Our CEO, Jim Yu, was part of a thought-provoking panel at the Search Insider Summit 2012 in Florida in late April. The discussion, involving some of the best minds in marketing, describes obstacles to attribution and suggestions on managing these obstacles. We strongly recommend watching the video of this very engaging discussion.

If you are new to the world of attribution, you can read the quick primer below. If you know it all, you may want to skip to the bottom and see the video.

Attribution = which channels get credit and how much?

As users, we consult multiple information sources across channels and devices before we make a purchase online. Let me walk you through a real example of how I recently bought my beloved Brooks B17 bicycle saddle/seat. Note that what you see below is a super-simplified version of the steps I took to buy the Brooks seat:

• Searched on smartphone – I used the default Google Search on my Android to search for ‘touring saddles’.
• Clicked first organic result – The first result was a discussion forum site where the consensus was that that ‘Brooks B17’ was best for bicycle touring. I decide to buy it.
• Called vendor and made purchase – I also see an REI display ad on the forum site advertising a deal on the Brooks B17. I call the toll-free number in the ad and buy the saddle for $140 by phone.

In a world of perfect attribution, REI would know exactly how much influence the 3 channels (Google Search on Android, display ad on bike forum site and phone) exerted on the sale. REI would have answers to questions like ‘What prompted the purchase?’, ‘Was it directly related to the ad or was it a combination of factors that drove the purchase?’ and ‘How much dollar credit does each channel get?’. Such insight enables marketers to measure the ROI they are getting from each channel, understand what campaigns are paying off and what aren’t, and know where to spend. That’s attribution in a nutshell!

What blocks attribution?

The video below actually talks about an exhaustive and arguably discouraging list of issues blocking attribution. Here is a sneak preview of these issues, which can be summed up by ‘obstacles to truly integrated digital marketing’:

• Technological – Tracking user activity across multiple channels on different types of devices is challenging. Many marketers use more than one technology to track these, and consolidating them to get a single view of what drove conversions is not easy.
• Data issues – An interesting perspective that came up in the discussion is that we have too much data available to us due to which we may be over analyzing everything to death.
• Structural and organizational - Despite the fact that user behavior has evolved and spans many channels (search, paid, display, phone, email), budgets and teams are siloed by channel. Also, marketers might not have the incentive to understand attribution outside their areas of responsibility.

There are best practices in attribution

Don’t let the hurdles above discourage you – the distinguished gentlemen in the video below have several great ideas to overcome them. We do have a strong point of view on this topic, which Jim Yu does talk about during the discussion, and best practices on getting there. All this is based on real results our customers achieved by tracking attribution in a pragmatic manner. We’ll save that for another day. For now, enjoy the panel discussion!

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For those of you following our blog, you’ll notice that we covered these stories in detail in earlier blog posts –  Managing PPC and SEO together for higher conversions and Tiny Prints and Feeding America boost rank and traffic with Twitter. The session is not a straight-up rehash of these posts – while Brad does touch upon these success stories, he also gives more context on how it reflects the changing nature of search in general. You’ll hear us talk more about that (and often)!

The world of social media saw a huge milestone this week – Facebook hit 900 million monthly users. Combine that with 340 millions Tweets per day, 1.6 billion daily Twitter search queries and billions of users across other networks and you end up with a massive opportunity for marketers. Marketers have been quick to respond by engaging users across  these networks but questions about the impact of social media persist. Does social media activity improve marketing results? If yes, how and how much? How can I show ROI on social media efforts? How can I integrate social media campaigns with everything else in marketing, including search? Read this post for answers!

Let’s first dispense with the fundamental question – does social media make a difference to marketing?

Yes, social media makes a difference – ask Tiny Prints and Feeding America!

You may have seen the MediaPost coverage of the joint study by BrighteEdge and Twitter about Tiny Prints’ 47% increase in organic search rankings and Feeding America’s 2.5X bump in traffic, both using Twitter. Clearly, social media has an impact and we’ll look at best practices to get the most out of social, specifically Twitter, in this post. We will also look at the specific BrightEdge tools that helped Tiny Prints and Feeding America make use Twitter to get real results.

Many thanks to Twitter for working with us on this study, and to Tiny Prints and Feeding America’s marketing agency Performics for choosing to partner with us and giving us insight into their sophisticated marketing capabilities!

