The Business Challenge

With hundreds of stores across North America, the beauty retailer's website is its largest store and the foremost prestige beauty destination on the Internet. Despite its online success, the company found its growth potential limited by legacy aspects of the site's design.

The site's structure made it difficult for Google to find and index valuable content beyond the top pages. They needed a way to scalably grow their share of organic search traffic despite the limitations of the site design.

The BrightEdge Solution

The company's marketing team knew it could help Google better find its content by building out internal links. However, doing so in a scalable, sustainable way remained a challenge.

The retailer's senior manager of SEO noted another challenge to internal linking. "We're limited in the real estate we have on the page where we can place links. We needed a way to scale internal linking in an intelligent way across the site."

BrightEdge approached the challenge with Autopilot, a new marketing automation technology that leverages internal links to move more high-value, non-brand keywords to page 1 of search where 75% of search clicks originate.

Intitially, the company's marketing leader voice some doubts about automating internal linking. Would it impact site performance? Would the links be high enough quality? Would it be able to support different markets and different languages?

The team decided to test Autopilot on its shop pages, saying of the implementation, "We had good communication with the BrightEdge technical team throughout the integration process. BrightEdge provided us with testing URLs, profiles and use cases, so that when it came time to release Autopilot, there were no issues."

The Results

Most importantly, the BrightEdge client saw rapid and significant results.

"We saw an increase in keyword visibility immediately. More significantly, we have seen a better conversion rate on pages that include the Autopilot link block and we've measured an increase in average order value on visits that engaged Autopilot."

Despite robust in-house SEO and technology operations, the company notes that Autopilot offered speed, scale and a "secret sauce" that further benefitted them.

"From just a cross-linking point-of-view, we could have built some sort of service back-end feature, but that doesn't get to the secret sauce, which is BrightEdge's Data Cube. That intelligence is where a lot of the value comes from, and it's not something we would have been able to develop. We couldn't put a price on that."

Following its initial success with Autopilot, the company has begun to expand its use of the technology. "We are expanding Autopilot into other product categories and other pages types. There is additional untapped value that we're really excited about."

That untapped value, according to the marketing team, goes beyond linking purely for SEO. "It is something we can enable on different areas of our site for different use cases. For example, I could use Autopilot to cross-link my support pages. There would be SEO value in doing that, but it would also improve my customer experience."

"In addition to measurable SEO value, we have also seen an increase in average order value on visits that engaged Autopilot. I would absolutely recommend Autopilot." - Senior Manager of SEO, Beauty Retailer

If you're interested in learning more about Autopilot, contact your BrightEdge CSM or request a demo of the SEO platform.

BACKGROUND

Windsor Store is a fashion company with a mission to inspire and empower women through clothing and accessories that make them feel beautiful. Prior to leveraging BrightEdge's SEO Platform, Windsor was working with other external solutions for expert SEO recommendations.

"We made a strategic pivot to focus on driving SEO performance. The initial goals centered around building an internal SEO team, launching an SEO platform to monitor performance, and providing data-driven insights," said Angelique Tavizon, Digital Marketing Analyst of SEO at Windsor Store.

"The key to success was not just understanding SEO performance but also: what keywords are driving organic traffic; ranking of focused keywords; what does and doesn't perform; and website page reporting for PLPs and PDPs," she said. They sought to perform keyword research, identify technical SEO insights, and to better understand how the organic channel works in tande, with other digital marketing channels.

SOLUTION

The Windsor marketing team consists of one full-time SEO and an extensive team that assists in SEO production including creative, eCommerce, IT, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing teams, and more. The team leverages the entirety of the BrightEdge SEO Platform including Data Cube, Site Report, Dashboards, ContentIQ, Keyword Reporting, and more as the key SEO tools to analyze organic opportunities in order to increase traffic and exposure to windsorstore.com.

In order to maintain up-to-date content, Windsor built authority through original content including images, and optimized for both the users and the customers at different experiences. They performed extensive keyword research through BrightEdge to maximize organic ranking opportunities and define critical keywords and optimized using technical and strategic tactics. Then, they refined SEO efforts based on team collaborations and keyword analysis in order to optimize in a most detailed effort. They optimized further down to an individual PDP (product detail page) level which can be important for many eCommerce sites to focus on.

The team executed on-page SEO efforts including optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and image SEO for all content including blog posts. For technical SEO efforts, they resolved all technical errors including orphan pages and duplicate pages, and focused on decreasing page load times with their IT department.

