SEO has become a critical part of marketing for any business who wants to build their online presence. Even for brick and mortar stores, 82 percent of smartphone users say that they will research products online before they buy something in person. B2B buyers also seek high-quality information to guide their purchasing choices. Customers who report the information they uncover while researching products is high quality are 2.8 times more likely to complete their purchase.

The Internet offers consumers today a wealth of information at their fingertips. They can learn about the potential solutions to their pain points along with information about the companies that offer them. Brands that want to attract these customers need to leverage SEO to improve their brand presence and enhance their ability to appear on the SERP.

SEO, however, can feel intimidating for brands with smaller teams dedicated to managing the demands associated with building an online presence. These teams want to learn more about how they can see SEO progress and build a strong brand presence with a limited time budget per week.

For organizations that see the value in optimizing their digital content and want to see what they can accomplish in just ten hours per week, here are our recommendations to maximize SEO success.

Spend the time to get to know your customers and their journeys

The key to achieving discernable success with SEO on a tight time budget lies in efficiency. You do not have time or resources to waste creating content that is not properly targeted for your buyers. This ineffective content will make it challenging to draw in leads and customers.

Therefore, before you begin a full-fledged SEO program, your team needs to do a thorough study of your target customers and their buyer’s journeys. Speak with the sales teams to learn more about the customers and leads to uncover valuable insight regarding their pain points as well as the obstacles they faced and the demographics that best described them. You want to make sure you have a thorough understanding of their budget, struggles, and the selling points that mattered the most to them throughout the journey.

Market research can also provide valuable information regarding potential holes within the industry that you can help fill.

As you gather this information, map out the journey these customers take, including the questions they ask, as they get closer to conversion. Know the platforms they use to gather more information. See how people interact already on your website, the success of your email lists, and keyword search rates to paint the best possible picture of your customers and their movements.

As you arm yourself with this information, you will have a clear outline of the type of content customers like to see from you and what you need to do to focus your efforts on producing material that will nurture the best possible outcome for your organization.

Know how to prioritize tasks and assign jobs to team members

As you build your team, you also want to appropriately prioritize tasks and assign jobs to team members. To keep your team running as smoothly as possible, you need to have clear expectations for everyone involved in the process so that there are no overlaps or gaps in the content creation and optimization processes.

With your limited time to budget towards SEO, prioritize your tasks based on the needs of your customers and your website. You will need to spend some of your time creating content for your website and some of the time optimizing what you already have. How you make this division will depend largely on the existing quality of your site.

Look at the buyer persons and the journeys you outlined in the previous step. This insight into what customers want to see can help you determine how well your site aligns with their current needs. Your existing site statistics, such as your traffic, engagement, and conversion rates will also provide helpful information into the current state of your website.

Prioritize quick wins to help you see as much SEO progress as possible for the least effort and time needed. Look for opportunities such as:

• Striking distance keywords, where you are close to achieving a top ranking position. This will help you see where you can quickly move your site into a higher-visibility position for important keywords, attracting more traffic.
• Keyword gaps on your site. If you have major gaps in your ability to nurture particular buyer personas through the buyer's journey, then you want to make sure these gaps get filled as quickly as possible so that you do not lose potential leads.
• Keywords that have high search rates but low competition. These keywords can help you attract prospective leads and the lack of competition will provide solid opportunities for rising quickly on the SERP.
• Important areas where you fall behind the competition. Analyze your competitor sites to see if there are important search terms that they have achieved high rankings for that you have not.

Finding the information to fill each of these categories can be done easily through the BrightEdge platform. With keyword research, competitor analysis, and striking distance keyword reports, you can begin to prioritize the most valuable tasks for your particular site.

Use data to track your progress

As you begin to build your SEO, you want to carefully track your progress so that you know exactly how your efforts impact the success of your website.

Consider the KPIs that align well with your website goals. For example, if you want to expand your brand reach, tracking your site traffic, engagement, and your appearances on the SERP will be important. If you want to increase the number of leads that your site brings in for the brand, you will want to know your traffic, engagement, and conversion rates for each of the steps of the buyer’s journey.

Set up dashboards that will allow you to track your progress from the beginning of your SEO endeavors. By establishing these dashboards, you will set a baseline.

With limited time to dedicate to SEO each week, you want to know as soon as possible what the impact and weight of your different SEO efforts are. See which types of content have the greatest impact on engagement or which optimization efforts do the most to raise the rankings of your website pages. This will make it easier for you to dedicate your limited resources towards the most successful forms of SEO for your particular business.

Have strong supports in place

To help you accomplish the SEO tasks that you have now prioritized, you want to have strong support in place. On a limited time budget, you do not have time to check a variety of different websites and areas to collect measurements or organize tasks with your team. Instead, you want to have all of your helpful information in one place, where anyone from your team can log in to see the relevant data.

The BrightEdge platform makes it easy for teams of all sizes to accomplish their SEO goals. As already discussed, you can use the platform features to design your website priorities and identify content areas that you want to target.

However, you can also use BrightEdge to track your progress so that you can gather information as your SEO process begins to materialize. You can gauge your levels of success and how the efforts you make influence your site performance.

You can also assign tasks to the members of your team to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding their expectations and what they want to accomplish. Additionally, you can create common dashboards that your team members can view to help you understand your progress and where you want to continue to build. The dashboards area also allows you to create content calendars and similar common documents that the team can use to remain connected wherever they might be.

SEO can be time consuming effort, but some brands find themselves forced to try and maximize their brand’s online presence with a limited time budget. Although SEO in ten hours a week can be a challenge, with the right plan and support it can still help organizations build their digital reputation and bring in more leads and customers. If you have only a few hours a week to dedicate to SEO, consider the advice above as you begin to plan out your strategy.