Apply basic marketing principles to succeed with Twitter

The Tiny Prints and Feeding America success stories highlight the power of marketing ‘basics’. Nothing is rocket science here and you’ll agree when you see the pillars of their success below:

• Set targeted goals for Twitter activity
• Identify how Twitter will drive rank, traffic
• Uncover page and keyword opportunities
• Deliver the right message through Tweets

Note: The leading agency Performics manages digital marketing for Feeding America. All the actions and decisions related to Feeding America described below were taken by Performics.

Step 1 – Set targeted goals for Twitter activity

Both TinyPrints and Feeding America were clear about the role of Twitter in marketing.

Tiny Prints pursued higher organic rank

Tiny Prints wanted to bridge the gap between search and social. It translated this vision-like statement into the specific goal of improving rank for targeted pages and keywords, using Twitter. Conversion rates increased exponentially with rank  and using Twitter to improve rankings  not only made business sense but also helped measure the return on Twitter activity.

Feeding America aimed for greater traffic through Tweets

Feeding America, on the other hand, eyed higher traffic because it historically led to greater conversions (donations and volunteer signups). Feeding America’s goal was specific – improve traffic for pages oriented towards specific keywords/trending Tweets.

Step 2 – Identify how Twitter will drive rank, traffic

Tiny Prints recognized that sharing pages through Twitter is good for SEO

Tiny Prints was clear about the chain of events that would potentially lead to higher rankings for targeted pages and keywords:

• Tiny Prints would engage users by Tweeting relevant content (see next section) related to its pages and keywords
• User engagement would trigger social sharing through Tweets and Re-tweets
• The sharing would result in higher rankings for those pages and keywords

Feeding America believed Twitter sharing leads to direct site traffic

Feeding America had a similar idea of using Twitter engagement to achieve its goals. The difference was that Feeding America had an eye on site visits directly through Tweets and not necessarily through search engines.

Step 3 – Uncover page and keyword opportunities

TinyPrints and Feeding America both recognized that engaging users through Tweets presented opportunities. They also understood that discovering these opportunities amounted to identifying the site pages and keywords that influenced the content of the Tweets. However, they had a different approach towards identifying opportunities.

Tiny Prints scanned competition to uncover opportunities

Tiny Prints uncovered opportunities through competitive analysis :

• It zoomed in on pages which could potentially outrank competition through Twitter activity for the pages, using BrightEdge S3.
• The key was to look for those pages which were similar to competitor pages in every way aspect except the number of Tweets.
• The example below shows the West Virginia Mountaineers merchandise page on the sports merchandise site Fans Edge. This page is ranked 10 on Google and is similar in most respects to the pages ranking 1 through 9 (not shown). However, it has no Tweets and increasing Tweets for this page presents an opportunity.

Feeding America looked towards user interest for new opportunities

Feeding America saw opportunity in discovering topics that matter to users and Tweeting about them:

• It sought to identify the hunger-related topics that mattered to its users and for which it has high-quality site content.
• It used the Twitter Keyword Volume tool in BrightEdge S3 to identify trending Tweets containing keywords that Feeding America tracked.
• The Twitter Keyword Volume tool also automatically identified pages on Feeding America’s site that were already oriented towards the trending topics.
• Now, Feeding America knew the topics that mattered to its audience as well as the pages on its site which were right for promoting on Twitter.

Step 4 – Deliver the right message through Tweets

The key outcome of the previous step for both Tiny Prints and Feeding America was knowing which pages could be promoted on Twitter and the keywords that mapped to these pages. The next step was logical – reach out to users through Tweets which contained the following elements:

• Target keywords(Tiny Prints) or keywords related to trending Tweets (Feeding America)
• The URL of page which was related to these keywords

Results

The Twitter activity achieved the desired results for Tiny Prints and Feeding America.   Tiny Prints saw a 300% rise in user engagement which, in turn, improved the average rank across keywords for targeted pages by 47%. This was over a four week period. Feeding America’s users responded positively to the Tweets since the content of the Tweets ( keywords and pages) matched their interests. This resulted in a 2.5X improvement in traffic for the pages mentioned in the Tweets.

Needless to say…

Here are some guiding principles that Tiny Prints and Feeding America religiously followed – very basic but so critical to their success that calling them out is worth it.

