As brands become publishers, content is being created, consumed, and shared at unprecedented scale. Now more than 27 million pieces of content are shared each day— making content marketing more strategic for businesses than ever. Brands are eager to understand what content performs and measure how that content impacts their business.

Win in the Content Battleground

We believe that the digital world is a battleground. As consumers interact with dozens of brands, every brands’ content is fighting a battle. To remain competitive, marketers need to understand who they are competing with, and what their competitors are doing to succeed. BrightEdge has built technology that enables brands to address this challenge head on and create content that wins in the content battleground.  What’s unique about BrightEdge is that we don’t just rely on first party data, instead we analyze the web at scale to provide actionable insights of what it takes to win.

With Content Optimizer 3.0, BrightEdge brings the power of BrightEdge directly inside Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to support proactive content optimization during the content creation process. Content Optimizer 3.0 provides that crucial competitive edge: the ability to tap into web-wide competitor content data. With competitive analysis alongside actionable recommendations, Content Optimizer 3.0 helps marketers to produce quality content that is targeted for the user, optimized at the time of creation, and measured at scale. When a marketer knows where their competition is succeeding and failing, they can be significantly more strategic.

BrightEdge + Adobe

BrightEdge is an Adobe Accredited Application Partner, with a five-year history of developing several integrated technology offerings. BrightEdge Content Optimizer brings the most powerful features and the intelligence of BrightEdge seamlessly into Adobe Experience Manager through an enterprise ready integration.

Content Authors: Bridge the Gap Between Content and Performance at the Time of Content Authorship

Now, for the first time content writers can increase the impact of their content while at the same time increasing their productivity. Armed with the machine learning insights into demand from BrightEdge (powered by the BrightEdge Data Cube), authors can focus on the right topics. Through an intuitive user interface, Content Optimizer guides writers in a step-by-step fashion to create content that is optimized for maximum traffic, conversions, and revenue without breaking or slowing down their content creation flow in AEM. Key benefits for content authors:

• Integrated Workflow — Access Content Optimizer’s step-by-step guided user interface within the existing AEM page-editing menu sidekick (AEM 5) or within the top navigation Content Optimizer icon (AEM 6), enabling seamless optimization in parallel with the content creation process.
• Competitor Analysis — With the BrightEdge Data Cube, utilize a detailed analysis of competitors’ digital content, with immediate insights to quickly take action. Webpage content is broken into page components, along with recommendations to create content that wins from day one.
• Consumer Demand Targeting — Guides content writers to topics that are highest in demand and lowest in competition, ensuring content is optimized from day one.
• Content Optimization Progress Tracking — Focus on what matters with up to 16 on-page recommendations that have the most impact on search performance. Recommendations guide content authors seamlessly through each step directly within AEM, prompting optimization recommendations for highly effective content.

Recommendations show the steps needed to drive performance – before authoring content

Online Marketers: Maximize Revenue From Content

With BrightEdge Content Optimizer, organizations are provided with recommendations that evolve along with the search landscape, and are compliant with the complex structure of large websites. Key benefits for online marketers:

• Policy Compliance Across an Organization — Manage policies with out-of-the-box support for multiple teams, templates, websites, and policies. Set guidelines at the account level, or for all site-wide content and enforce compliance across multiple teams and templates.

• Page to Content Pairing — Pair content with targeted web pages to rank in organic search for the correct content without cannibalizing other pages.

• Powerful Competitive Insights — Track top competitor strategies on page elements and use the insights to optimize pages for best performance.

Administrators: Leverage a Flexible, Seamless, and Adaptive Integration

Organizations can easily customize the impact level of content for their different business units with automated web content policy management, all while maintaining a secure enterprise environment.

• Designed for Enterprise Architecture — Working with current infrastructure and IT investments, data is transferred through HTTP proxy and standard package share installation.

• Enterprise Grade Security — Secure API access with government level encryption policies.

• Trusted Technology — BrightEdge actively supports over 7,200 account integrations via the BrightEdge Connect API.

Online Marketers: Measure Compliance Across Your Content Authoring Team

Understand specific areas of your site where optimizations are being made, or still need to be made, and create a culture of content optimization

Content performance success is dependent on optimizing your most valuable webpages. Digital marketers are often faced with the overwhelming task of performing analysis on each and every webpage, and optimizing areas they notice could be improved. In many cases, what needs to be improved on one page is quite different from the next due to the complexity of websites and contributors from a myriad of teams. Marketers often struggle to identify all the areas for improvement across numerous pages with varied page structure, code, internal backlinks, text length, and writing styles, and are left with a time consuming, ineffective process.