SEO management means integrating different parts of SEO best practices to accomplish your online goals, including driving more leads, increasing your brand exposure and growing your share of traffic. With more than 51% of traffic coming from organic search, doing SEO effectively becomes increasingly important. Search algorithm enhancements have driven the growing complexity of SEO optimization. Increasing competition is pushing many companies to create more content and to make it better quality, more engaging, and mobile optimized. All these factors make SEO efforts sophisticated and require a clear framework and an appropriate technology. With 8 years of close cooperation with such top SEO performing brands as Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Home Depot, Deloitte, 3M, and many others we developed a solid 4-step methodology for efficient SEO management. Our BrightEdge platform helps to make each of these 4 steps faster and easier – saving time on analysis, measurement, and reporting. This frees you to concentrate on content creation and bringing more value to your customers. The platform covers the entire SEO cycle – from context-based goal setting and understanding the audience to optimizing the workflow. 

SEO management in 4 steps

1. Identify demand
2. Benchmark competition
3. Optimize content
4. Measure Impact

Identify demand

Targeting demand means learning which topics interest your audience and uncovering the queries your customers use to look for your product or service. First, you want to understand which topics your website already ranks for and what keywords are already driving good traffic. Make sure to preserve and defend those results in the first step of SEO management. Second, do keyword research to find new topics to expand your reach and new traffic or further engage your intended audience. The research and analysis involved in targeting demand makes it one of the most complex stages in the SEO cycle. Competitive pressure pushes companies to create more content and target more keywords. Marketers usually require multiple tools to get the necessary information and insights. High-quality targeting consumes a considerable amount of time. Even with free or inexpensive tools, marketers must find the hours needed to track down the information. That is why scalability remains a major SEO management challenge – doing a due diligence this way on 100s of keywords is possible, but it can hardly be done for 1000s of keywords. BrightEdge’s SEO management platform solves the scalability issue. The BrightEdge Data Cube is a unique, patented technology that makes targeting demand straightforward and drastically improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the research process. Data Cube is a resource in BrightEdge's SEO management platform that allows you to perform research both by domain and by keyword. On the keyword level, it suggests other potential keywords and allows you to track them with a click of a button. This feature will often identify relevant ideas and topics that you had not previously considered for SEO management. The Data Cube also segments its suggestions into High-Ranking Keywords, Long-Tail keywords and Universal Content results. On the domain level, the DataCube provides insights on the keywords for which the site ranks. This allows you to identify ‘quick wins’ where you can focus your optimization and SEO management efforts. Apart from your own keyword research, it is also important to understand the tactics that worked well and benefit your competitors.

Benchmark competition

Competition usually presents a challenge for marketers, but it is also a big source of opportunity. Each of your competitors is playing their own SEO game to increase their share of voice, and you can leverage their SEO management results for your own benefit. Understanding competitive analysis and which keywords and pages worked best for your competitors can guide your own keyword selection and make it easier to create content that will drive traffic. Data Cube and other features of the BrightEdge SEO management platform provide key insights for data-driven demand targeting and decision making:

• Show which keywords drive the most traffic to your competitors’ sites and identify the pages ranking for each keyword
• Provide keyword gap analysis – the words that your competitors rank for that you do not
• Show the top-10 pages ranking for a keyword with information on all the important on-page SEO factors, including the H1, title tags, meta description and alt tags
• Show trended SEO performance of your domain authority versus your competitors
• Generate a Keyword Gap Analysis target list vs. each of your competitors

Backed by such a robust data set, you can strategize your SEO management and do demand targeting more efficiently to have more time for content creation

Create and optimize content

Creating content is always manual – it requires words and images and sticking to your planned cadence to keep your content fresh and your website breadth expanding. To have enough time for content creation, you need full SEO management platform functionality. As SEO analysis, content creation, optimization, and content measurement become more efficient, you will engender a culture of content in your company. The culture of content means motivating everyone in the content value chain to contribute ideas and assets to content production in their area of expertise. This distributed content creation labor can significantly boost your production capacity and keep the cadence highly competitive without impacting variable or project budget. Creating content efficiently is only the first step of SEO management, however. This new content also needs to be “findable” by the search crawlers. To rank and drive leads and new revenue, your content needs to be SEO-optimized. Optimizing content means utilizing technical SEO to improve page rank in the SERPs. Several key questions arise when approaching this step:

• Which pages serve as landing pages for which keyword topics?
• Which pages need to be optimized?
• Which optimizations are the “quick wins” that will make the fastest impact?
• What should be done on each page?
• How do I track our progress in a bigger SEO team?

Most of these questions can only be answered with an enterprise-grade SEO management platform. BrightEdge tracks all your pages and provides key insights for optimization:

• Provides a list of pages to optimize
• Creates a to-do list for each page
• Identifies “quick wins”
• Develops a campaign module to make step-by-step optimization easy, even for non-SEOs
• Uses a task module for easy SEO management within a team

SEO optimization with the help of the platform not only simplifies the entire process, but it also ensures that the group does everything consistently, without skipping steps. Many of our BrightEdge customers boosted their SEO efficiency by optimizing their existing workflow and standardizing it around the Campaigns and Tasks features of the platform. One of the most common SEO optimization pitfalls or mistakes is doing it in the “vacuum”. In today’s competitive search landscape, optimization means optimization in the web-wide context. When numerous players compete for the top rankings, it is important to understand what helps the market leaders win. BrightEdge provides that insight and helps you do SEO management and optimization in the existing context. BrightEdge’s SEO management keyword and page grouping functionalities provide greater insight and more ways to approach the organic data. On a page level, instead of manually uncovering the pages to optimize, you can structure work by creating separate groups for the main website pages, blog pages, specific campaign pages and more. On a keyword level, it gives you the convenience of separating new from existing keywords, research-sourced keywords from competitive-sourced ones, or dividing sets of words according to the SEO team working on them. Possessing all these insights makes your efforts easy to tune, execute and scale, but most importantly it allows you to generate new revenue quickly.