Let data be your guide

Both Tiny Prints and Feeding America took a close look at data at every step of the way:

• Tiny Prints scanned the competitive environment to identify pages which stood a good chance of outranking competition through Twitter activity.
• Feeding America took a close look at their users to identify topics/keywords that were relevant to them as well  its own cause.
• Both companies kept  a close watch on the correlation between their Twitter activity and rankings/traffic.

Use technology to enable you

Technology is not the be-all end-all of digital marketing. But it does enable you when it presents the right insight – so you can spend time on making the right decisions driven by data without relying on guesswork.

• Tiny Prints used BrightEdge S3’s competitive intelligence capabilities to identify pages that could benefit from Twitter.
• Feeding America used Twitter Keyword Volume tool within BrightEdge S3 to identify trending Tweets and spot the best pages oriented towards those keywords.
• Both used BrightEdge S3 for monitoring success of their efforts by correlating Tweets with rankings (see chart below) and traffic.

Communicate and collaborate

Tiny Prints stated what’s in the hearts and minds of most digital marketing organizations –  reaching that elusive integrated marketing utopia. Whether or not this is a stated goal for you, there are synergies in making search and social work together. If you want to explore these synergies, close cooperation between the two teams is essential.

Summary

Twitter can make a huge difference to marketing. Tiny Prints and Feeding America proved it by achieving a 47% increase in average ranking for targeted pages and keywords, and a 2.5X increase in traffic respectively. It takes careful planning, meticulous execution, reliance on data and close cooperation to get these results. Hope you found this post useful!

Hot on the heels of receiving our recent patent for the unique competitive analysis technology BrightEdge Share of Voice, we are proud to announce that BrightEdge is now part of the highly-selective Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. We are the only SEO company in this exclusive club, and we are honored and humbled to be recognized by Facebook for our leadership, and unique search and social marketing applicatons (hence, the lens on ‘Apps’ in badge above).  In this post, we will explain what the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) is all about, why we were selected and how our customers will benefit.

What is the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Program?

• Facebook aims to help brands succeed in social marketing – The ultimate goal of the Facebook® PMD Program is to help brands get higher return from social marketing. Facebook seeks to enable brands in their efforts to develop social campaign strategies, execute them, and measure and boost results in a data-driven manner.
• Connecting brands with marketing leaders is key – Facebook® PMD Program identifies experts in social marketing and connects brands with them so that brands can lean on their expertise and make social marketing work for them. Through a rigorous selection process, Facebook identified experts proven to deliver solutions in Facebook Page Management, Ad Management, Apps and Insights.
• Facebook® PMD Program enables members – An integral part of the Facebook® PMD Program is to provide members with exclusive access to Facebook APIs/interfaces. Access to this technology will help them develop social marketing solutions that have wide adoption while also meeting specific needs of industries, markets and geographies.
• Close partnership with Facebook lies at the heart of the program – Facebook® PMD Program membership is not just about API access. It signifies a collaborative relationship with Facebook to ensure that brands always have access to the latest technologies as social marketing evolves. In our case, program membership open a new chapter in our already strong ties with Facebook – Facebook uses BrightEdge S3 for SEO, and our innovative marketing solutions BrightEdge Facebook® Social SEO and BrightEdge SocialSite Audit were built in collaboration with Facebook.

Why were we chosen to be a part of this program?

• Recognition of our leadership - BrightEdge is the only SEO company to be a part of the Facebook® PMD Program. Membership in this program is a recognition of our leadership, with the first ever patent in SEO for BrightEdge Share of Voice, $12.6M in series C financing, opening of global office locations, and 400% revenue growth in 2011.
• First to tie SEO and Facebook – We were the first company to address the increasingly social nature of search. With BrightEdge Facebook® Social SEO, we gave brands visibility into the impact of Facebook® Shares and Likes on SEO(shown below), for themselves and competition. We also helped brands boost rankings and traffic for their Facebook® pages through detailed recommendations on optimizing their Facebook pages. We are proud to share that we built these technologies in partnership with Facebook. Learn more about managing search and social together in the white paper jointly published by BrightEdge and Facebook – ‘Facebook for Social SEO – Best practices to drive organic search performance with Facebook’.

