Case studies from the BrightEdge community

BrightEdge makes it easy for brands across all sectors to grow with their SEO initiatives. SEO plays a critical role throughout the buyer’s journey, helping brands increase their visibility for potential customers and achieve SEO success. Quality SEO will help brands have a strong presence on the SERPs, casting them as industry leaders and insightful experts. 

The top-of-the-funnel stage tends to receive the most attention from companies considering how to improve their SEO effort, but the strategy also offers considerable power for the rest of the customer journey as well. Customers use search throughout their buying process. 

During the early stages, they tend to seek out educational content as they read a variety of articles and consume different types of content, trying to determine how they want to solve their pain points.

As they move forward with their top company possibilities, however, they still perform searches. These prospective customers want to compare the brands to others and look at the results other customers have seen during the middle stages of the funnel. As they prepare to buy, they will look for deals and promotions that help them get the best possible value and ensure that they receive the most value for their purchase.

The power that the Brightedge platform offers works for organizations of all sizes, therefore, can have a tremendous impact on SEO success, the funnel of clients, and their ability to bring in new customers. 

We have selected three BrightEdge customers from different sectors who have successfully employed the platform and thus seen tremendous SEO success..

Kiddie Academy

Kiddie Academy offers educational childcare. They wanted to focus on local SEO, to reach new customers, and broader SEO that would help them connect with potential franchise owners.

AIS/Thrive

Based out of Atlanta, Thrive wanted to increase their visibility to new buyers. Their paired with AIS Media to create an SEO campaign that would help them meet aggressive business goals.

Philips Hue

Philips Hue is a smart lighting brand that works to provide customers with the best lighting experience possible. They wanted to launch a blog as a pilot in the UK and then expand.

Strategies to nurture their SEO throughout the sales funnel

As these companies set about improving their SEO strategies, they had several commonalities, despite their diverse industries.

1. Each of them looked at gaps in their sites. To ramp up an SEO initiative, brands have to understand where the gaps in their current content creation process lie. This allows them to start to identify where they need to create content and how they can ensure that the content they produce encourages people to move down the sales funnel.
2. They used BrightEdge to find keywords that aligned with the customer experience they wanted to create. Keywords do not only matter at the top of the funnel. Knowing the terms people search for in the middle and bottom stages of the customer journey make it easier to create content that can bring people through all the stages of the journey towards conversion.
3. They understood the importance of using SEO throughout the entire funnel. They did not only look at the top of the funnel, but instead used their early stage content as a part of a larger strategy that helped them convert that traffic into customers.

As these three organizations set out to improve their SEO campaigns, they worked with the BrightEdge platform and team to experience some incredible results. Here are a few of the strategies and platform features that these brands use to drive their SEO success.

BrightEdge features to build an SEO success strategy

Recommendations

The recommendation feature of the platform allows site owners to easily see what parts of their pages need improvements. Rather than going through page by page, they can prioritize which changes will give them the best results. This allows them to see the most progress while optimizing their time investment.

AIS used the recommendation engine, along with preferred landing pages, to create content that was segmented to the needs of the audience. The recommendations helped them better optimize their pages to attract users at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Data Cube

The Data Cube is the powerful BrightEdge feature that makes it easy to perform a variety of types of content research. For SEO purposes, it allows customers to identify keywords and easily understand their search value. With data such as the search volume, the level of competition for the keyword, and even if they keyword produces alternative types of results on the SERP-- such as videos, Quick Answers, or images-- customers can use this information to build a full strategy. 

Philips Hue used the Data Cube to find keywords that they could use to create clusters of non-branded keywords. This allowed them to start to expand their blog by creating helpful content that could begin to earn them rankings. They were also able to find keywords that offered great potential for building a strong blog by finding the terms that had high search volume but low competition. This got their blog off to a running start.

AIS also used Data Cube to nurture their SEO success. Thy uncovered keyword opportunities that aligned well with aggressive business goals Thrive had put forth. Specifically, the brand was able to find the critical keywords that played important roles in customer decision making. They were thus able to map content that nurtured growth and kept customers moving through the buying process. 

Customer Service Team

In addition to the incredible features on the Brightedge platform itself, the importance of the customer service team can also not be underestimated. The BrightEdge support team can use their knowledge of SEO as well as the platform to help customers achieve their maximum possible SEO success.

With the client Kiddie Academy, the BrightEdge team worked with their internal marketing professionals to find opportunities where they could win Quick Answer placements. The strategy worked successfully, which helped Kiddie Academy to dramatically increase their real estate on the SERP, and thus their brand recognition and the number of clicks they received to their site.