Measure content

So how well is SEO working for you and your SEO management team? This is the question many marketers fail to answer, resulting in low SEO budgets and limited ROI. The lack of data on how SEO drives revenue makes it hard to influence senior decision-makers and help them see the benefits of SEO. Measure. Measuring SEO ROI is a challenge. At BrightEdge, we found a way to make this process fast and easy – our StoryBuilder marries analytics data with metrics linked to ROI. The platform provides a precise look at how your SEO initiatives generated revenue and helped achieve business-specific goals. Report. Once you have all the right data in place, the next step in SEO management is reporting it to your stakeholders. Reporting usually means telling a story that answers 4 key questions:

• What happened?
• Why?
• How did this impact revenue?
• What do we do now to continue seeing success?
• While analytics engines show what happened, they usually fail to explain why and provide actionable responses.

The SEO management BrightEdge StoryBuilder answers all these questions and more. It offers you powerful multi-dimensional dashboards from templates that we designed with top SEOs from multiple industries. It also automates reporting so you can create and send various reports to different stakeholders on a preset schedule. This is how StoryBuilder can help you customize and improve your internal & external communications and build a stronger authority for SEOs. Content monitoring is also an essential part of the measuring process. The more content your company creates, the harder it is to track bugs, broken links, duplicate content, or drastic metrics changes. Keeping track of all those changes manually is next to impossible, and the majority of free or lower-end tools provide just a portion of this necessary insight. BrightEdge regularly scans your site with site audits to find any existing issues and notifies you whenever there is a significant change that impacts the major parameters you are tracking for your own domain and those of your competitors. BrightEdge helps you with SEO management by enabling you to set up Anomaly Detection which will inform you whenever the data triggers certain levels or events.

What do I do now?

Register for a demo. Our product experts will bring these 4 steps to life in a compelling online demo. During this presentation, you will be able to see what can be done for your specific business and industry case. In each demo we offer insights about your website performance and show how effective SEO can be with the right technology. This approach to SEO management will help you make the case to management and more importantly generate business outcomes. This 4-step methodology for efficient SEO management was developed in close cooperation with top SEO-performing brands, like Microsoft, Nike, Wiley, Marriott, Open Table, Home Depot, Deloitte, and 3M. Learn more about each step and see how to save time and increase efficiency on each stage of SEO cycle – from context-based goal setting and understanding the audience to optimizing the workflow.

Read the full white paper now.

BrightEdge has started releasing a new series of platform training videos to help clients become even more familiar with how to use the platform. Produced by BrightEdge experts, these new platform training videos are designed to be relatively short introductions to various areas of the platform for busy marketers who rarely have large blocks of time available for training.

BrightEdge Customer Onboarding Manager George Stanton from the Seattle office, who loves helping customers and has a "sunny" disposition as you can see from the photo, made a comprehensive series of 54 platform feature videos over many weeks. You can access the platform training videos from the platform in Settings > Profile & Preferences > Get Certified or find them in the Help section by various platform topics.

Next we want to share more in-depth workflow and solution videos. A great one to start with is a two-part program training viewers in how to use the Data Cube for keyword research as well as analyzing a competitor’s domain. Each of the two segments is about 20 minutes long.

The Data Cube videos were created by Bill Fergusson (Bill Sensei) from the Silicon Valley office and Head of Employee Onboarding. “Over the years I’ve developed several exercises for training our new employees in the Data Cube, and I shortened these to fit into a 20-minute time frame for the new video series.” A simple worksheet accompanies the competitive research video.

Needing to present SEO metrics easily to those who are not SEO savvy? Uncertain how to create a relevant dashboard of SEO metrics? Short on time to figure out the best way to get to numbers that matter?

BrightEdge has some really good templates to build your reporting arsenal to measure success and determine optimization opportunities.

Solution Consultant Michael Mazzone from the Cleveland office led an introduction to dashboarding in his recent webinar, where he covers these 4 sections:

1. Executive Dashboard,
2. Primary Competitor Insights,
3. Category Action Plans,
4. Editing, Time Frames, Events, and Dashboard Distribution

This material is designed for and appropriate for BrightEdge beginners and intermediate-level users.

Coming soon:

Solutions Consultant, Justin Abrams from the NY office will explain how to run an effective site audit using ContentIQ. Justin recently rocked presentations on SEO and the BrightEdge platform at Eric Enge's (author or The Art of SEO) training class at SMX East.

Justin was one of the Advanced trainers at the 2018 BrightEdge Share conference in San Francisco. “The importance of becoming proficient and autonomous within specific disciplines is more important now than ever. The ability to diagnose challenges, strategize a plan, and execute accurately could be the differentiating factor in your digital transformation.” We know that video is a great way to learn, so this expert team will keep rolling out the tutorials in the coming months.  

The Spring Tour of the Leading SEO Conference Is a Wrap!