• First to enable Open Graph compliance – We recognized early on that complying with Facebook Open Graph guidelines presented a huge opportunity for driving website traffic and conversions through social sharing on Facebook. BrightEdge SocialSite Audit helps marketers easily comply with Open Graph best practices by assessing compliance for entire sites including all pages and page templates (shown below), prioritizing list of issues to address based on the value of impacted pages and ensuring compliance on an ongoing basis.

What does this mean for our customers?

At the cost of being repetitive, we’d like to reiterate that commitment to customer success is our core value. The litmus test of everything we do and achieve is whether it has a real impact on our customers. We are excited about being part of the Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer Program because we firmly believe that it delivers real business results to our customers.

• Innovations that meet your evolving needs – The world of search and social marketing changes rapidly. Being part of a program led by a marketing pioneer like Facebook ensures that we will have a pulse on the shifts in social marketing. More importantly, the membership guarantees a close partnership with Facebook and access to the technologies that address your evolving needs in this area. Know that our Program membership will only make our existing Social and Social SEO solutions even stronger while opening the door for more such innovations.
• Assurance that you partner with the proven leader in SEO – Facebook® Preferred Marketing Developer Program membership requires a rigorous selection process to establish expertise in digital marketing as well as thought leadership. Being anointed by Facebook is a huge deal and it really speaks to our stellar record and our ability to deliver digital marketing solutions that help our customers succeed, now and in future!

BrightEdge Share of Voice is the market share of search

BrightEdge Share of Voice is the market share of search. It tells you how you stack up against your top competitors when it comes to occupying search real estate. BrightEdge Share of Voice is calculated using a proprietary algorithm that factors in variables such as ranking and number of keywords ranked, among others.The chart below shows the BrightEdge Share of Voice for our website www.brightedge.com against our top competitors on Google.

BrightEdge Share of Voice gives you the most insightful competitive intel

While the math behind BrightEdge Share of Voice is definitely innovative, it’s the stunning insight into competitive performance and strategies that makes it one of the most powerful and popular tools in our customers’ SEO playbook.

• Discover who you compete with – Most customers track a handful of known competitors. But it is common that there are other players eating into SERPs without their knowledge. BrightEdge Share of Voice ensures you don’t overlook or miss any competitors by showing you the search share for all the top competitors, including those you don’t track or are not aware of. In the chart above, the good news is that www.brightedge.com does have the maximum Share of Voice for brand terms, which is expected. However, it is obvious that our website is competing with sites such as www.yoname.com and www.bizreport.com. These were not on our radar before we ran the BrightEdge Share of Voice report and it was quite a revelation to see the entire competitive landscape.

• Get granular and segment competition – Companies have different competitors for different products, product categories, services, brands and geographies. BrightEdge Share of Voice discovers exactly who you compete with for each of your keywords and keyword groups, which most marketers map on to specific offerings, brands and geographies. The previous chart measures the Share of Voice for our keyword group ‘Branded’ which consists of brand-related keywords such as ‘brightedge’, ‘bright edge’, ‘brightedge s3′, ‘s3′, ‘birhgtedge’, ‘Sites.Search.Social’, ‘Sites Search Social’.

• Get deep insight into competition’s SEO strategies - BrightEdge Share of Voice allows marketers to dig deeper into  SEO strategies of all your competitors because it collects detailed info on the pages that they are ranking for. How are their on-page optimizations? What is their backlink strategy? What other keywords are they ranking on? BrightEdge Share of Voice gives you all the answers.

• Take real action to outrank competition – Discovering who you compete across products, geographies and brands is great. Knowing how they manage SEO is even better. Acting on this intel to win is, to quote a cliche, priceless! With BrightEdge S3, marketers can translate competitive intelligence into actions that leads to results by viewing recommendations, implementing them using powerful workflow and automatically tracking performance in real-time.

To net it all out, Share of Voice tells you who your competition is for each keyword and keyword group, calculates your search share against them and gives you unprecedented insight into their SEO strategies. Share of Voice is like the market share of search, on steroids.

Why did we patent it?

We are fortunate to be the global leader in enterprise SEO, with over 2000 brands using  BrightEdge S3 to win at SEO. A large part of our success is due to our technology leadership and innovation. BrightEdge Share of Voice is one of the most popular and powerful innovations in the  platform. Our customers can be assured that, with our patented technology, they have the edge to win at search engine optimization. In addition, patenting BrightEdge Share of Voice educates the market on what Share of Voice in SEO really means and helps marketers see through the layers of jargon when the term ‘Share of Voice’ is used in this context.

