Weekly Marketing Update: Google Kills Authorship & B2Bs Win in Organic Search
Google captures this week’s headlines, this time with its announcement that it is killing off “Authorship” in its search engine results pages, with limited exceptions. However, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan explains, Google’s “Author Rank” lives on, defining the distinction between the two.
In other news, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu reports at Marketing Land that B2B brands are seeing results in the form of traffic and revenue from the organic search channel, and discusses what brands should optimize for in the wake of Google’s “Pigeon” update over at Search Engine Watch.
From the BrightEdge blog, more live reporting from our Share 14 event, this time on mining data for SEO and content at scale; plus, BrightEdge’s Emily Alojado describes what makes BrightEdge’s corporate culture so successful.
Enjoy!
Content from the CEO
”B2B Marketers: Why Organic Content Is Your Weapon Of Choice” by Jim Yu
“B2B brands have embraced content marketing as a way to boost organic visibility and are seeing great results from their efforts,” writes BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu at Marketing Land.
Citing data from Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2014 B2B Content Marketing report, Jim states that 93 percent of B2B brands indicated that they were involved in content marketing heading into 2014, driving organic Web traffic primarily with articles and blogs.
New BrightEdge data from August shows B2B brands are gaining organic traffic and revenue from their content marketing efforts, with the overwhelming majority of Web traffic originating from organic search.
Referring to the data, Jim notes:
Only 39 percent of B2Bs surveyed in the CMI report expected content to lead to direct sales, yet BrightEdge research shows content in the organic search channel is driving real revenue. For B2Bs, the organic search revenue share was much higher than other sectors and proved to be more fruitful than other channels studied like paid search, display, email and social.
He concludes with how B2Bs can plan for even more effective content marketing results for 2015, saying that while quality content will continue to be a “prime marketing weapon,” it needs to be fueled by strategy and data , optimized such that your target market finds your brand’s content at the time they need it (i.e., Google’s “ Zero Moment of Truth ”).
”How Google Pigeon Impacted Local Queries, and What You Can Do” by Jim Yu
As previously reported by Seth Restaino and Sudhir Sharma on the BrightEdge blog, Google’s local search algorithm update (dubbed “Pigeon” by the analysts at Search Engine Land), released on July 24, made a considerable impact on several industry verticals – both positive and negative.
*Note that some of the queries were difficult to classify in the analysis, so the industry data by row does not add up to “all” data.
BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu further discusses the Pigeon update at Search Engine Watch, detailing queries that won and lost in the SERPs, as determined by the recent findings from the BrightEdgeData Cube analysis. He also notes that the results depicted may not be “definitive,” as “many are reporting a constant flux” in their Google Places and Google Web results.
He advises brands “not to panic,” but instead “continue to focus on the tried-and-true methods of local search that you’re used to.” Jim also notes several factors that brands should focus on, including:
- Hyperlocalization
- Local Carousel Optimization
- Good Ol’ Fashioned Local SEO
Content from the Bright Ideas Blog
”Mining Data for SEO and Content at Scale #Share14” by Jessica Lee
“Sure, you’ve got content – but how is it performing? Is it targeted to what our users are searching for? Is it producing results?” These are the questions opening up the coverage for the “ Mining Data for SEO and Content at Scale ” session from our Share 14 event .
This extraordinary Share 14 session featured brands like Adobe, OpenTable, Rosetta and SearchLaboratory, all of which presented case studies on how they used BrightEdge’s suite of tools to accomplish their tasks efficiently, at scale.
Among the case studies and solutions shared by the Share 14 speakers were:
- Key Data Questions to Answer in Brand Migration
- Spotting New Keyword Groups for a Large Retail Site
- Aligning Rich Media with the SERP Landscape
- Geotargeting
- The Search Impact Lifecycle Driving Enterprise SEO
If you weren’t able to attend Share 14, we provided a summary of coverage in last week’s marketing update .
”The Recipe for BrightEdge’s Successful Corporate Culture” by Emily Alojado
What makes for a successful corporate culture? At BrightEdge’s SEO company , the “recipe” for its resounding success is “investing in and showing appreciation for its people,” writes Emily Alojado .
When BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu and co-founder/CTO Lemuel Park began building the company seven years ago, they defined “their shared vision for BrightEdge’s culture, centered on the people with whom they wanted to work,” says Emily.
From the very beginning, they held small company events for its handful of employees that celebrated new releases every five weeks, she writes.
As BrightEdge has grown by quantum leaps over the years, its tradition of honoring its people — now numbering over 250 — lives on, Emily reports. She then shares a sampling of BrightEdge’s company events, from small “Thank-You Thursdays” to the annual “President’s Club” trips for top performers with voyages to places ranging from Las Vegas to Hawaii.
Emily concludes:
Becoming a part of the BrightEdge family is an awesome adventure, personally as well as professionally. If you’re interested in pursuing a career with us, we encourage you to take a look behind the scenes at BrightEdge , and check into the opportunities we have available. You can also email us directly via recruiting@brightedge.com. We’d love to have you join us!
In-Depth Articles from the Marketing Community
”Align SEO and Social Marketing Practices Inside Your Company” by Dave Lloyd
Adobe Systems’ senior manager of global search marketing, Dave Lloyd, speaks to the critical importance of aligning SEO and social media marketing (SMM) within enterprises at ClickZ, “in order to design an effective overall marketing strategy.”
Beginning with a description of his suggested process to strategically align SEO and social media marketing efforts by getting them “on the same page,” Dave says it’s to an organization’s advantage to either hire or seek out internal “hybrid specialists” who grasp the synergy between SEO and SMM.
In discussing the nexus where SEO and SMM overlap, Dave writes:
The overlap lies primarily in the content your marketers are distributing. As you can see, quality content supports both tracks. On the social side, without distribution of quality shares, comments, video, and more, your organization will likely not achieve its digital marketing goals. On the SEO side, without keyword-relevant content on your Web properties, your domain or page authority suffers, thereby lowering page rank.
Search News
Google Kills Off Authorship Support
On his personal Google+ account, John Mueller, webmaster trends analyst for Google, announced that Google has “made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results,” having observed that authorship information “isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from [search] results.”
Reporting on the development for Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz writes: “This shouldn’t come as a surprise because they recently dropped author images from the search results as well. Some say this is another sign that Google+ is dying, I may agree with that.”
Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not
So what’s the difference between Google’s now defunct “Authorship” and “Author Rank,” which still lives? Following up on Barry Schwartz’s post (above), Danny Sullivan explains at Search Engine Land: “Separately from Google Authorship is the idea of Author Rank, where if Google knows who authored a story, it might somehow alter the rankings of that story, perhaps [giving] it a boost if authored by someone deemed trustworthy.”
“Author Rank” is a term assigned by the SEO community to describe the concept of Google giving search ranking preferences for those it recognizes as an expert or authority for its “ In-depth articles” section . So how does Google accomplish this, in the absence of authorship?
Danny explains that the key is bylines, saying “That’s looking to be the chief alternative way to signal who is the author of a story, now that Google has abandoned its formal system.”
If you’d like to read up on Authorship and Author Rank, he lists several resources in his post.
Feel free to test your knowledge with BrightEdge Digital Marketing Quiz or SEO Quiz .
And with that, have a great weekend!