On April 19th, BrightEdge concluded the first leg of its Share Global Insights Tour in London. Share, a series of one-day SEO conferences for digital marketers, by digital marketers, kicked off the 2018 tour with stops in New York in March and London in April and will reconvene in San Francisco this Fall. This year’s tour saw even greater attendance than 2017, a sign that the BrightEdge community is full of momentum and collaboration—not to mention a huge roster of impressive thought leaders in the industry from brands including: L'Oréal, IBM, Staples, Thomson Reuters, BlackRock, Comcast, and ShopDirect! Read more about the first half of the tour The theme of #Share18 is Search, Content, and the Customer Experience, and content explored understanding consumer intent and how agile organizations are using AI and automation to bring together search and content marketing to deliver a personalized digital experiences. At BrightEdge, we believe that performance starts with the customer journey and understanding consumer intent—which is possible through search and practical insights. The Share Global Insights Tour aimed to give digital marketers actionable takeaways through the daily efforts of our customers. Great examples included:

• Carlos Spallarossa, Head of SEO at L’Oréal explained how optimizing page speed helped drive organic traffic conversion and how vital it is to stay on top of AMP for the mobile customer experience. [Share NY]
• Connie O’Brien, CMO at Tungsten Networks, Scott Roen MD of Digital at BlackRock and Collin Colburn, Analyst at Forrester joined our industry panel to share best practices around elevating the role of SEO within organizations and how to ultimately drive deeper cross organization alignment. [Share NY]
• Michel Kant, Head of SEO at Staples, shared his journey and best practices around extending the value of search beyond the SEO channel and how to move SEO upstream in an organization by leveraging search to develop messaging, persona mapping and ultimately drive deeper engagement with your audience. [Share London]
• Jennifer Gac, SEO Manager at ShopDirect, spoke about key goals that e-retailers are trying to accomplish with their websites, how SEOs collaborate with content, merchandising, and trading teams, how to elevate SEO in the organization, and how to leverage AI to improve the performance of digital marketing. [Share London]

A huge theme from the spring tour stops surrounded the ever-expanding topic of AI and how to leverage machine learning in today’s digital marketing arena. Paul Roetzer of AI Institute, and Collin Colburn of Forrester joined panels to share the latest trends surrounding machine learning and how digital marketers should be thinking about establishing AI processes internally. Ellen Mamedov, IBM and Michel Kant, Staples encouraged the BrightEdge community to kickoff AI projects on a small scale and begin measuring results, as trial and error is a unavoidable in becoming successful at leveraging machine learning insights.

BrightEdge Community All Stars: BrightEdge Announced 2017 Awards at Share NY and London Recognizing Excellence in SEO and Content

BrightEdge announced and presented the BrightEdge 2017 SEO and Content Marketing Awards at Share NY and London. Response to the call for nominations was tremendous with more than 200 submissions and campaign summaries submitted. Marketers from top-tier brands across industries had remarkable achievements in 2017, and these awards recognized their results, community leadership, and business acumen. Read more about the London Share event and awards on the ClickThrough blog post published following Share London.

Here is a partial list of award winners from NY and London:

• SEO Program of the Year in North America: L’Oréal (New York)
• Agency Campaigns: iProspect and Resolution Media (New York)
• Innovator of the Year: Michel Kant, Staples EMEA (London)
• Community Member of the Year: Jennifer Gac, ShopDirect (London)

 We would like to give a big “thank you” to the more than 40 speakers who led breakout sessions, spoke on panels, shared (pun intended) their valuable insights onstage in the spring of 2018. Check out the agendas and full lists of speakers: New York, London.

What’s Next? The Final Leg of Share Global Insights Tour in San Francisco

BrightEdge is excited to announce that the Share Global Insights Tour will complete its Fall tour in San Francisco on October. Our flagship SEO conference, Share San Francisco, will take place October 10, 2018, at the Westin St. Francis. This 1.5 day event will be packed with industry leading panels, persona-based breakout sessions, dynamic keynotes, and formal networking opportunities.

Make sure to check out our Share San Francisco event page below and send questions to events@brightedge.com. San Francisco: October 9-10

Need Inspiration?

We are thrilled to announce our keynote speaker for Share, Derek Redmond, and his inspiring story of grit and determination. Derek’s semi-final at the Barcelona Olympics will be remembered as an eternally inspirational moment, as his father headed onto the track to help him cross the finishing line after a serious injury mid race. Lauded as NBC’s third top Olympic moment ever, and mentioned in a public speech by Barack Obama, Derek Redmond is a top global motivational speaker. Dogged by serious injury from the start of his career, Derek’s remarkable achievements are internationally lauded. “Derek Redmond bravely making it through with little help, moments of euphoria after years of hard work. Moments when the human spirit triumphs over injury that should have been impossible to overcome." -President Barack Obama

Reasons to Attend Share San Francisco

We want you to get the most out of your Share experience so we’ve taken your feedback from 2017 and optimized the 2018 roadshow to make it even better. Here’s what you can expect:

1. Innovative Break Out Tracks: Whether your focus is in digital, content, or strictly SEO, Share will have two tracks specifically designed for you. Get the most out of your day with BrightEdge by attending sessions specifically tailored to your needs.
2. Training and Certification: Would you like to BrightEdge certify or certify someone on your team? We will be offering in-person training on October 9th for just $300. Participants will be the first ones to receive training on the latest product functionality and to earn the BrightEdge Update Certification 2018.
3. Innovation: Join industry experts who will help bring artificial intelligence to your fingertips. We’ll cut through the hype surrounding AI and provide real, practical advice on how you can become an AI-First marketer.
4. 2018 Global Award Ceremony: BrightEdge will recognize outstanding achievement in the community at the closing ceremony of Share SF event. Leverage the knowledge and success of your digital marketing community.
5. Community Networking: Learning happens both on and off the stage (ahem, and at happy hour) and this year Share will have tailored networking so you can connect with peers in your distinct role and share your successes.

Register Now!

