The past year or so has seen quite a shake-up in the organic search world. Those who were not prepared to proactively roll with the punches find themselves in a confused state of affairs. Can you still increase organic search, despite all the changes? Some would speculate that it’s becoming harder, but it’s truly the approach to your increase organic search strategy that will carry you through the algorithm changes, the search engine initiatives and search trends. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the changes we’ve seen, and how to continue to have a winning organic search strategy by focusing on content and mobile.

Mobile marketing

“There is a new phase of content development forming with in-app and mobile experiences. Content is being developed and tailored for device types that fundamentally improve the overall experience. It’s surprising to still see people just digitize content, but not actually tailor it for mobile.” - Darren Pleasance, head of customer acquisition at Google.

Indeed. According to comScore data reported by Rebecca Murtagh at Search Engine Watch, mobile use surpassed that of desktop early this year, forever altering the digital marketing landscape for brands and businesses. Coupled with comScore’s latest (June 2014) smartphone subscriber figures, which forecasts smartphone penetration (in the U.S.) to reach 74 percent by the end of the year, marketers have every incentive to adopt an informed mobile solution for their content.

This surge in mobile use followed Google’s June 2013 announcement that it’d be rolling out ranking changes in its mobile and smartphone search results for sites that provided a poor user experience. According to Google, the two most common mistakes in website configurations for mobile are faulty redirects and smartphone-only errors. Looking for more information on mobile marketing and solutions? Data from The BrightEdge 2014 Mobile Share Report provides insights into the growing mobile search traffic revolution and proper mobile SEO optimization. Also, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu has written extensively on the subject, including:

• The Mobile Boom Is Here: Deliver the Best Experience, No Matter the Device at The Huffington Post. Jim notes that “just because you’re ‘doing mobile,’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it right,” advising brands to optimize for the boom in mobile organic search by choosing their best “mobile path” as determined by the relative performance by of their Web pages by device.

• Going All Responsive Is Not Always “One Size Fits All” With Mobile at Marketing Land. Citing data from the BrightEdge 2014 Mobile Share Report, Jim states that 27 percent of the websites studied made mobile configuration errors that resulted in an average loss in smartphone traffic of 68 percent. Based on BrightEdge’s Data Cube research, he also cautions that the responsive design (recommended by Google) doesn’t necessarily mean higher search rankings for your site as compared to the other two mobile solution options.

• Mobile Site Configuration 101: How to Choose at Search Engine Watch. Jim outlines the three mobile site configurations supported by Google, and advises brands to consider their goals and the Web traffic insights culled from their analytics when deciding upon a mobile solution.

Content & semantic search

“This past year will be remembered as the ‘Year of Content.’ [There has been] so much conversation around how important content is, people moving budgets towards content efforts and so on. And yet, for all that talk and action, content has always been important.” – Duane Forrester, head of the webmaster program at Bing.  

As the digital marketing mantra goes, “content is king.” Brands have learned that they must embrace Google’s directive to provide users with the best experience and quality content since the Panda algorithm first arrived on the search scene in 2011. Now, it’s an integral part of Google’s algorithm, rolling out on a continuous basis. Combined with its Penguin update, which targets link schemes, massive guest blogging networks and other attempts to pass PageRank, Google has made its zero-tolerance stance towards such shortcuts clear. “And as if content weren’t enough, more and more companies are starting to hear the message around marking up content, and taking an action towards it. This is a future-proofing tactic that will serve websites well,” Duane notes.

The transition to semantic search, evidenced by Google’s rollout of its “Hummingbird” algorithm as well as improvements to its “conversational” voice search and Knowledge Graph, ushered in a new era of SEO and content development. Coinciding with the search giant’s move to 100 percent secure search, Google unveiled Hummingbird at its 15th birthday celebration in September 2013 (although it quietly rolled out the new infrastructure the month before), marking the beginning of the end of traditional, keyword-driven SEO and content optimization.

As Duane alluded to when he spoke of “marking up content” as “future-proofing tactic,” semantic search is most effectively leveraged when you use Schema.org to markup your digital content. Simply put, Schema.org helps the search engines to better understand your content and what a web page is about, allowing them to deliver better results (think “rich snippets”) to the user. For more information on how semantic search works using the Knowledge graph and structured data, check out these resources and articles:

• Use Structured Data for Rich Search Results at Google Webmaster Tools Help. A comprehensive, how-to guide on structured data and rich snippets.

• Google Hummingbird & The Keyword: What You Need To Know To Stay Ahead at Search Engine Land. BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu discusses Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, and what it means for marketers. Coupled with Google’s eclipse of keyword data, Hummingbird represents an improvement in semantic search, allowing Google to better interpret the searcher’s intent and the context of the words used in a query.

• Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, Not Strings at Google Inside Search. In a detailed explanation of the Knowledge Graph, Amit Singhal describes it as the “critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.”

