The BrightEdge New Year Release is Live

At BrightEdge we had a great 2014 and broke records across our business. Continuing the momentum, we kicked off 2015 on a high note with our New Year Release (live for customers last month). We could not be more thrilled to deliver over 20 new innovations all focused on your success.

The search and content marketing space is fast-paced, Google updates their algorithm more than 500 times each year. There’s plenty to keep up with: SERPs continue to change, new competitors continue to enter the scene, all the while many brands are operating at a global scale. Businesses want to be able to approach these challenges as opportunities for success, while ensuring their teams work in a productive, collaborative manner. Furthermore, businesses want the ability for flexible and accurate reporting across different time periods, with the ability to measure seasonal variances, and across Blended Rank.

We addressed all these suggestions (in fact over 100 customer feature ideas were addressed in this release) to ensure your organization is equipped with the technology necessary to succeed!

When partnering with BrightEdge, you’ve selected the leading Enterprise SEO Platform. When we say platform what we mean by that is that everything inside of BrightEdge works with everything else in BrightEdge. And with this release, we’ve further enhanced these capabilities with our new Keyword Reports. Every keyword group in the platform integrates with all the major modules in the platform, virtually every single chart can be added to a Dashboard in one click, and when you hover over metrics in a table, you can then navigate to other insights in the platform.

And, a platform is built for the enterprise. We have the privilege to work with some of the largest brands and agencies in world. To help support teams and organizations with multiple sites and brand properties, we’ve enhanced our Tasks & Events technology to make it easier than ever for agencies and big brands to drive value.

This release was our largest ever! In fact, our release summary was 22 pages long. Check out some of the highlights below:

Local 3-Pack and Quick Answers Reporting

Local 3 Pack

In November of last year, Google unveiled another major search innovation, a Local 3-Pack which appears below the paid listings, and above the standard organic listings. The Local 3-Pack affects hotel, restaurant, and entertainment brands. The Local 3-Pack replaces Carousel listings that appeared at the top of the SERP for hotels, restaurants, and entertainment brands (Carousel listings still appear for certain terms such as actors and movies).

On the heels of Google’s innovation, BrightEdge is excited to release innovative technology to measure the Local 3-Pack with Local 3-Pack Reporting, which enhances Blended Rank , an innovation introduced in June of 2012, which includes Carousel Reporting introduced in September, 2013.

Quick Answers

In the summer of 2013, Google introduced Quick Answers whereby it displays answers to questions typed in a search query. Examples include: How to cook quinoa, or How to get a power of attorney.

Quick Answers affects both B2B and B2C businesses across numerous verticals. Quick Answers listings appear below paid listings and above traditional organic listings in the SERP. BrightEdge is excited to release innovative technology to measure Quick Answers with Quick Answers Reporting.

Introducing BrightEdge Local 3-Pack & Quick Answers Reporting: Brands can understand their actual placement in the SERP inclusive of Local 3-Pack results and Quick Answers, uncover which of their search terms display Local 3-Pack results and Quick Answers, and where their competitors rank.

Uncover your actual placement in the SERP

Local 3-Pack & Quick Answers Reporting provides:

• Complete visibility – Track your performance in the Local 3-Pack, and/or Quick Answers as part of Blended Rank
• Local optimization – Gain insights necessary to optimize pages for revenue, traffic, and ranking
• Competitive footprint – Uncover which of your competitors rank in the Local 3-Pack and Quick Answers across all your tracked keywords
• Multiple-device support – Understand and optimize Local 3-Pack and Quick Answers performance on desktop, smartphone, and tablet

Why Local 3-Pack & Quick Answers Reporting Matters: Search Engine Results Pages have evolved to include image, local 3-pack, carousel, quick answers, video, social, and local results. Marketers now need to know the rank of their pages among all types of results. Metrics and strategies based on Blended Rank and not just text results alone are what marketers really need to succeed. BrightEdge is the first and only SEO platform to provide complete insight into Blended Rank, including the local 3-pack, and quick answers.

Contextual Recommendations powered by the Data Cube

New Contextual Recommendations help you stay ahead by leveraging Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), powered by the BrightEdge Data Cube.

What is LSI? Web content is crawled by search engines and the most common words and phrases are identified and assembled as the keywords for the page. LSI looks for synonyms related to the title of your page.

For example, if the title of your page was “Outdoor Furniture”, the search engine would expect to find words relating to that subject in the content of the page as well, i.e. “patio furniture”, “patio sets”, “patio umbrella”, “adirondack chairs” and “porch swing”.

Contextual Recommendations – What’s New: In Page Manager and Keyword Recommendations, users now have the ability to identify semantically-related topics they could consider including in their page content to improve SEO performance.

When a user drills into a recommendation, they will see a new button called “Content Analysis”. In this view, BrightEdge displays a list of semantically related keywords pulled from the Data Cube (by performing a Data Cube query for the primary keyword for a given page).

Contextual Recommendations provides:

• Powerful Insights – Tap into the power of the Data Cube to identify semantically related keywords
• Identify Low-Hanging Fruit – In the keyword table, identify keywords with low competition that you consider optimizing
• Actionable – Identify keywords that you’d like to mange, track, and assign tasks in BrightEdge

Why Contextual Recommendations Matter: Gain powerful recommendations for all your keywords in BrightEdge. Leverage the power of the BrightEdge Data Cube to identify semantically related keywords to rank well on a page in a search engine. Discover the critical factors that contribute to high rankings for your target keywords and pages so that you can determine the most effective strategies to deploy.

New Competitive Comparison Report

What’s New: We’ve introduced a new report that helps you track historical keyword performance across the competitive landscape. Answer questions such as: “I have a drop in my visibility on page 1 of Google, how has that change affected everyone in my competitive landscape?”

Compare performance across up to 10 competitors, and measure all the metrics below:

• Ranked on page 1, 1 & 2, 1-3
• Tweets, Facebook Likes
• Avg. Rank
• Across classic and Blended Rank, and by device type

Why the new Contextual Comparison Report Matters: Search is a zero sum game. As part of our platform capabilities, we’ve built the Competitive Comparison Report to help brands understand their Share of Voice across multiple metrics in one report. By expanding your view across 10 competitors you can gain a comprehensive picture of the entire competitive landscape.

New Search Volume Trend Report

What’s New: The Search Volume Trend Report, unique to BrightEdge helps you understand the historical seasonality of search demand for your keywords, and keyword groups – across search engines, and location.

Why it Matters: Investigate if demand is higher in specific regions for a specific product, for example you could find out if Jean Leggings have more demand in New York vs. San Francisco. You can also review performance from a specific time period this year, compared to last year, and explore the trailing 12 month average as a proxy for forecasting future demand.

Only BrightEdge allows you to compare search volume trends and seasonality by keyword groups.

Expanded Search Engine Coverage for 605 Search Engines

What’s New: BrightEdge continues to increase our search engine coverage by supporting 34 new global search engines across multiple device types (desktop, smartphone, and tablet). BrightEdge now supports 605 search engines in total (214 global and 391 local search engines).

Why it Matters: Global organizations need to maintain brand consistency, while taking into account local nuances and search preferences. An integrated global and local approach to search addresses these needs. With deep insights across 6 continents, 6 major search engines, 214 country/language/device, and 391 local/language/device combinations you have the ability to both manage SEO at scale globally as well as target locally.