Calling all early birds! Register for Share SF before September 14th to take advantage of early bird pricing for just $499 ($699 regular price) Learn more about Share San Francisco here: San Francisco.

Submit Your Award Nomination!

The 2018 call for BrightEdge Edgie Awards nominations is open now. You can nominate yourself, a colleague, or a customer in 7 different categories through August 2018. Winners will be announced at Share SF.

Want to Speak at Share SF?

We here at BrightEdge can’t wait to bring you more innovative and creative ideas at Share SF this October. If you are interested in becoming a speaker at Share, please submit your topic and interest on our Share page. This year, the BrightEdge Community has become an impactful network that shares insights, provides platform best practices, and, most of all, elevates the role of SEOs and digital marketers across the industry. We look forward to building on our community success in 2018 in San Francisco! Whether you are running a global SEO team or a powerhouse team of one, Share has something for you. See you all there!

Google called for “HTTPS Everywhere” (secure search) at its I/O conference in June 2014 with its Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far stating: “We want to convince you that all communications should be secure by default,” and it anticipated some resistance and skepticism from the SEO industry. The picture is definitely getting more clear. As a digital marketer, it’s important to understand the differences between HTTP vs HTTPS, the advantages of switching, and any issues you might encounter in your SEO management efforts. 

A few years later, two different Google representatives advocated for HTTPS: Maile Ohye in a joint BrightEdge webinar "A View from Google" called HTTPS a "requirement" and Thao Tran speaking on the main stage at Share16 in October said "HTTPS and making sure your site is secure is an imperative at this point... Google will start marking things non-secure... The future of the web is a secure one, and so make sure people in your organization understand HTTPS, and it should be on the road map" for all websites.

The adjustment period has come to an end with Google warning Chrome users when displaying pages that include forms from non-HTTPS sites: “Chrome will show the ‘Not secure’ warning in two additional situations: when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode.” This message will appear in url bar of Chrome browsers.

What is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is a structure for transferring and receiving information on the web, most frequently operated to retrieve HTML web pages. HTTP is considered an application layer protocol — it exists to present information to the web user no matter what channel it takes to do so. HTTP is stateless, which means it uses less data by forgetting earlier web sessions.

What does HTTPS stand for? HTTPS, or Secure HyperText Transfer Protocal, was established to sanction secured transactions and authorization over the web. Exchanging information, like credit card numbers or access, requires security to avert unauthorized entry through HTTPS. So 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. The additional layer of HTTPS security uses Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, to transport data. HTTPS exercises TCP Port 443 by default, so they use two separate communications. For a detailed walkthrough see our on-demand webinar on HTTPS vs HTTP for SEO.

Where Does SSL Come In?

HTTPS works simultaneously with another protocol, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to communicate information safely in three ways:

• Encryption: Encrypting the transferred data for security
• Data Integrity: Data cannot be altered or corrupted during transmission
• Authentication: Users are authenticated to communicate with the website

Just like HTTP and HTTPS don’t discriminate with the path that data takes to its destination, SSL equally doesn’t care how the data looks, but HTTP does. So how does it affect HTTP vs HTTPS? In between the two 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.

What is HTTPS Used For?

Since the key is search security, HTTPS has been used for any site involving secure information. It’s used for ecommerce sites to tender protected transactions. More than likely, your bank will use HTTPS to secure your personal information — easily recognized by the padlock on your browser. And as we’ll discover next, HTTPS is recognized and used as an SEO benefit to your secure site.

HTTP vs HTTPS: HTTPS as a Ranking Factor

Even years ago, research showed an increase in encrypted URLs. However, it wasn’t until the official announcement that we began to see sites affected by this factor. Considering their user-based algorithm updates, Google preference for trusted sites isn’t surprising. If users are guaranteed to have a secure site experience, the answer to HTTP vs HTTPS becomes simple — they will prefer HTTPS to HTTP.

SEO Advantages of Switching to HTTPS

If you’re following Google’s recommendations, deciding on HTTP vs HTTPS is also easy - switching to HTTPS will benefit you and the security of your site. There are also some additional SEO benefits for you to consider: Increased Rankings Not a major boost, but as part of an overall strategy with other ranking factors, it’s a safe bet. In addition, we usually see that the impact of Google’s recommendations and algorithm increase over time. Learn more about Google page rank. Referral Data If you’re exploring Google Analytics for your HTTP site, the traffic passing through referral sources can appear as “direct” traffic. Through an HTTPS site, the security of the referring domain is preserved. This makes the HTTP vs HTTPS decision even easier to make. Security and Privacy Security benefits your overall goals in a few ways:

• Authenticates the website and server communication
• Avoids damage by third parties
• Encrypts data and communication, like browsing history and credit card information

So Are There Any SEO Concerns in Switching to HTTPS?

As with all major URL changes and site migrations, there is likely to be a disruption and loss of rank followed by a recovery in rank. There are little to no issues when switching to HTTPS, especially for SEO. But implementing the secure switch incorrectly can hurt your site and possibly your SEO and cause a sustained loss in traffic. Steps to Switch Google’s own recommendations are below:

• • Determine if you require a single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
  • Use 2048-bit key certificates to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on your webserver
  • Make sure to maintain a current SSL certificate
  • Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
  • Redirect to HTTPS pages by server-side 301 HTTP redirects (mod_rewrite is common)
  • Update your robots.txt to allow your HTTPS pages to be crawled
  • Check that your website returns the correct HTTP status code

• Get and configure the required TLS certificates on your server

More from Google Support: Avoid irrelevant redirects

Don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant destination, such as the home page of the new site. This can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error. However, if you have consolidated content previously hosted on multiple pages to a new single page, it is acceptable to redirect the older URLs to that new, consolidated page.