• Knowledge Graph Optimization at Blind Five Year Old. AJ Kohn discusses how brands can leverage the Knowledge Graph by optimizing their website’s connection to it, which can translate into greater search visibility.

If you’re still trying to perfect your content SEO strategy, you’re not alone. In fact, 52 percent of respondents in the BrightEdge 2014 Search Marketer Survey said they would invest at least 10 percent to 25 percent more in their content SEO strategy if they could identify what was most engaging to their audience.

Knowing how to market your brand through content, and what your audience responds to is an age-old question, actually. Pioneers in content marketing include John Deere with the launch of a magazine in 1895 – “The Furrow” – that provided information to farmers to be more profitable, and Michelin with its “Michelin Guide,” first published in 1900, with info on auto maintenance, accommodations and travel.

What is new in the content marketing equation is the mass of data we have about how our audience is responding to content.

Marketers today know how important data is. In fact, 78 percent of those surveyed for our search marketer report said it’s either “more important” or “much more important” to connect content efforts to ROI in 2014.

But that connection doesn’t come easily. You, of course, need data you can trust and a roadmap of what to measure. With the multiple ways to publish and track content today online, where do you start?

Start with the foundation: your website.

Your Website, SEO and Content Marketing

Organic search is one of the best channels to understand demand. Through organic search, you can know what topics matter to your target audience and what the competition is up to as well.

Your website is the hub of your brand and the beneficiary of all your content marketing efforts, no matter which channel you decide to focus on, be it organic search, pay-per-click, social or any other.

That’s why any content SEO strategy should begin with the foundation, your website, optimized for both search engines and users. In fact, your website content can be one of the most powerful inbound marketing tools when optimized for search.

Most professional marketers are now comfortable with the idea that SEO is a form of content marketing. In fact, traditional SEO and content marketing have the same goal: to get the right content in front of the right people.

However, brands sometimes still feel a disconnect within their organizations between content creation, organic search and ROI. Is optimizing your content SEO strategy really making a difference? How do you know?

BrightEdge studied the impact of optimizing pages for search, and we found potential to drive 10 percent more traffic, 25 percent more revenue and 50 percent less time to results for targeted pages.

So yes, optimizing your organic content seo strategy can and does work.

In fact, 83 percent of marketers surveyed for the BrightEdge search marketing report see the potential, too, stating that increasing content performance by optimizing your organic content seo strategy in 2014 is “much more important” or “more important” than 2013. 

Optimizing Your Organic Content SEO Strategy

The appetite for content to be served on a silver platter to its consumers is growing. Your audience doesn’t want to, nor should they have to, go digging to find the content they need when they need it.

Likewise, content not only has to be relevant, but also strike a chord. Would you find the information you’re publishing useful? Engaging? Thought-provoking? If not, start over.

Some say we’re in the age where traditional marketing meets digital marketing when it comes to SEO. Today, you need staff to focus on both the technical and creative side of content, and staff who will analyze the results to shape the strategy moving forward.

Last month at the Adobe Summit, BrightEdge announce an enhanced Content Optimizer that includes the following capabilities:

• Real-Time Content Coach: Marketers and content writers will have the ability to enhance content as they create it, saving time and effort while growing revenue. The technology guides the author seamlessly through each step directly within Adobe Experience Manager, prompting optimization recommendations for highly effective content.
• Content Demand Targeting: For the first time ever, marketers can tailor content as they write to match the topics that people are actually searching for and interested in reading. The technology bridges the gap between SEO experts and content writers, enabling marketers to be better equipped to develop content based on demand and publish content that consumers are most interested in.
• Optimal Content Structure: Combining the strengths of search engine optimization with the powerful impact of content offers new opportunities for content engagement. SEO managers are now able to determine the optimal structure for effective content, set guidelines and policies within the BrightEdge S3 platform, and instantly share these guidelines in Adobe Experience Manager, connecting SEO know-how with the content creation process.

When thinking about how to boost the quality of your organic content seo strategy, keep in mind all the moving parts of how to make your content for organic search shine, including:

• The research: What topics resonate with your audience? What conversations are happening around a topic? What words are people using when they search? What content is already out there on that topic?
• The creative side: What do those who have a vision of the brand say about content? What messages do you want to disseminate? How do you want it to feel?
• Optimization: All the White Hat foundations of SEO help your content be discovered through on-page optimization best practices.
• Promotion: Beyond optimizing the content for search, tell people about the pages and blog posts on your website through your social mediums.
• Tracking: Harness the big data that’s available to you by setting boundaries on what you’ll track and how you’ll measure the performance of the pages and posts you create.

This year, don’t be a statistic. As marketers, we can all work a little harder to ensure we’re connecting our content to performance metrics that matter to our business, and, make sure our organic search channel is working at full capacity for our brands and our content.