BrightEdge streamlines this process with Page Manager, which adds to the powerful BrightEdge S3 recommendation suite for keywords, social, backlinks, and competitive analysis.

BrightEdge S3 Provides:

• Prescriptive best practices – Comprehensive on-page, backlink, internal link, and social recommendations guide you to success.
• In-depth prioritized recommendations – Uncover the highest impact opportunities to increase rank. BrightEdge analyzes +32 elements for each unique webpage—including duplicate content, and provides recommendations for title, header, image, and meta-tags, URL, content, backlinks, and social engagement.
• Customizable recommendations – Control the prioritization of recommendations and specify unique recommendation parameters that cater to your business needs.
• Ability to target multiple keywords per page – Effectively target similar phrases or complementary phrases to boost overall page ranking.
• Tasks & Workflow – Take action on recommendations by assigning tasks to team members. Align content performance efforts and track progress from start to finish.
• Competitive Intelligence – Uncover the top 10 competing webpages and see your chances of ranking in the top positions

Complete insight into your internal links:

Many organizations today are undertaking internal link cleanup and optimization initiatives, as internal links are essential for establishing a site architecture that’s easy to navigate and spreads link juice across your website. And, having a link structure that’s easy for search engines to crawl is necessary for proper search indexing and rankings.

• Identify Internal Links – See a complete list of all internal links directing to each URL, and if the anchor text contains your target keywords.
• Take Action – Assign tasks to team members and streamline the process of identifying and optimizing for internal links across your site.

Group and analyze pages by category

• Focus on what matters – Easily group pages by categories such as departments, seasons, promotions, and business units. Each team member can easily view and filter recommendations that matter to them.

<p><a href="https://www.brightedge.com/technology/universal-search">Universal Search</a> presents a huge opportunity for marketers. Thumbnails of images, videos, places, and news in search results attract the most attention from users. Ranking for this content drives greater conversions while also grabbing market share from competition, since real estate on the first page of search results is limited.</p>

<p>Marketers face challenges when trying to optimize content performance for universal search across multiple types of content, in addition to text. They also have limited visibility into keyword performance for the different types of content, for their own companies as well as competitors’.</p>

<p><mediawrapper data=""><img alt="universal search results graph" class="media-element file-default" data-fid="2902" data-media-element="1" height="778" src="http://www.brightedge.com/sites/default/files/universal%20search.jpg&qu…; typeof="foaf:Image" width="2301" /></mediawrapper></p>

<p>BrightEdge S3 helps marketers outrank competition and drive greater conversions by optimizing their sites for images, video, places, and news, while also understanding their true rank with Blended Rank.</p>

<p>Search engines focus on delivering the best possible user experience, by providing <a href="https://www.brightedge.com/glossary/improve-content-quality&quot; target="_blank">high-quality content</a> and relevant results. Last year, Google made waves with their broad sweeping <a href="/content/google-panda-update">Panda </a>and Penguin <a href="/glossary/major-google-updates">algorithm updates</a>, rewarding those websites with a solid content strategy with improved rankings and visibility.</p>

<p>In the current search climate, it’s more important than ever to invest in unique, compelling, web friendly content, and optimizing for search performance. Consistent with a history of innovation, BrightEdge has developed unique technology enabling marketers to take a content and page based approach to managing content performance.</p>

<p>Enterprise project management can require the coordinated effort of multiple roles within an organization. BrightEdge enables you to turn your business intelligence into actionable tasks through a single integrated environment. Turn your BrightEdge content performance recommendations into assigned tasks which you can track and close, or have BrightEdge S3 close implemented recommendations automatically.</p>

Part of an effective digital marketing program includes utilizing web analytics. The challenge digital marketers face is integrating web analytics with data, leaving them stuck toggling between two tools or manually attempting to combine data in one place, consuming significant time and resources. BrightEdge does the heavy lifting for you by integrating web analytics data with content performance and social data in BrightEdge S3, providing a complete view and single source of truth for your program.

The most sophisticated content performance and SEO strategies require in-depth competitive SEO analysis. Conducting that competitive analysis requires a wide array of tools to collect high-value data on competitors' SEO and get actionable insights out of it. With BrightEdge you will be the first to know about the campaigns that your competitors have rolled out, their latest backlink strategies, the individual pages and page templates that are driving organic traffic, and much more.

“White hat” backlinks building strategies are one of the foundational elements for a successful content performance program. Google interprets backlinks as a way to determine if a site is trusting and credible. Because backlinking is such a critical component of content performance programs, the accuracy and volume of backlink data is of the utmost importance.

BrightEdge provides the most accurate and complete set of backlinking reporting, encompassing backlink tracking, discovery of high-quality backlinks, and competitive backlink insights with actionable, keyword-level backlink recommendations supported by built-in task & workflow management. Building your backlink profile will result in better results for your organic opportunities.