Provide errors for deleted or merged content

For content on the old site that will not be transferred to the new site, make sure those orphaned URLs correctly return an HTTP 404 or 410 error response code. You can return the error response code at the source URL in the configuration panel for your new site, or you can create a redirect for a new destination URL and have that return the HTTP error code.

Ensure correct Google Search Console settings

A successful site move depends on correct — and up to date — Search Console settings. After the move, add the URL to Search Console. If you haven’t already, verify you own both the old and new destination sites in Search Console. Be sure to verify all variants of both the source and destination sites. For example, you should verify www.example.com and example.com, and include both the HTTPS and HTTP site variants if you use HTTPS URLs. Do this for both source and destination sites. Make sure to read our detailed how-to checklist for how to perform a successful HTTPS site migration.

The Takeaway

HTTPS will make your site more secure and Google is ramping up advocacy and signal weight for it. As always the majority of your decision should be based not on chasing algorithm changes, but on optimizing the needs of your business and improving your user experience. For a more detailed breakdown view our on-demand webinar on HTTPS vs HTTP for SEO.

BrightEdge proudly announces its next-generation site audit solution with advanced crawling capabilities and full integration within our SEO and content performance platform.

Unplanned site changes severely impact organic search performance

In fast-paced, agile environments, multiple teams across an organization are responsible for creating content. It is estimated that 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced daily. And content creation is only getting bigger: 43% of companies reported increasing their content marketing staff levels in 2016.

With so many moving parts, and some team members failing to adhere to SEO best practices, technical errors, and unplanned site changes can occur. Site errors – including duplicate content, pricing errors, missing tags, and broken links – lead to penalties and lower ranking and provide a poor user experience. And when web pages see a downturn in organic performance, the result is decreased traffic, conversions, and revenue.

To prevent this from happening, a site audit is a critical first step in assessing your website’s health and identifying the technical errors that impede organic performance.

ContentIQ provides the power and flexibility needed in today’s site audit solution

We are pleased to announce the launch of BrightEdge ContentIQ, a new and improved site audit solution. Now all BrightEdge customers can add ContentIQ to their BrightEdge platform to identify the site errors that impact organic search performance.

Using ContentIQ you can:

• Utilize best-in-class crawl technology, parsing the content elements used to build today’s web experiences
• Target site crawls to just a few sections of your website or crawl your entire site – scalable to hundreds of millions of pages
• Set custom crawl settings to match your organization’s unique digital standards

Updated crawl technology for a comprehensive assessment of site health

Web developers and content creators are now tasked with creating dynamic web experiences across multiple devices including desktop, tablet, and mobile. Traditional site audit solutions, which focus on crawling static HTML in a desktop environment, no longer provide the insights needed to fix the site errors that impede performance today.

ContentIQ technology parses the content elements used to create today’s web experiences, including progressive web applications, sophisticated JavaScript frameworks, schema, social tags, and more. Errors are displayed according to severity and by section of your site, allowing you to click in to investigate further and prioritize errors to fix.

Customize your crawl and access insights directly within the BrightEdge SEO platform

Other site audit solutions are fixed and rigid and may not single out the specific site violations that you care about. ContentIQ lets you adjust your crawl settings to comply with your organization’s digital standards, including content governance, web accessibility standards, and website architecture. You can isolate your crawl to focus on just a few pages or to complete a full audit of your entire website.

And since ContentIQ is available within the BrightEdge SEO platform, you maximize efficiency by identifying, fixing, and monitoring site errors within a single workflow. This means that you can use BrightEdge platform features in conjunction with your ContentIQ site audit data. For example, use StoryBuilder to build engaging dashboards and charts that demonstrate the impact of recent site revisions.

With ContentIQ, you gain an upper hand on the site violations that are keeping your performance down. Providing customizable settings, best-in-class crawl technology, and integration within an SEO platform, ContentIQ gives you peace of mind as you identify, target, fix, and monitor the violations that most threaten your site traffic, conversions, and revenue.

ContentIQ is available to all customers as an add-on to the BrightEdge search and content platform. Ask your Customer Success representative about ContentIQ, or schedule a demo. 

We love hearing from clients using the BrightEdge platform to learn how it helps them drive success and how we can support them in their endeavors.

Share16 is now just days away. We are excitedly wrapping up the final details as we get ready to meet with some of the world's best marketers to discuss the latest trends and best practices. We spoke with the SEO team from Be Found Online, an agency based in Chicago, who is also one of our co-marketing partners. They will join us at Share, and we wanted to chat about how they use our platform in their work and how it influences their progress. It was a great conversation, so we wanted to share some highlights with you.

BrightEdge: What problems does using the BrightEdge platform help you solve?

BFO Team: "It is often difficult to find holistic, competitive data," begins SEO Analyst, Adam Woodburn. "The Share of Voice feature in conjunction with Data Cube has been quite helpful in tackling client requests and in-depth competitive analyses." Adds Dianna Kersey, the Account Director, "BrightEdge offers us valuable insight into keyword ranking opportunities, gaps in content, local 3-pack performance, data analysis, and competitive insights. Of course, we also cannot forget the importance of the smartphone search engine performance analysis as an ever increasing number of consumers use mobile."

BE: What platform functionality do you use the most?

BFO: Dianna Kersey begins, "I find myself regularly using the gap analysis, page reporting features, Share of Voice, StoryBuilder, and Recommendations. I also regularly adjust my settings to dive into the mobile and local insights so that I can see specifically how we are performing in those channels." Dalton Finney, an SEO Analyst adds, "Besides using the reporting and campaign features for regular client updates, I am also a big user of the Share of Voice capabilities to help assess competitive threats. Site audit also helps me ensure that our clients' site fundamentals are solid and the backlink reporting uncovers new potential backlink opportunities.