Windsor also re-platformed their website to Shopify in early August and focused on Google images where they found an opportunity to help consumers shop via images. The team drove results by updating file format, server location, and leveraging structured data for images. They continued to refine strategies based on the results they received.

RESULTS

Within six months, Windsor Store saw a 55% increase in ranking image results and a 59% increase in page one keyword rankings. Furthermore, they've seen an increase in impressions by more than 73%, improved average rank, and an increase in the overall number of relevant ranking keywords.

The BrightEdge team has been a strategic partner from the start, their data-driven approach helps us act on opportunities enabling us to optimize our website in an efficient manner to drive increased keyword rank, impressions, webiste traffic and ultimately sales through the organic channel."

BACKGROUND

Paycor, an online platform that provides payroll and human resources software to small and medium sized businesses, initially paired up with BrightEdge to gain visibility into content performance, share of voice, and secure recommendations to better strategize for SEO.

Prior to working with BrightEdge, the Paycor marketing team scarcely provided proper attention to SEO. "Now, there are two of us in-house who are working on SEO at least some of the time, but neither of our roles are 100% dedicated to SEO...we're stretched thin," said Leslie Handmaker, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist, at Paycor. Even so, Paycor's small SEO team spends nearly 25 hours each week on both on-page and technical optimization strategies.

SOLUTION

At the beginning of 2020, Paycor completed two sizable site migrations to support their overall master brand strategy. The team leveraged Data Cube to evaluate high-performing content from each Paycor domain and mapped out a plan to rebuild using both new and published content. "Both migrations went well and contributed to our growing domain authority," said Handmaker. Paycor has also deployed Autopilot for SEO on their site to assist in offering users an overall better UX when finding relevant content.

THE RESULTS

Handmaker tracks the number of users who are arriving to the site organically but not signing in to the platform. Paycor uses the term "non sign-in organic traffic" as an in-house metric. Using this metric, her team receives insights into their prospect growth. Currently, the YoY growth for these site visitors are up 308%. The team has also seen a YoY increase of 994% for Net New Organic Leads.

Due to the 2020 pandemic, Paycor saw a jump in search volume and moved into position one for keywords including "sick leave laws" and "hiring process". They also saw a massive shift in search demand for relevant keywords including "coronavirus mask policy" and "rehiring furloughed employees". The content team created content and provided value on the topics to assist employers in their current challenges. "The organic channel is continuing to perform strong and exceed revenue goals," said Handmaker.

BrightEdge has been helpful in creating dashboards that get sent out automatically to internal team members. It saves me time to have it automated. Our writers get in and access Data Cube and it helps inform our content strategy and prioritize what content we create. - Leslie Handmaker, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist, Paycor

BACKGROUND

Established in 1980, Manulife Singapore provides insurance, retirement and wealth management solutions to meet the financial needs of our customers across various stages of their lives. Globally, Manulife Financial Corporation, is a leading global financial services group providing relevant financial, insurance, and wealth and asset management advice and solutions for our individual, group, and institutional customers.

With a digital team in-house, Manulife Singapore was trying to measure how they fared against the competition in the organic space, spending countless hours consolidating data from various SEO tools in vain. A more structured approach would be critical to their success.  

Manulife partnered with BrightEdge to leverage the SEO platform that they could not only track keywords, improve ranking, but also identify opportunities and detect site errors needing technical ­fixes.

“The BrightEdge team provided us with a value-add by not just providing us with a SEO tool, but they would make recommendations based on data. It was like having an additional SEO consultant with the regular sync-ups,” Alvin Lim, Manager, Digital Marketing of Manulife Singapore.

THE SOLUTION

Prior to partnering with BrightEdge, Manulife was “only scratching the surface” when it came to SEO efforts. While they spent time optimizing meta tags, there was minimal optimization beyond that.

Since partnering with BrightEdge, the Manulife Digital Marketing team is able to prioritize specifi­c SEO strategies and works in-house to implement both on-page and technical SEO such as optimizing meta tags. They utilize ContentIQ - pre and post-migration - to prioritize technical SEO fi­xes to advance the site’s overall health. They also emphasize focus around achieving superior content performance.

With BrightEdge, the Manulife team has been able to reduce 75% of their time spent on data compilation. “Prior to using BrightEdge, we spent days to compile the data to analyze for insights. Today with BrightEdge, we are able to easily glean actionable insights and take action to capture new opportunities in less than a day,” Lim said.

THE RESULTS

With BrightEdge, Manulife Singapore saw a 38% increase in organic visits YoY from 2018-2019 and 60% of Manulife’s priority keywords moved into page one.

