high-converting keywords through Page Reporting. They also utilized Recommendations to spot areas of weak optimization and further enhance FUNtastic’s visibility in page-1 search engine results pages. They implemented the on-page optimizations and utilized the target keywords and backlinks effectively.
THE RESULTS
Between quarter 2 of 2014 and quarter 1 of 2016, the presence of FUNtastic Dental increased by 175% in page-1 results on Google SERPs for high-converting keywords.
They grew from 8 keywords on page 1 and 250 visitors from organic before BrightEdge to 22 keywords on page-1 and over 400 visitors today. This page-1 keyword growth provided FUNtastic Dental an opportunity to expand its practice to include an orthodontics office.
The BrightEdge Universal listing report confirms the team secured a Google page-1, blended rank 1 in the prized Google Local 3-Pack position for the highly-desirable target keyword “pediatric dentist,” beating out many established competitors.
BrightEdge makes it easy to optimize client sites to increase results. We are able to provide actionable steps to our team and prove the results to our clients.
FUNtastic Case Study
Direct Agents Helps Client Recover after Google Pigeon Update
Overcoming Pigeon penalty and using BrightEdge's Data Cube to discover keyword trends made a huge difference in generating organic results
157%
increase in organic rankings
Direct Agents Helps Client Increase Organic Rankings 157%
Overcoming Pigeon penalty and Brightedge's Data Cube to discover keyword trends made a huge difference in generating organic results
THE PROBLEM
In July 2014 a major North American transportation company’s site was negatively impacted by Google’s Pigeon update, which resulted in the loss of the majority of their non-brand organic rankings. Organic traffic and revenue plummeted year over year as a result. Direct Agents, supported by the BrightEdge platform, took over this company’s SEO campaign in early May 2015 to help regain the lost rankings, traffic, and revenue.
THE SOLUTION
The loss of sales, rankings, and traffic was also attributed to the increased organic efforts of OTAs (Online Travel Agents) which were pushing down the client’s site in valuable Search Engine Results Pages. A large focus needed to be placed on detail-specific pages that were very relevant to the brand’s offering and had a high search intent, but were also not going to automatically lose out to OTAs.
The idea was to find niche terms that had enough combined search volume to generate highly qualified organic traffic that could and would convert to counteract the loss that the client had seen prior to Direct Agent’s SEO engagement. With the use of BrightEdge’s Data Cube, they performed a Keyword Gap Analysis and identified underutilized keywords on which competitors were ranking.
THE RESULTS
Direct Agents built out evergreen content around route pages based off of the competitor keyword data. After a few months, they began to see impressive results. Year-over-year organic keyword ranking for the site increased consistently as new pages were optimized for the key route terms, driving significant increases in traffic for those specific pages.
The site gained 242 new organic Page One rankings with a combined monthly search volume of 181,470 and an average increase in rankings of over 157%. Organic traffic for new route pages increased by 679% and revenue increased by 431% between September and April. There was a direct correlation between the amount of organic keywords ranked, their rank increasing over time, the amount of traffic that was brought in, and the revenue generated from it.
Utilizing BrightEdge's Data Cube to discover keyword trends can make a huge difference in generating organic results.