Tag: BrightEdge

Is International SEO More Important Now?

Ranking in search engines, particularly Google, is not getting any easier, but how often are you considering the search engines around the globe? Many in the industry see international SEO as only gaining in importance.

Do you think it’s more important for marketers to optimize for different search engines around the world than it used to be? Share your thoughts in the comments.

A recent report from BrightEdge indicates that the majority of search marketers think that it is becoming more important for sites to rank in global search engines. According to the firm’s survey, six out of ten believe it will become either “more” or “much more” important this year, compared to last year. 36% said “more,” while 27% said “much more.”

“SEO marketers at global companies aspire to reach customers worldwide, and drive leads, revenue and traf!c through global SEO initiatives,” says BrightEdge in the report. “Looking beyond a single country also helps them demonstrate a greater ROI on marketing investments. Not only does this boost marketing ROI but also maintains global brand consistency while accommodating local nuances. A global concerted approach to SEO marketing addresses these needs.”

Respondents were specifically asked about Chinese search giant Baidu, with 31% saying it would be much more important to rank in Baidu in 2013, and 10% saying “much more important”.

“With roughly 540 million internet users, 900 million mobile users and 388 million mobile internet users, China is the world’s largest internet market,” says BrightEdge. “Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, is one of the most valuable gateways to this large internet user base.”

You can download the report in its entirety here. It deals with numerous topics, far beyond the topic of global SEO.

Another recent report (via MarketingCharts) from Covario found that Baidu generated three times more global paid search clicks than Yahoo/Bing in Q1.

“I no longer believe it makes sense for any company to roll out an international SEO programme to multiple countries without also having a PPC campaign in place,” writes WebCertain CEO Andy Atkins-Krüger in a post for Search Engine Land about multinational SEO. “In some cases, we would recommend leading with PPC and landing pages first, rather than full blown (and relatively expensive) international SEO.”

He adds, “There are a number of reasons why we recommend this, but one is that user satisfaction on your site can be measured much more quickly with PPC than with SEO. Behavior really matters — so if you can study it first and quickly with PPC, your SEO efforts later will work out to be much more successful. I do worry that the association of search engine warnings with SEO being ‘bad’ are beginning to stick with people who are newer to the industry, and therefore, SEO is having a health warning attached.”

Dave Davies has a great article on international SEO considerations at Search Engine Watch, in which he concludes, “While expanding one’s market is generally a good thing, what people often forget is that you still have to maintain what you have, so make sure you have the resources. Many wars have been lost simply by trying to fight them on too many fronts.”

“If you have just enough resources to dedicate to a successful SEO strategy in your own country, it doesn’t make sense to expand in that you’ll be drawing resources away from the strategy that’s keeping the lights on,” he adds. “You need to make sure it’s the right decision for your business and if it is, make sure that you’re picking the right strategies to maximize your odds of success in the shortest period of time.”

In your international optimization efforts, you may also want to keep in mind some recent changes Google has made to its indexing systems. They’re now treating some country-code TLDs differently in terms of geography vs. generic. The list will change over time, but right now, these are the ccTLDs Google is considering generic: .ad, .as, .bz, .cc, .cd, .co, .dj, .fm, .gg, .io, .la, .me, .ms, .nu, .sc, .sr, .su, .tv, .tk and .ws.

Are you increasing your focus on international SEO, or are you simply focusing on your own region? Let us know in the comments.

May 5, 2013
Google’s 7-Result SERPs Having A Bigger Effect On Sites Than Panda?

Google has been making it harder to get first-page rankings. That’s not just because all of the algorithm updates the search giant keeps launching, an increased emphasis on “answers” results, which require users to click over to other sites less often, and the addition of Google’s Knowledge Graph to search results. Sure, these things all come into play, but for more and more queries, Google has also been showing less traditional results altogether.

Google results pages have commonly and historically showed ten main organic results, but for a growing number of queries, that number has been reduced to seven. Specifically, this is happening on results pages in which the top result displays additional “sitelinks”. Here’s what Google has had to say about it (via Danny Sullivan):

“We’re continuing to work out the best ways to show multiple results from a single site when it’s clear users are interested in that site. Separately, we’re also experimenting with varying the number of results per page, as we do periodically. Overall our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given query as quickly as possible, whether it’s a wide variety of sources or navigation deep into a particular source. There’s always room for improvement, so we’re going to keep working on getting the mix right.”

Dr. Peter J. Meyers, President of User Effect, recently shared some interesting research at SEOmoz about this phenomenon, which seems to have begun in early to mid August.

