those page rankings translate into traffic and, ultimately, “conversions” (purchases, newsletter signups, or whatever BrightEdge’s client values as and end result).
This can help companies document the effect of relatively small changes in content. “We worked with a SaaS [software as a service] company that wrote all of their marketing materials to focus on the term ‘on demand,'” Yu recalls. “They had this software product–let’s just say for the sake of the example that it was for expense management—and they were calling it ‘expense management on demand.’ But that is not where its prospects were.” It turned out (to continue with Yu’s disguised example) that the company could attract far more organic search traffic simply by describing its product as expense management software.
Another “completely new” capability that BrightEdge offers, according to Yu, is its “competitive keyword map.” The company tracks not just the search rankings of its own clients’ pages but those of its clients’ competitors. Meanwhile, it uses a proprietary combination of proxy variables to estimate the volume of competitors’ search-generated traffic. It displays all that information in colorful graphs that show how a client’s site is performing relative to those of its competitors in terms of the search traffic volume resulting from specific keywords.
“It’s an extremely powerful technology,” Yu boasts. He says a large online travel company used BrightEdge’s maps to identify keywords that it hadn’t even realized its competitors were using. By optimizing certain of its own pages to use those same keywords, the travel company saw a 40 percent increase in revenue from those pages over six months.
A final ingredient in BrightEdge’s package is its SEO management system. This is a tool that enables marketing officers who need to manage sites with thousands of pages to truly track performance across all those pages and coordinate optimization efforts. “In organic search, anybody who touches the website impacts SEO, so as the SEO manager, you have to get results through collaboration,” Yu says. “So this is really the first time where you have everybody in the company—the SEO guys, the community guys, the PR guys, the product marketing managers writing white papers—collaborating in an enterprise to actually execute.”
But even with all this power under BrightEdge’s hood, Yu says he’s aware that his company and other SEO players have an uphill battle to fight when it comes to public perceptions. All that snake oil, after all, can give an industry a bad name.
That’s part of the reason BrightEdge spent three years in stealth mode, Yu says. The company invested that much time because it wanted to build a reliable platform and prove its worth with an initial group of beta customers. “We are all about creating a lot of value for our customers, and that is very different than what has traditionally happened out there,” Yu says. “When you look at e-mail marketing, in the early days it had a poor reputation as well, but over time, as it moved from the fringes to the mass market, you have companies that have turned it into enterprise-class platforms like Exact Target and Constant Contact. That’s a natural evolution.”
Toward the end of our interview, I let my cynicism get the better of me, and suggested to Yu that in the end, both black-hat and white-hat SEO consultants are working against consumers’ best interest. All of them, I reasoned, are out to manipulate the supposedly unbiased organic search results that Web surfers see at Google, Bing, and other engines in their clients’ favor. Not surprisingly, Yu disagreed.
“That’s not at all how we look at it,” Yu says. “Our mission is to help customer connect with their audiences.” He compares BrightEdge’s service to the algorithms that Google employs to make sure that the most relevant ads, rather than simply the most lucrative ones, pop to the top of its AdSense listings.
“In this new era of online marketing, it’s not about the broad positioning, but how you connect with your audience—where are they, what keywords are they searching for, what content do you give them,” he says. “When you connect those dots you are complementary to the search engines. We believe that’s a very valuable mission that’s good for the marketers, for the search engines, and for search users.”