The idea of negative SEO is a controversial one. Although the major search engines generally say that it is difficult but not impossible to hurt another site through negative SEO, there are also reports of brands saying that their websites were impacted by backlinking from spammy sites. It is always a good idea to check your backlinks and make sure that they are from reputable sites and can help your search engine rankings. If you find links that are not up to your quality standards, it is possible to disavow them so that Google knows that you do not want this site counted among your backlinks.

Backlinks are the fundamental structure of the Internet and are a quality signal to search engines that your content is valuable and that people appreciate what you offer. The key to leveraging this signal to increase your page’s ranking is producing high-quality content and getting it in front of the people who are likely to link to it. Follow the best practices, and use the tools available to you to get the most out of your backlink building and optimization efforts.

BrightEdge has published though-leading posts, like 10 Simple Link Building Ideas You Can Do In a Day to help BrightEdge community members at any level of SEO expertise make backlink and SEO porgress. Contact us for a demo today to start addressing your backlinking opportunities.

Leveraging social media for search provides a significant opportunity for digital marketers to provide broad sweeping organization benefits, including: reputation management, increasing brand and product visibility, and driving engagement on social media sites.

Through a partnership with Facebook, BrightEdge has introduced a new way for digital marketers to effectively analyze, track, and optimize content performance for Facebook. BrightEdge is a Facebook-approved technology vendor in the highly selective Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program: an indication of the external validation of the unique ability BrightEdge has in delivering technology that makes social marketing easier and more impactful.

BrightEdge drives Social Content Performance with Facebook by:

• Optimizing Facebook pages for relevance with search engines to increase organic rankings and traffic for those pages
• Measuring the impact of Facebook Shares and Likes on improving rankings of any page on your website, especially pages targeting high-value head terms
• Competitive analysis of your competitors social strategies to identify opportunities for you to gain an advantage
• Demonstrating the ROI of your social efforts by creating reports and dashboards that measure the impact of your Facebook engagement, including traffic and revenue metrics

Taking Social Content Performance efforts for Facebook a step further, BrightEdge S3 Social Site Audit makes it possible to quickly analyze and track all Facebook optimizations by measuring compliance with Open Graph. Social Site Audit provides automated recommendations and instant reporting on Facebook optimization, giving practitioners and executives instant visibility into how Facebook is impacting their organic performance today, and over time.

BrightEdge was the first to release mobile technology in August 2013, including mobile analytics, mobile Share of Voice Reports, and Mobile Site Audit to assist brands in defining and executing a mobile search strategy.

In 2014 BrightEdge mobile research found that 62% of search results vary from mobile to desktop, that tablets and smartphones make up 35% of organic search traffic and mobile traffic was growing 10 times faster than desktop traffic. Misconfigured mobile websites lost 68% of smartphone traffic.

Since 2015 mobile search has many brands concerned about the impact of Google’s April 21 mobile algorithm update. Meanwhile, BrightEdge customers have had mobile technology in place for two years to help them understand their rank and the competitive landscape across 605 local, global and mobile search engines - equipping them to win in the competitive and strategic mobile battleground. BrightEdge research has calculated the impact of the mobile algorithm change in the first week on mobile SERP results.

Knowing how to optimize your site for mobile takes the right technology. You need to accurately understand the mobile experience your site is creating today and how to make improvements for tomorrow. Here are the major mobile capabilities BrightEdge provides:

• Mobile Site Audit – provides recommendations to improve your mobile page content performance
• Mobile Rankings – identifies your mobile ranking separately from your desktop rankings
• Mobile Share of Voice – describes your full mobile competitive landscape for each of your content categories which can be easily benchmarked against your desktop competitors
• Mobile StoryBuilder – enables dynamic multi-dimensional data visualization for mobile tracking
• Analytics Integration – the industry’s broadest API integration with all the leading marketing analytics platforms that allows you to segment results by device type
• Unified Platform – fully integrated platform with ultra-convenient UI and dashboards

How BrightEdge Helps with Mobile Optimization

BrightEdge takes mobile reporting beyond the webmaster and to the marketer with reporting that helps brands understand their content performance by device.

BrightEdge’s mobile reporting allows users to track and measure mobile device performance with things like:

1. Measuring true rank by device in Universal Search (image, video, social).
2. Visibility into local content performance by keywords and keyword groups across cities.
3. Tracking and reporting on keyword trends and rankings across device type.
4. Optimizing mobile campaign performance for ecommerce.
5. Understanding the competitive landscape and “share of voice” for a brand across mobile devices.

The following screenshots show the BrightEdge mobile solution in action.