Following a Site Audit of Manulife’s URLs, the team was able to reduce 90% of the website errors found following their site migration. Manulife’s SEO team uses Dashboards to report SEO successes to C-level management. “The data and insights are rolled up to our Regional dashboard which is shared with the C-level audience. It helps us to show our growth story from organic search channel,” said Lim.

“Unlike most SEO tools that are disparate and have to be used in conjunction, BrightEdge consolidates all the necessary SEO data and turns them into actionable insights to help focus on continuous performance optimization.”

Background

Graco Inc., a B2B manufacturer of fluid handling products and solutions for homeowners, contractors, and more, has utilized the BrightEdge platform for five years. When they first began working with BrightEdge, Graco's top pages were not their preferred landing pages. The Graco marketing team dove into technical SEO strategies and added canonical tags pointing to preferred pages in order to strengthen content and rank for the best possible keywords.

Next up? The Graco team, including Geoff Angell, Senior SEO Specialist, strategized to create new content and optimize published content frequently in order to drive top-of-funnel leads into mid-funnel sales opportunities. The plan was to do so by providing valued content and gain control over featured snippet opportunities.

The Solution

Beginning in February 2019, Angell's SEO team implemented image SEO best practices starting with optimizing image alt text. KPI priorities shifted to focus on lead generation and the lead activity on Graco's distributor locator landing page. Angell structured his team's creative strategy to include tracking keywords in Data Cube prior to producing new content and managing alignment between keywords and content.

The Graco team utilized striking distance keyword research to uncover high search volume keywords to optimize existing pages for in order to gain access to featured snippet results. They continue to see an influx of organic traffic from gained Quick Answer opportunities.

Results

Angell and his team saw the position zero opportunties for Graco and nearly gained ownership of them all. By prioritizing optimization for keywords that generate featured snippets, Graco saw a 718% increase in People Also Ask results and a 145% increase in Quick Answer results over the last year. In the last six months, the Graco team has seen a 35.4% increase in ranking images. "SEO drives the majority of all web leads, and I guess the majority of all leads at Graco." Graco has seen double digit growth in leads and an overall increase in organic traffic.

The visibility I get from competitors for my own website makes BrightEdge a really good platform for me. I can quickly see how I'm performing at any given time. And with other tools, it's just not as clear. And I think the Data Cube aspect of BrightEdge along with the tracking of my keywords really gives me a clear understanding of where I stand at any given time." Geoff Angell, Senior SEO Specialist at Graco Inc.

THE PROBLEM

MYOB helps Australian and New Zealand businesses succeed. They offer intelligent and intuitive accounting software and business management tools to make business life easier. Their primary aim with BrightEdge was to enable the team to increase leads and sales via the organic search channel and to improve the synergies and efficiencies of organic and paid search.

"We were using another provider for rank tracking however, we quickly outgrew the limitations of the tool and needed a more robust platform to help us with dashboarding/reporting and keyword tracking."

Learn How MYOB Drove Thousands Of New Leads With BrightEdge!

BACKGROUND

Atomic212 works across both SEO and SEM for Torrens University, meaning that digital campaigns and learnings are always complementary between channels. Coming into the beginning of 2019, CPCs across education keywords were rising to a point of economic inefficiency. Thus, organic presence needed to improve to further support paid spend efficiency and drive lead volumes and quality. Further, Torrens University was faced with the objective of simultanously improving their on-site mobile experience for users as well as future-proofing the site for a more voice-search-active audience.

THE SOLUTION

Since volume and quality of conversions were the key measures of success for stage one of using the BrightEdge platform, Atomic212 utilized SEM data to populate BrightEdge with keywords that represented the highest conversion values. Further, all of these recommendations were supported by BrightEdge's Opportunity Forecasting to project business results. Thus, all on-page Recommendations from BrightEdge informed upgrades that were conversion-focused with hundreds of unique insights aiding the amplification of Torrens' organic performance.

Further, researching in Data Cube where Torrens' best opportunities to secure organic SERP features were, these keywords were assigned target pages to inform optimization. Following this, Atomic212 worked with Torrens' CRO team to create a new design of course pages to suit mobile best practice and ensure pages were in an optimal structure to achieve in-SERP features, including Quick Answer, and subsequently trigger audible voice search responses. Atomic212 then utilized digital PR to build authoritative and relevant links to the Torrens domain and these course URLs in particular.

THE RESULTS

Following the publishing of all new pages in February 2019, the first two months of being live saw a 39% improvement in the number of featured snippets related to specific courses available on the Torrens website - each of which were recited audibly when the relevant voice search was made on mobile. The site also experienced a 14% increase in the number of non-brand queries organically appearing on page one. All of which culminated in a 76% YoY increase in organic conversions/leads on course-related pages. Since initiating the use of BrightEdge in October 2018, the Torrens website experienced a 101% improvement in non-brand visibility and a 105% increase in the number of Quick Answers.