Firefox now uses Google Secure Search By Default

Back in October 2011, Google announced that users logged into Google would see their organic queries default to secure search. In other words, for the portion of visitors that are logged into Google and coming to your site from a query on google.com, you will only get the information that the visitor came through an organic search. What you won’t get are the words that they searched on with Google.

Now, searches using Firefox’s built-in features, such as its search box, will be done via secure search. Therefore, when a user visits your site, the exact search term used will be known only to Google and the user if the user is signed into Google and/or uses Firefox Google search. Notable exceptions are Google AdWords and Google Webmaster Central users. Let’s save that discussion for another day.

The number of secure searches is significant

The percentage of secure search referrals is increasing rapidly. Our clients across industries have 15-25% of their traffic coming in through secure search. You can see a few examples from different industries below:

Secure searches do not affect your rankings or optimizations

Secure searches have no impact on rankings. If you are a BrightEdge S3 user, all ranking reports continue to be unaffected. Recommendations, Tasks, Share of Voice and other SEO analysis provided by BrightEdge S3 are also not impacted.

Secure searches affect insight into user behavior at keyword level

The increasing number of secures searches does  affect visibility into why users are searching for you and how they are coming to your site. Previously, web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, Webtrends and Coremetrics attributed metrics such as conversions, traffic and revenue to individual keywords or keyword groups. You could identify the organic search keyword that drove every one of the visits on your site.

With secure search, SEO marketers can not attribute all the site traffic to individual keywords. This means that the reported traffic (and not the actual traffic) from those keywords decreased while the site traffic attributed to unknown keywords increased.

It is important to note that secure search does not affect reporting at an aggregate or page level i.e. total traffic to the site remains the same and so does the traffic for each page.

Measuring the impact of secure searches

Secure search referrals cannot be ignored. While they do not affect rankings directly, they do impact search marketers’ understanding of why and how users come to their site. Fortunately, the impact of rising number of secure searches can be mitigated and here are some suggestions:

• No impact on top level reporting – There is absolutely no impact on top level metrics that report “total organic searches”.
• Adjust all keyword level metrics –  The metrics associated with the individual keywords will be artificially lower. We recommend adjusting the traffic, page views, conversions, orders, revenue upwards for each keyword. The adjustment factor varies on diversity of the target segments and products.
  • Sites fairly focused in terms of products and target segment – Increase web analytics metrics such as traffic and conversion by a percentage equal to the proportion of secure searches. If the percentage of secure searches is 25%, increase the metrics for each keyword by 1/(1-0.25). This assumes that secure searches are evenly distributed across all searches – brand, non brand, day of week – which is a  reasonable assumption for sites focused in terms of products and target segment.
  • Sites with a broad variety of products and diverse audience profile – When the products on a site or the audience demographic vary greatly, it might not make sense to increase the keyword-level metrics by the same percentage. We recommend classifying the site/pages by product type or audience profile, and applying a different adjustment to each bucket.
• Adjust brand vs non-brand keyword reports – While reporting on brand vs non-brand organic search analytics, create a third bucket for empty or “keyword unavailable” keywords. Otherwise, the secure searches will be added to the non-brand group and skew percentages.
• Monitor monthly – Monitor the % of secure referrals in your site monthly.

How to find the percentage of secure searches on your site

In Google Analytics:

• Go to Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic.  Select Source as your Primary dimension and drill down into Google.
• Select a secondary dimension, Traffic Source -> Keywords, and look for the keyword “not provided”.
• The ratio of visits from that keyword to the total visits is your percentage of secure searches.
• By changing the dates, you can then see how that percentages have changed over time.

In Adobe SiteCatalyst:

• Go to Traffic Sources -> Search Engines – Natural.
• Drill into the Google results by selecting Traffic Sources -> Search Keywords Natural  and look for the percentage associated with the keyword “keyword not available”.
• By changing the dates, you can then see how that percentages have changed over time.

Summary

• 15-25% of searches are secure - By looking at our customer base of 2000+ brands , we conclude that 15-25% of searches are secure.
• Ranking is not affected: Secure searches do not affect ranking. If you are a BrightEdge S3 user, ranking reports, recommendations, tasks and other SEO analysis is not affected.
• Visibility into user behavior is affected – Metrics like traffic can no longer be attributed to keywords so marketers have lesser visibility into why users come to their site.
• The effect of secure search can be partially managed – Make adjustments to metrics provided by your web analytics platform by increasing traffic, page views, conversions, orders and revenue to compensate for the queries which are not accounted for.