The BrightEdge team also worked with Kiddie Academy to identify gaps within the site. Working together to repair these gaps made it easier for the site to nurture customers and drive more business to the client.

Philips Hue also turned to the customer success team to maximize their results. The team worked with Philips Hue to identify important keyword clusters and potential terms that they could go after on their blog to increase their SEO success. This guidance helped them grow their blog quickly.

Results

All three groups saw dramatic increase in their SEO rankings by using these important features. Kiddie Academy saw a 249% increase in their high-ranking keywords in position 5 or better along with a 41 percent increase in organic conversions. Philips Hue was able to increase the readership by 10,000 additional visits per month and enabled them to roll their blog out to other important markets. AIS and Thrive achieved an 87.8 percent increase in page 1 rankings, increasing their market share. Their increase in organic leads led to major client deals.

Understanding the importance of SEO throughout the sales funnel can empower brands to get the most out of the BrightEdge platform and see strong results that will help them drive their brand. Come and explore our case studies for these three clients to learn more about their SEO success and how they reached the results they achieved.

Are you using rel="next" and rel="prev" tags correctly on your paginated content? Learn the connection between site pagination and SEO.

Site pagination and SEO and optimal customer experience

Do you paginate results on your site search or faceted search results? For instance, if you have 150 videos do you stack them in 15 pages with 10 videos on each page? If you do, you are not alone, almost every site paginates results to make them easier to browse and select.

Once the pages are crawled and indexed they become points of entry for organic visitors. However, entering in the middle of a large site pagination and SEO series may not be an ideal user experience. Two better user experiences are to land on the first page of the series or specific content page that best matches the query.

One of the tricky aspects of site pagination and SEO is that some CMSes do it without exposing the pagination group as additional pages, meaning they do it automatically, and this leads to duplicate title tags, descriptions, and H1s because the normal page and markup workflow is different and somewhat invisible to the SEOs and site managers.

Let's look at two examples of site pagination and SEO

In the first, imagine you have a 3-page article. Googlebot will crawl and index all three pages. The publisher would prefer that visitors start at the first page and move through in order to appreciate the content, generate more pageviews, and view more ad inventory.

How to optimize well-structured paginated sections for search and user experience

Google recommends that you use rel="next" and rel="prev" in the HTML of each of the six pages. The first page has the rel="next" and the other five pages have rel="prev". Google uses this information to provide a searcher the first page of the article.

1. In the <head> section of the first page (http://www.example.com/article-part1.html), add a link tag pointing to the next page in the sequence, like this:

   <link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article-part2.html">

   Because this is the first URL in the sequence, there’s no need to add markup for rel="prev".
2. On the second and third pages, add links pointing to the previous and next URLs in the sequence. For example, you could add the following to the second page of the sequence:

   <link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article-part1.html">
   <link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article-part3.html">
   

3. On the final page of the sequence (http://www.example.com/article-part4.html>), add a link pointing to the previous URL, like this:

   <link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article-part3.html">

   Because this is the final URL in the sequence, there’s no need to add a rel="next" link.

In the second example, imagine you are an ecommerce site that has 1,000,000 products in 10,000 categories each with 100 products. To make it easier for customers to browse you paginate the product groups into 10 pages each with 10 products on them. The Googlebot will likely crawl and index 1,010,000 pages for the site, 1,000,000 product pages and 10,000 category pages.

If the category pages are consciously built they would be optimized for the category and then there would be logic to the order of the products, for example, best sellers, best rated, or most profitable first. So the company wants users to browse from the first page in the group, not start in the middle. To some degree, the site pagination and SEO groups are competitive and dilutive to the product pages.

How to optimize less-structured or unstructured paginated sections for search and user experience

In this case, you would use rel="next" and rel="prev" in the HTML of the 10 pages in the site pagination and SEO group, which will indicate to Google that you would prefer that SERP results that match an interior page link to the first page of the group. If the index listing pages are dynamically built by the CMS, then they will have default and duplicative tags from the first page in the group. In this case, the first page is not necessarily better than the interior page that best matches the query, so making sure the product pages are in the sitemap and using a <noindex> tag on the pagination index pages may be best because it reduces the dilution and saves the crawl budget for the more important pages. This is what we have done on the BrightEdge site for the paginated videos where we use Drupal as our CMS.

 

Customers in Action

As part of their technical optimization, BrightEdge customer Sweetwater uses site pagination and SEO extensively on their 125,000-page site to display their products. Yes, the selection at Sweetwater is amazing. They implemented rel="prev" and rel="next" and it helped them increase site performance.

You can learn more about the success the SEO team at Sweetwater is generating by reading the newly published case study available in the BrightEdge Resources section.