BrightEdge allowed us to amplify and accelerate our SEO initiatives. The key insights, recommendations, and the different metrics we are tracking in our dashboards were integral to our SEO strategy. This led to marketing budget efficiency with organic channels supplementing our paid lead acquisition activities. With more indexed pages and better on-page SEO content structure, we've also increased the visibility of our web pages and future-proofed it for voice search, especially on relevant keywords. - Maricel Custodio, Head of Digital Marketing, Laureate International Universities ANZ

Background

CION Investments, a B2B finance company based out of New York, has always used SEO best practices to optimize their website and remain very user-friendly. Their SEO goal was to anchor down on paid search and increase organic traffic. CION utilized BrightEdge and the expertise of several team members, including marketing and operational positions, to play important roles in regular optimization.

The Solution

CION used BrightEdge to check in on data on a weekly basis. They drive simple wins for better optimization. Alison Tyler, Digital Marketing Strategist at CION, says BrightEdge acts as a home base for them to come back and reference daily.

Their various team members utilized Recommendations and Keyword Research to take advantage of SEO opportunities that led directly back to their goals. Keeping strategy in mind, CION dove into keyword grouping where they created multiple principal keyword groups to focus on. They understood the importance of differentiating articles and content to avoid in-house competition. Using those keyword groups, CION created unique content that steered them around and away from their existing pages. 

The Results

CION used BrightEdge to help guide customers straight to their product pages. Tyler said, "BrightEdge lets us perform better organically". That helped keep the bounce rate low and time spent on site high with BrightEdge.

At CION, they write and optimize content their consumers want to read, including educational pieces that elevate CION Investments as a thought leader in the finance industry. From the end of their first quarter to the end of the second quarter using BrightEdge, CION saw a 58% increase in keywords ranked in position one, a 97.9% increase in keywords ranked in position two, and a 100% increase in keywords ranked in position five through ten.

As organic search is our number one website traffic driver, BrightEdge empowers our team to move with speed and confidence. Whether it's identifying content opportunities in Data Cube or optimizing our existing content using ContentIQ, we leverage BrightEdge daily to inform and enable our SEO strategy. This allows us to ensure we're ranking effectively for both branded and non-branded keywords we want to win on while staying focused on hitting our brand awareness goals throughout the year. - Alison Tyler, CION Investments

Request a demo of the BrightEdge platform today!

THE PROBLEM

AGA - American Gastroenterological Association - didn't address SEO until their recent website redesign. SEO took priority following the redesign as AGA lost SERP authority and traffic due to inaccurate redirects.

They utilize three teams to successfully execute SEO strategies, including the Communications, IT, and Marketing teams - all for different but relevant reasons. The IT team applies their tech knowledge directly onto the back end of the site to code, fix errors pertaining to JavaScript, and more.

The Communications team at AGA is the main group of BrightEdge users utilizing the platform. They work with the Data Cube and ContentIQ, Keyword and Page Reporting, and set up dashboards to later report to VPs or their board. AGA's marketing team turns to IT to make sure the programs and events they plan gain plenty of exposure.

THE SOLUTION

AGA made use of the Data Cube and ContentIQ to expand reach through organic search, exposure, and understanding how they can continue to increase it while pushing out new, patient-targeted content to ensure they're reaching the right audience. This helps keep AGA competitive with other websites, including Web MD and Wikipedia. "BrightEdge has a huge impact on the content we produce at AGA as everything is tied essentially to how it performs," said Arnulfo Moreno, Senior Communications Manager of AGA.

AGA is going through another redesign using the knowledge gained from their SEO efforts using BrightEdge and their original redesign to avoid repeating the same site errors.

THE RESULTS

While using BrightEdge, AGA switched to a mobile-first website and discovered that while their site is mobile-friendly, their page load speed wasn't where it needed to be. AGA saw increases in rank, including their priority patient GERD page moving onto page one. AGA utilizes BrightEdge to focus on creating SEO-driven content and to display their wins as well as identify their potential wins.

"BrightEdge has actually helped us a lot in doing more SEO work because it lets us show the metrics and show the actual wins. And, more importantly, it lets us show the potential wins. I think when you see that all you need to do is make these small, little changes and you can gain a lot of impact, that's huge." - Arnulfo Moreno, AGA

Request a demo of the BrightEdge platform today!