How does using the BrightEdge platform impact your content marketing and your editorial calendar?

BFO: Dianna Kersey explains the impact of BrightEdge: By using the Data Cube analyzer, I can compare a client’s website and review where we rank for Universal performances for more than just keywords. I can review images, videos, Quick Answers, and the local 3-pack. I can also run the GAP analysis between a client and their top competitors to determine which keywords are missing. This helps me build out a content strategy for new material and page optimization. “I have also seen some great successes over this past year. For example, I was analyzing Local 3-pack data regarding how performance changed from a Google national desktop search engine to a Google local smartphone search engine. The changes in ranking, traffic, and revenue were significantly different from the ‘near me’ local 3-pack target campaigns.”

BE: Tell us a little about your experience with the BrightEdge setup and how the platform impacts SEO support in your company.

BFO: Dianna Kersey says, “We received excellent training and technical team support that made the platform easy to setup and use. “We also use the platform for page reporting and understanding conversions at the page level. This helps us to analyze against our competitors and inform us of new optimization opportunities. The automated reports sent each week are also a huge time saver.”

BE: How useful is the industry content and resources that BrightEdge puts out?

BFO: Dalton Finney says, “I look forward to the white papers and the POVs that BrightEdge releases about changes in the SEO landscape. As opposed to many SEO blogs, BrightEdge resources focus squarely on how these changes impact our jobs and our clients and what we can do to take action today. This is very helpful.”

BE: What functions does using the BrightEdge platform uniquely enable you to tackle?

BFO: Dianna Kersey replied, “I am able to make real decisions for content, competitor optimizations, and to accurately determine and measure the impact of my prior changes. I love being able to track more than one search engine for a keyword group to truly gauge national, local, and hyperlocal rankings and performance.”

BE: What are the benefits of a fully-integrated tool versus a standalone solution?

BFO: Ben Hocking, the SEO Director for the agency, fielded this question. “A fully integrated tool becomes more and more essential the larger your company gets. Oftentimes, the biggest hurdle to SEO success in enterprise organizations is getting everyone on the same page as far as performance goes and what the next step will be to beat your competitors in organic search.”

We always enjoy getting perspective from our clients on how they use our platform and how BrightEdge helps them reach their SEO goals. We look forward to chatting more with the BFO team at Share in just a few days and we hope you will join us. Steve Krull, the co-founder of BFO will be speaking on October 25 about the content management cycle, so come listen in! We look forward to seeing everyone at Share next week. 

BrightEdge has great pleasure in announcing that the Share16 content and agenda is live! Recognized by Forbes and Inc.com as a must-attend conference – this year Share16 welcomes leading brand speakers from Google, YouTube, Microsoft, REI, Home Depot, Marriott, Oracle, Wiley, and many more. Whether you want to learn more about upcoming advanced SEO and content marketing sessions, discover new digital marketing best practices and elevate your personal and professional career then Share16 is the place to be.

At Share16 (my 5^th year as the Content and Speaker Chair!) we are honored to host speakers, industry leaders, and brands from such diverse industries as retail, hospitality, software, and many more. With an unbelievable lineup of keynote presenters and sessions new and enhanced additions like our hands-on learning labs, BrightEdge University and a whole track dedicated to career development Share16 the biggest and best year yet. Below is an overview of the main tracks and session content at Share16. Further detail can be found over on the Share16 website and, over the coming month, we will be updating the agenda with speakers and speaker information.

Industry Keynotes

• Digital Centers of Excellence
• Marketing Technology Innovation
• Organization Culture and Design
• Marketing Leadership case studies from technology leaders

Search Advancement Track

While organic search drives 51% of website traffic, the rules are constantly changing, with Google making over 600 algorithm changes each year. In order to stay ahead, search professionals must stay on top of the latest technology trends and advanced search marketing techniques. The Search Advancement Track focuses on search strategies and technical tactics that enable you to maximize the impact of your largest digital channel. Industry experts will share their frameworks for success aimed at balancing technology acumen with strategic execution. Topics include advanced technical, global, mobile, and hybrid SEO and PPC methodologies to ensure you stay ahead in your competitive environment. Algorithmic Change and Response: SERP positioning and SEM alignment Advanced Mobile Optimization: Accelerated Mobile Performance Data Sources and Data Sets: Mastering Analytics and Integrations Technical Site Configuration: SEO Friendly Design, Build & Infrastructure Global, Local and Mobile Search: SEO, PPC and Social Synergy Insights from In-house experts: Technical Tactics & Conversion Strategies  

Content Optimization and Digital Integration Track

Nearly all marketers now consider digital marketing a core part of larger marketing operations. And content marketing is set to become a $300B+ industry by 2019. In today’s fast evolving digital marketing economy, it’s critical for marketers to master the paths to conversion that now span multiple digital marketing channels. The Content Optimization and Digital Marketing Track focuses on the strategies to design and measure the effectiveness of content, to drive conversion across digital channels and support desired business outcomes. Experts will discuss key creation, optimization and measurement strategies that are built for scale and foster greater cross-channel collaboration. Intelligent Content for the Customer Journey: Engagement & Experiences The Content Management Cycle: Optimizing Content for Scale & Efficiency Content Metrics That Matter: Traffic, Engagement, Conversion and Revenue Search, Social & Content Marketing Trifecta: Digital Branding & PR Managing Multiple Digital Channels: Finding The Perfect Mix Staying Ahead of Your Digital Competition: Share of Voice & Share of Market  