‘Managing’ in ‘managing paid and organic together’ is a rather loosely used term and it makes sense to boil it down to concrete goals and decisions:

1. Meet real business goals- Managing PPC and SEO together is a way to:
   1. Increase combined conversions from paid and organic – AND -
   2. Drive marketing ROI, i.e. more combined conversions per PPC dollar spent.
2. Take actionable decisions- Hitting these goals requires that you answer these questions:
   1. What keywords should be optimized for SEO and PPC?
   2. What are the right bid levels on the PPC keywords?

Paid And Organic Search Work Together At Loews Hotels

Let’s take a look at how the leading agency HeBS Digital managed paid and organic together for the luxury hotel group Loews Hotels to achieve outstanding revenue growth.

Increasing Combined PPC and SEO Revenue Was The Goal

Loews Hotels is a premier luxury hotel group in North America. Both paid and organic search programs drove online room bookings and were previously managed independently. HeBS Digital saw an opportunity to maximize Loews’ combined online room bookings from PPC and SEO by managing both together. HeBS Digital also sought to increase overall marketing ROI i.e. revenue from PPC and SEO per PPC dollar spent.

PPC-SEO Visibility Was Key

HeBS Digital chose BrightEdge S3 to manage SEO and SearchCenter+ for handling paid programs for Loews Hotels. The tight integration between the two platforms enabled integration between site traffic, conversions and paid data with organic performance, and view them side-by-side for the entire keyword portfolio. The marketing team could look at this data for the Loews Hotels’ primary search engines, Google and Bing, across all search markets in North America.

An Iterative Process Helped Translate Visibility Into Results

With visibility into SEO and PPC for all keywords, HeBS Digital devised a 6-step process to use this visibility to drive real revenue.

1. Start small by focusing on few keywords — Choose a single site/domain and a small keyword sample to assess the impact of bidding strategies before wider roll out.
   
2. Identify SEO winners – Identify top SEO keywords that also have high PPC ad spend.
   
3. Cut PPC spend for SEO winners – Reduce PPC bids by more than 50% for the top-ranked SEO keywords.
   
4. Shift ad spend to low performing keywords – Use ad spend savings to increase PPC spend on keywords with poor PPC and SEO performance.
   
5. A/B test impact on total conversions – Measure total conversions and revenue resulting from new PPC bid rules.
   
6. Extend to all keywords – If combined PPC and SEO revenue from Step 5 above increases, apply Steps 1 through 5 for all keywords, sampling few keywords at a time; add more domains.
   

Results

The client saw a 63% higher combined revenue, 44% greater combined ROI and 120% bump in conversions for targeted keywords.

Best Practices

1. Be clear about the goal – The primary benefit of managing paid and organic together is higher total conversions from PPC and SEO, and a higher ROI.
2. It’s not about reducing ad spend – An extension of #1 above, the goal is not to lower PPC spend but to get more from the same level of PPC spend. In the example above, Loews saw a marginal increase in PPC spend but a huge increase in PPC revenue (45%).
3. Communicate and Collaborate – Needless to say, paid and organic search teams need to collaborate in this effort. From what we observed across clients, communicating openly about the goals paves a smoother path to working together closely.
4. Identify key questions you will need to answer – Keep an eye on the questions you need to answer – what keywords should be optimized for PPC and SEO, what are the right bid levels such that conversions are maximized?
5. Çhoose the right technology- Your choice of PPC and SEO technologies should satisfy the following criteria:
   1. Best-of-breed platforms proven to have data you can trust.
   2. Platforms that play well together by making this data available within each other’s platform seamlessly without loss of data quality.
   3. Support for all engines and geographies that matter to you.
   4. Proven to deliver results, individually and together.
6. Define an iterative process – Having all the visibility is futile unless paid and organic search teams define an iterative process driven by collaboration and testing. Implement the process over a small sample of keywords on a single domain, test and re-test, and roll out only after you see good results for this sample.

To get a copy of the Loews case study, please visit http://www.brightedge.com/seo-omniture-integration. If you are an Adobe SearchCenter+ customer, you can also sign up for a free 200-keyword promo of BrightEdge Express.