Now, BrightEdge has put out some new research on the topic based on analysis of queries for 26,000 keywords. According to CEO Jim Yu, the effects from this are even greater than those of the Panda update.

In a piece sharing the firm’s analysis at Search Engine Land, he writes, “The percentage of keywords impacted is currently 8% across the industries we examined. This is significant, considering that a critical update like Panda affected 5% of searches.”

“We have found that the impact varies by industry,” he adds. “The Technology – B2B sector has 9.4% of its keywords affected, while Technology – B2C industry sees 12.1% keywords impacted. Financial Services industry has about 2.7% of keywords affected, and about 3.5% of keywords in Retail are impacted by this change.”

Even if a site’s rankings did not technically drop, a move from the first page to the second page in search can bring a significant barrier to visibility.

It’s interesting that Google has not brought infinite scroll to web search as it has to image search. You can get through ten pages of image results in no time with this feature. A simple click to another page may not seem like a huge step for a user, but it’s still an additional step. It seems like introducing this feature to web search would also go along with Google’s emphasis on increasing speed in search. It’s certainly faster to scroll down further than it is to click to another page. Yet, Google seems to be going in the opposite direction, and actually reducing the number of results on the page.

To be fair, Google usually does its job in returning the information needed on the first page (at least in my experience), and if you have to go past page one, perhaps Google is not doing its job. If you have to go deeper than seven results, even, it’s not doing that great a job. There is, however, a discoverability element that is eliminated, or at least impeded, by showing less results. Perhaps you found what you were looking for in the top results, but missed something that could have been equally helpful or interesting had you had a chance to see it.

Image: gigglecam (YouTube)

October 11, 2012
Google+ Pages Quickly Adopted By 61% of Top 100 Brands

61% of the world’s top 100 brands created pages within a week of Google’s recent Google+ Pages announcement, according to research from BrightEdge.

That’s good news for Google. Clearly the brand interest is there, and coupled with interest from celebrities, this should help user growth.

Still, interestingly enough, only about 13% of the brands that created pages displayed a link to them on their home page (the number is more like 53% for Facebook). That news isn’t quite as good for Google. It seems that the brands want to make sure they’re found on Google+ if people are looking, but aren’t too concerned about making sure all of their visitors know that their Google+ Page is a good place to follow them.

“In this early phase of a Google+ presence, brands appeared to be having mixed success at building social networks around their Google+ presence,” the firm says. “In fact, Google had the largest fan contingent of any brand on Google+, having attracted more than 65,000 fans. But other consumer brand stalwarts like Coke, McDonalds and Verizon had only dozens of fans, all just a shadow of the millions of Facebook fans these brands have already connected with.

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Of course, when you put in the amount of engagement displayed by the McDonald’s page, what can you really expect?

“Brands have been quick to embrace a presence on Google+, but clearly there is a long way to go in establishing social networks that really have scale and deep user engagement,” said BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu. “Now the real work begins for these brands if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+. And it will be interesting to see how these communication and marketing channels will grow in a way that remains meaningful for the world’s top brands.”

According to the research, 94% of the top 100 brands have a presence on Facebook. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s not 100% if these are really the top brands.

One more interesting point made is that Google+ pages on average appeared in the top 12 Google search results for the corresponding brand, while the brand’s Facebook pages appeared in the top 13 or 14.

Here are some Google+ page tips for your business.

November 16, 2011
Twitter Share Button Works Wonders for Content

BrightEdge released a new report looking at social share metrics around Twitter engagement and the use of social plugins around the web. It draws upon the firm’s analysis of over 4 million tweets and 10,000 of the largest sites on the web.

According to the report, pages that show Twitter share buttons get 7 times the social media mentions than sites that don’t. A spokesperson points out that this points to an “enormous social marketing opportunity that brands can implement immediately at almost no cost.”

Another finding is that about half of the largest 10,000 sites don’t display any kind of social sharing link or buttons at all, which is quite surprising.

53.6% display some social links or buttons on their front pages, up from 52.8% in late July.

“It’s clear that social sharing buttons can drive real social traffic that will inevitably drive sales, brand awareness or even affinity but it’s also clear that many brands are not taking advantage of this simple, cost free tool,” said BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu. “It’s surprising that with so much talk about social and clear consumer adoption, almost half of the web’s largest sites don’t take advantage at all of free social sharing tools.”

If you need any more convincing about the power of a retweet, read about this bet from a poultry enthusiast.

September 1, 2011