Business and Career Elevation Track

Gartner predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs. The success of digital marketing campaigns and the opportunity for marketers to obtain career advancement hinge on mastery of People, Process, and Technology. Developing skill sets and digital acumen across these three areas is critical for marketers who want to develop into leaders and drive overall business performance. The Business and Career Elevation Track focuses on case studies and real-world examples of business and professional transformation. Organizational leaders and departmental heads will share insights and tips on how you can transition from online practitioner to cross-functional, organizational leader. The Digital Marketing Maturity Model: People, Process & Technology Creative Storytelling & Evangelizing Success: Selling Ideas and Building Business Cases Digital Career Success Stories: From Practitioner to Organizational Leader The Digital Marketing Mind: The Psychology of Self Development Organizational Design: Building Digital Centers of Excellence Building an Extended Team: Working with Agencies and Contractors  

Additional Sessions 

The Share16 team will also be adding additional sessions (x3) based on demand over the coming months. Stay tuned for further speaker and session updates throughout July! Note: final session titles subject to change at the discretion of BrightEdge and the speakers. Partner hands-on labs feature practical experience using the partner’s technology to help solve your marketing challenges. Monday Evening: Welcome Reception Network with BrightEdge executives and strategic partners showcasing cutting edge solutions that assist you in elevating performance. Drinks and light appetizers will be served. Solutions Showcase Learn more about the latest products and services from BrightEdge and partners. Monday Night: Dine-Arounds Experience the vibrant San Francisco restaurant scene and start the dialogue with like-minded peers at Share16 dine-arounds.

Tickets are limited – Book your place alongside the Worlds best brands now!

To avoid disappointment (tickets are limited), we highly recommend you register now and book your place in the Share community.

Register for Share16

Venue Details October 24 to 26, 2016 Westin St. Francis, Union Square, San Francisco

Thank you to our Share16 sponsors

Gold Sponsor: 97^th Floor is a digital marketing agency fueled by creativity and innovation. They truly believe that in a digital world companies are only limited by their imaginations. They thrive in ideation, creation, and execution. A full-service team that understands the connection between content and customers.

Silver Sponsors: Majestic – With a track record of trusted and reliable data, Majestic is the biggest and freshest backlink database which can help you bridge the gap to your competitors. Search Laboratory – A global customer acquisition agency, helping clients grow internationally through SEO, SEM, Online PR, Social Media and Programmatic Display in 20+ languages. BFO (Be Found Online) – An international team of digital marketing experts. We specialize in delivering results through Search, Display, Content Marketing, Social Media and Analytics. Revana Digital – Revolutionizing performance marketing through our ability to unite omni-channel audience data to create actionable insights and maximize results for enterprise clients. Noble Studios – An award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in web design and development, online marketing, social media, and analytics. Merkle – The nation’s largest and fastest-growing performance marketing agency. Employing data-driven strategies, Merkle combines marketing, technical, analytical and creative disciplines to offer integrated customer relationship management strategy and customer marketing solutions.

Be a Part of Share16 - For All the Right Reasons

Share16 is a top rated conference, according to both Forbes and Inc. Magazine. This 6th annual digital marketing event brings together the highest concentration of search, content and digital brand marketers and industry thought-leaders.

These highly motivated individuals return year after year for the solid lessons they learn, the innovative ideas they take away, and the awesome people they meet.

Here are the main reasons why Share conference attendees keep coming back:

• Reason #1: Elevate Performance with Actionable Strategies
• Reason #2: Attain Platform Expertise with BrightEdge University
• Reason #3: Advance Your Company AND Your Career
• Reason #4: Connect with Other Leading Digital Marketers

Early Bird Rates expire on June 30th - Register Now and save up to $600!

         

 

No other event in the industry offers this level of insight for brands to implement ideas right away at their own companies. That’s because Share focuses on practical, hands-on insight, not theory, targeted to the challenges that your brand faces and aimed to help you elevate personal and professional performance. At Share 16 you’ll get tips from brands and marketers just like you who have experience and results implementing strategy. This is different from other events that put just “personalities” on stage. All content created at Share16 is objectively driven with a “zero tolerance” policy for subjective material or sales pitches to maximize value for participants.

“Be Inspired, Drive Performance”

As Share15 approaches, we’re doubling down on our efforts to spread the word on content performance marketing. With content in mind, we’re excited to extend an invitation to our upcoming Twitter chat!

Follow #ContentBattleground on September 3rd at 11am PDT to see Share15 speakers from brands, like Cabela’s, The Home Depot, VMWare and Stone Temple Consulting (and a few big-brand special guests!) discuss and answer questions on all things related to content performance marketing. And don’t forget your own questions! We want to hear from you. The session will be moderated by Amberly Dressler of Website magazine.

So why #ContentBattleground? With brands opening microsites, producing how-to videos, and even opening their own publishing houses, content marketing has never been more prevalent — and essentially more competitive. As more and more brands invest in content, the landscape becomes increasingly crowded: a true content battleground.

But it’s not enough to just show up and stake your claim anymore — with more and more competitors entering the landscape, brands are finding that they have to fight amongst each other for share of voice. That’s where content performance marketing comes into play. While churning out content and spreading it around haphazardly may have worked once, the game has changed. For the best shot at success, marketers need their strategies to be powered by data-driven insights. When they see where they stand, where their competitors stand and where the opportunity areas are, they can develop a clear plan of attack that will lead to victory.

We look forward to discussing the Ins and Outs of the #ContentBattleground with you during our Twitter chat. And to continue the conversation, don’t forget to register for Share15, where we’ll have dozens of sessions and hands-on labs that can continue to arm you with information to help you find success on the content battleground.