1. Public web listings
2. Public Google+ posts and photos, Picasa photos
3. Private Google+ posts and photos, Picasa photos

We keep a close eye on changes in search and help you respond right away. The summary below describes how this update affects marketing and what you can do to capitalize on this update.

What this means for marketing

• Social matters even more

  Social’s impact on search has been discussed for a while, and the update reinforces it’s influence on rankings and brand. Google+ content such as posts, pages and photos will feature prominently in search results, and the importance of social as a ranking factor will continue to rise over time. For marketers, this is a powerful way to drive SEO performance and brand image.

• SEO scope expands

  SEO continues to expand – it is both more segmented and more integrated across digital channels. SEO success now requires a unified strategy that spans both websites as well as social media presence. This strategy requires integrated analytics, integrated content, and a unified user and search engine experience. SEOs must also begin to optimize social channels for search engines.

• Impact varies across segments

  While the impact will likely affect many segments over time, searches with heavy personality-driven keywords (entertainment, politics and sports) or strong customer facing brands (cars, consumer electronics and games) will see more Google+ content sooner.

• Universal search evolves

  Universal search has been present for some time, but the source of content displayed has changed. This may mean that previous content no longer displays in the same prominence as before – marketers will see competition from content within their users’ social networks.

How you can navigate these changes

• Create or optimize your Google+ page

  If you don’t have a Google+ page, please create one. If you have a Google+ page, optimize your site to reinforce your Google+ page and vice versa.

• Unify site, search and social strategy

  Make sure there is a coherent, integrated plan between the three different channels that includes integrated analytics and messaging. It’s also important to create a unified “search engine” experience—make sure that Google and other engines see and show the consistent messaging and content.

• Manage site, search and social together

  Understanding the relationship between the three channels in a changing market is critical. We recommend creating a single dashboard with visibility across channels; be sure to include universal, social and keywords specific to Search Plus Your World. Analyze your keywords to identify the value and importance from different channels, and prioritize.

• Assess universal search results

  Look at the universal search results and see if there are any major changes, positive or negative. Analyze keywords to determine their likelihood to be impacted by the change and build an improvement plan

]]> http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/google-%e2%80%9csearch-plus-your-world%e2%80%9d-and-you/feed/ 0 http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/brightedge-weekly-search-recap-122/ http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/brightedge-weekly-search-recap-122/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:57:11 +0000 Albert Gouyet http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/?p=923


1. “Minor” Google Panda Update On November 18th

 



Google tweeted that they have pushed out a minor update to the Google Panda algorithm this past Friday afternoon.The update impacts less than one-percent of searches, which is why Google labelled this a “minor” update.

2. 10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using

Over the past eight months, Google has steadily released one revolutionary new feature after another. On March 17, the company announced a new version of Google Analytics. Up until this point, users could decide whether they preferred to stick with the old interface or switch to the new one. However, Google recently announced that the old version of GA will be turned off in January 2012.

3. 10 Stats to Justify SEO

Have you seen the potential of SEO but are struggling to convince your boss or colleagues? You are not alone. SEO can often be viewed as a difficult, techy oddity, and not something that every company needs. Small-scale businesses often think they won’t benefit from spending money on online marketing.

4. SEO Salary Guide For Top 20 U.S. Markets [INFOGRAPHIC]

ONWARDsearch released and infographic yesterday called SEO Salary Guide: For Top 20 U.S. Markets that shows you which U.S. markets offer the highest number of SEO-related jobs and what the salary ranges for those markets are.

5. Beyond SEO: Retaining the Visitor

During SES Chicago, there was definitely a resounding theme. You have to think more about your visitor than you have in the past. It isn’t always about a throng of visitors. As I’ve worked to create a better and more meaningful user experience for my clients’ site visitors, I noticed that time and time again, my clients keep making simple mistakes that detract from what I call visitor retention.

6. 5 Powerful New Features to Leverage in YouTube Analytics [INFOGRAPHIC]

Yesterday, YouTube replaced Insight with the brand new YouTube Analytics. The new analytics tool, which is more robust than YouTube Insight, will provide detailed data regarding the audience and how that audience interacts with the video.

