How much value do schema tags actually provide? Are they an SEO essential that everyone should pulling out all the stops to implement across every page of their site, or is that time going to be better spent elsewhere?

Schema is a markup system that helps to further articulate to the search engines what your content contains. Although Google does a good job of accurately determining the type of content and connecting it with search queries, the search engine sometimes needs help identifying the purpose and intent of certain page elements. Makeups help to prevent any possible mistakes. Given the highly competitive nature of current SEO, no brands want to lose potential rankings because of errors.

SEOs often discuss schema and try to decide if they should implement it. Markups have been proven to help in a specific set of content areas. Before implementing, a first question to answer, however, is how much value does it actually offers the average company. Brands need to prioritize their time and where they spend their resources and efforts. We believe that organizations need to carefully consider the importance of schema in their specific goals and projects to make the decision that is right for them.

Take a deep dive into schema markup and why it's relevant to your site.

Native apps are the familiar applications you download to your smartphone to play games, listen to music, watch video, shop, or order a car ride. Native apps take a lot of work and skill to develop. App development costs range between $100,000 and $2,000,000 with an average of $270,000 according to Formouts.com. Each app developer has to decide on which of the dozens of phones over multiple generations on which they will ensure proper functionality.

In contrast, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are server-based apps that merge the experience of a standard native app into a website experience. In 2015 Google began to promote the idea of the progressive web app, and over the past few years these new apps have begun to attract increasing amounts of attention.

Is it a worthwhile use of your web team's time and resources to invest in developing a PWA versus a traditional native app delivered via the standard distribution networks? In this exclusive point-of-view piece from BrightEdge we break down the pros and cons of both approaches and come down on the side that any serious digital marketer should be pursuing.

Register now to read our full point-of-view article.

Vertical search is differentiated from a traditional search because it focuses on one specialized industry where you can get the information you're looking for in one place. Examples of this are Pinterest, Facebook, and Google.

From an interactive and transactional perspective, search is the fundamental digital discovery activity. People search, find alternatives, explore, and then make decisions. Traditional search engines report billions of queries per day and in excess of two trillion queries worldwid per year. However, Comscore reports traditional desktop search query count down between March and April 2017. Business Insider reports that use of traditional search for discovery is dropping about 10% per year. Bloomberg reports that more than 50% of shoppers start their search on Amazon, while only 28% now start at traditional search engines, down 18% from last year.

Leverage our POV and download the differences between vertical and native search.

The Panda 4.0 release had a notable negative impact on the SEO power of many PR websites, including PR Newswire. This led to the press release site issuing new guidelines to help ensure that their site only published quality content in an effort to recover some of their visibility.

The conversation has also delved into the value of a separate media releases in the age of digital marketing and social media. Brands now have multiple platforms where they can promote themselves, including their own blogs and social media platforms. Given the followings that brands can cultivate on social media, promotions that run on these platforms can be very effective. Since these forms of promotion also take place on the web properties of the brand itself, they offer greater control over any prospect interaction that occurs as a result.

Download the full report and better understand why you should be press releases to promote your brand and content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is in a very different place from where it was just a few years ago. Google has updated its search algorithm hundreds of times every year making rapid, sometimes dramatic changes to how sites are ranked on search results pages. This has often times led to a trend of SEOs engaging in "algorithm chasing" or rushing to try and outguess what Google will do next.

Download the full report and gain knowledge into Google algo changes and how they impact your site. 

Google reports that voice search reached 21% share of queries by 2019. Voice is riding on the explosion of mobile, smartphones, digital assistants on devices and on PCs, and smartwatches. Juniper predicts combined digital assistant prevalence to grow 255% to 5.5 billion by 2021.

The reasons for using voice search are easy to enumerate: faster, more convenient, handsfree, and typing on mobile devices is unpleasant (Thrive Analytics/LSA survey). It also helps that voice recognition has reached 94%+ accuracy, which is at parity with humans (Purna Virji Microsoft). Progress above this normal human rate will attract many more users. Learn how to optimize for voice search.

The voice search feature is growing and has exponentially grown in the last 3 years. Google Trends reports an increase in “ok google” queries from a relative base of 4 in March 2014 to 68 in 2017. That is a 1600% increase. Voice queries spike in December and January to around 98 as people buy new hardware. Voice queries are about 20% of total queries and assessed as 30X more action-oriented than text according to Mariya Moeva of Google.

Understand how to grow the user experiences on your site alongside the growth of voice search as it happens and download the full report.

Hyperlocal continues to be a driving force of commerce. According to Google, four out of five people use search engines for local search. These local searches then have a big impact on purchases: 50% of mobile users are likely to visit a store after they do a local search. Once these visitors arrive in the brick-and-mortar location, their chances of becoming paying customer is higher than the average visitor, with 18% buying versus 7% of people who did not arrive through local search.​

Customers using mobile devices also tend to have different intentions than desktop users. They are interested in key bits of information such as business hours, directions, products, and addresses. A hyperlocal strategy positions brands to better understand their local users and create content that appeals directly to them, allowing them to tap into the incredible influence of local mobile search.

Register for the full whitepaper to access a guide to creating your own hyperlocal strategy.​

Mobile is the future of the search. Over 53% of all browser searches online now happen on mobile, and Google says that their search algorithm embraces a full mobile-first index, which means it separates and prioritize the mobile experience over desktop.

Speed and responsiveness are crucial to SEO across all devices, but especially on mobile. This makes sense, since mobile devices will often be accessing the internet via cellular networks on data plans that may or may not have monthly data caps on them.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a type of HTML optimized for mobile enables pages to load extremely fast on a mobile device. Essentially, with the use of AMP markup a site can present a separate version of a page optimized for fast delivery on mobile. With that in mind it’s easy to think AMP pages are a one-size-fits-all solution you should use across your entire site, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Drive more mobile traffic to your site by better understanding AMP using our full whitepaper.

What's the difference between HTTP vs HTTPS? HTTPS is HTTP - just the secure version. HTTPS follows the same protocols as HTTP - the browser begins a connection to a server on a standard port. HTTPS works simultaneously with another protocol, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to communicate information safely in three ways:

1. Encryption: Encrypting the transferreed data for security
2. Data Integrity: Data cannot be altered or corrupted during transmission
3. Authentication: Users are authenticated to communicate with the website

HTTPS presents the best of both worlds: the data is visually appealing to the user, and you're getting the extra layer of security as the data moves.

Learn more and take a deep dive into HTTPS migration with the full report.

SEO presents your brand with a significant opportunity, but it requires collaboration between multiple functions. Picking the players and setting the right process for your SEO team are the first steps in increasing SEO ROI. This white paper describes an optimal workflow for the SEO group and each team member, explains how to increase each person’s contribution, and how to support SEO in the company with a culture of content.

There are typically four roles on an SEO team. Learn how each of the below team members could contribute to your SEO success:

• CMO or Senior Marketing Executive
• SEO Manager 

• Marketing Manager
• Writer/contributor

Download the full report to for the SEO team building process and stack your SEO team.