7. Cyber Monday 2011 Marks Biggest U.S. Online Spending Day in History

Cyber Monday 2011 was the heaviest U.S. online spending day in history, with the holiday season as a whole up 15 percent YoY to $15 billion this season-to-date. Average order values increased 2.6 percent and mobile traffic to retail sites are up 3.9 percent over the biggest online shopping day a year earlier, according to just-released reports from IBM, comScore, PayPal, and others.

8. Top 5 Considerations For International SEO

Considering a global expansion in 2012? Extending your web presence internationally can be challenging, especially without local resources at your disposal. But, with the right preparations it can be done. Understanding the basic principles of International SEO will ready you to enter a new foreign market successfully. Here are five critical considerations to account for prior to embarking on global SEO.

9. Infographic: Black Friday As Seen Through Foursquare Check-Ins

Black Friday is only three days away, and some people are already camping out in front of stores. Judging from Foursquare check-ins from last year in the US, peak shopping will happen at 2pm, Target & Best Buy will be swamped and department stores will be busiest.

10. Google: Parked Domains, Scraper Sites Targeted Among New Search Changes

In what’s now to be a monthly update on search changes, a new Google “Inside Search” blog post today tells us that life is getting tougher for those with parked domains, life may get better for those plagued by scraper sites and those hoping to “push down” negative listings may have a tougher challenge.

]]> http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/brightedge-weekly-search-recap-122/feed/ 0 http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/brightedge-weekly-search-recap-1118/ http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/brightedge-weekly-search-recap-1118/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:50:39 +0000 Albert Gouyet http://seo-blog.brightedge.com/?p=903 This week marketers get some advice from Siri, SES Chicago highlighted some exciting topics and the BrightEdge SocialShare looked into how brands are, or aren’t, adopting Google+ pages. Read on for more…
1. Using Social Media to Build Site Authority


The days of traditional website authority building are long gone. So many innovative channels have become available today that on the surface can make the task seem much easier but require hard work, dedication, and a lot of strategy, too.
2. PPC Optimization – Organize Into Tightly Themed AdGroups


So today I am organizing a PPC account.  This is an account that I took over from another agency.  The account has four different Campaigns with around seven different AdGroups throughout all the four different Campaigns.  In each of the AdGroups there are around 100 different keywords and keyword phrases.

3. Guilty, Hopeful, Clueless Marketers and the Need for Change



Guilty, Hopeful, Clueless Marketers and the Need for Change – #SESCHI 2011 Keynote
4. Siri, What Can You Teach Search Marketers?


I recently upgraded my phone to the iPhone 4S and, like everyone else, started playing around with the Siri feature. I noticed that as I used the feature and watched others use it, almost everyone was asking Siri questions.

5.  New on Google Analytics Landing Pages Report


At some point last week Google Analytics quietly released an apparently small change to its Landing Pages report (Content tab => Site Content => Landing Pages). This report was almost useless before this change and now it joins the list of the most useful reports on the tool. In a few words the change was simple: we can now link landing pages to goals, i.e. we can see the value of each landing page out of the box.
6. WordPress SEO: How to Optimize Your WordPress Site


WordPress has made it very easy for small businesses to have a website that is easy to update and maintain, but do you know how to optimize your WordPress site so that it has the best chance of appearing at the top of your customers’ search results?
7. How Casual Connections Can Boost Your SEO, Social Strategies


People love to feel connected to their friends without the burden of giving them their full attention. For example, my daughter has a Skype video call open with her best friend some nights while they both do their homework. Most of the time they don’t say anything to each other, and are simply doing their own thing. But, they are still there for each other. Connected, but their focus is on something else.
8. What’s In A Domain Name? Twitter Wants Twittter.com, Twittr.com



Twitter was recently successful in obtaining the domain name Twiter.com after filing a dispute with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and has apparently grown an appetite for more.
9. Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream


Unfortunately, there is this perception, almost bias, against automation in our space: a misbelief that there is nothing that we can set and forget
in SEO. Well, I am here today to free you from the reigns of some of your daily miseries of  SEO, all for the incredible price of free.



10. Google+ Pages Launch Increases Traffic, But Brands Struggle to Find Followers

Google launched the first iteration of its new Google+ Business Pages on November 7. The new Pages feature allows brands, products, companies, businesses, and organizations to build their very own tailored Google+ presence. This is Google’s latest gambit aimed at recruiting legions of entrenched Facebookers to the fledgling social platform.

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