Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following: 

• How easy is the platform to use? 
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features? 
• Is the reporting actionable? 

Other questions to ask: 

How do you calculate search volumes? Knowing how the system treats information types will impact how you ascribe value to certain keyword terms, make decisions about keyword and content choices and affect the ROI of your search marketing efforts. Find out from where raw data is extracted (i.e., analytics, log files, a proprietary tracking pixel). •

Can this system track millions of searches, visits, site pages, etc.? Knowing whether the platform is a true enterprise solution or a simple tool that may not scale for your business needs is crucial. Limits on the numbers of keyword rankings, pages or traffic tracked could impact your use of the system or significantly increase the cost.

Do you support international search? There are many nuances within international SEO that can mislead even the best SEOs. Find out if the numerator in the calculation of the platform’s average clicks per search or average search volume is normalized for global or local (in that market) search and whether search ranks are calculated from within the country or remotely. Does their tool make hreflang coding recommendations? Will it manage the page relationship and directional recommendations? The misapplication of international data could impact the ROI of your search marketing efforts. 

How do you track and report on SERP features? You will want to know if and where your site was listed on the results page. For example, did your listing appear in web results, in Top Stories, in a carousel or the video results? That location and reporting feedback helps to quantify strategic and tactical efforts, which is especially important given that these SERP features can drive substantial or more-targeted traffic. 

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Does your tool help customers understand what competitors do and derive actionable insights from that? What are the most important features the tool has for providing competitive research? Competitive intelligence is a standard feature for virtually all enterprise SEO platforms – but the scope and cost differ between vendors. Find out what level of data is provided about your competitors and vertical industry and make sure it fits your requirements. 

How robust and flexible are your reporting options? Different users have different reporting needs. Find out if reports can be customized and automatically delivered to different users and types of users, and whether data can be exported in CSV format. 

Where are the actionable reports? Enterprise tools have dashboards and generous amounts of data but it’s important to understand how (and which) reports can immediately benefit your business. A good sales team will understand your company’s objectives and KPIs and will have reports ready or be able to run them in real-time. This is data that can be handed over to the appropriate teams and promptly acted upon. 

What other meta-information does your system collect that may be made available via API? Being able to trace search traffic data from the front of the funnel all the way to sales data in a CRM or business intelligence (BI) system will help you to more accurately calculate ROI. 

Is there a workflow built in that allows us to coordinate the work of our marketing, content, web development and social media teams across the organization? SEO cannot operate in a silo. A true enterprise platform should provide built-in workflow management that includes task assignment, management and monitoring of completion rates across groups. 

What does the onboarding process entail and how long will it take? What are the training options (i.e., is it online only or will you send people to our location to train us on-site)? Be sure to find out what onboarding and support is included in pricing and what is an add-on. 

What kind of ongoing support and client engagement will your account team provide? How will you gauge our use or non-use of the platform’s features? One of the most common reasons a company transitions out of an enterprise platform is because they don’t use it enough. How do they propose you avoid tool fatigue and checkout for your organization? A vendor should be prepared to address this issue and specifically how the tool creatively engages users and gets them back into the environment. 

What new features are you considering? What are the long-term roadmap and launch dates? The SEO landscape is constantly changing with new features to further leverage digital assets rapidly coming out of Google and Bing. This is especially important as AI chat interfaces emerge as a key channel for customer engagement. Find out how quickly the vendor responds to the implementation of new SERP features and begins tracking them. It’s important to understand the level of innovation and the ability to add and track emerging technologies. Knowing a vendor’s new feature release date schedule and its ability to stick to committed timelines is also important. This helps establish long-term trust and an expectation with the vendor that it will always be on the cutting edge of SEO.

The post 12 questions to ask SEO platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Do you need an enterprise SEO platform?

Deciding whether your company needs an enterprise-level SEO platform calls for the same
evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment
of your organization’s business needs and resources, staffing, management support and financial resources.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Use the following questions as guidelines to determine the answers.

The post Does your marketing team need an SEO platform? appeared first on MarTech.

SEO is not just about content creation and promotion anymore. It also involves improving the user experience and adapting to the evolving ways that search engines display and deliver results across different platforms like voice assistants. However, traditional SEO practices are still relevant. Keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition and rank tracking, are still essential for success even in a changing landscape.

SEO platforms offer numerous capabilities that include all of those, as well as competitive intelligence, social signal integration and workflow rights and roles.

Enterprise-level platforms may also provide more extensive link and site audits or analytics that include predictive scoring systems to identify potential opportunities to improve page performance or link authority. Vendors differentiate by offering more frequent or detailed data updates or content marketing features that sometimes require additional investment.

The following section, from our SEO platform guide for marketing (downloadable here), discusses some of these capabilities and the key considerations involved in choosing an enterprise SEO platform.

Link analysis and acquisition

Links are still one of the key external or “off-the-page” factors that can help a website rank higher in search engines. Most platforms for enterprise SEO offer link analysis (i.e., what sites are linking to yours), link building or removal suggestions based on competitive analysis, and other reports that show opportunities for getting links (i.e., what sites should you ask for links from) as part of their core platforms.

Keyword research/rank analysis

Keyword research —  finding out what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for different queries, and how you should use those terms in your copy — is a fundamental part of effective SEO. Almost all platforms for enterprise SEO offer keyword research tools that help marketers understand how consumers search for content, and what keywords are bringing traffic for competitors.

However, vendors get this data in different ways. Some license data from point solutions or ISPs, because Google’s terms of use limit the use of scraped data and the percentage of search results that are “keyword (not provided).” Others create and maintain their own database of keyword terms. As a result, reliable keyword data has become more scarce and costly.

It’s also worth noting that rank analysis has become more complicated as Google has increased its use of more dynamic and visual search engine results pages (SERP). Marketers are not happy with just a simple numeric indication of how their page ranks for a specific query; they want to know if it’s shown in a Carousel, in a Knowledge panel, with Sitelinks — or any of the other ways crawled content is being displayed on the SERPs. One of the latest additions to this category, Visably, offers a very different perspective on ranking, going as far as to look at all of the content on pages that rank for a certain keyword and then categorizing those pages.

All of this data aims to give brands a sense of how they’re perceived in search overall, even if the brand-related activity is happening on third-party sites.

Search intent-based analysis

Google’s search algorithms, often powered by artificial intelligence, now focus less on keyword matches and more on search intent. To counter the lack of keyword data, SEO platform vendors are developing more tools to analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that would meet the searcher’s needs.

Custom site crawls/audits

Content quality is a key factor for SEO success, so marketers need to use site crawls or audits to evaluate their websites. Enterprise SEO platforms can help by providing suggestions for improving keywords, page layouts, and site accessibility. They can also rank and score different elements of the web pages, such as HTML tags and meta-tags.

The frequency of site crawls varies among SEO platforms. Some do it daily, while others do it weekly. The best tools should be able to scan the whole site, not just a sample of pages, and should also support mobile-friendly and AMP pages. However, some sites are too big to be fully crawled by any tool.

Social signal tracking and integration

Social media activity isn’t directly included in search engine ranking algorithms, but pages that are highly shared benefit from higher traffic, and watching social activity can help inform content creation and distribution strategies. 

Most enterprise SEO platforms track, measure, and integrate social signals into their analytics and dashboard reports. These capabilities range from social signal tracking and correlations to site traffic and conversions, as well as social profile monitoring and sentiment analysis, and contact-relationship management.

While most vendors do well at tracking organic traffic, few currently track paid social activity.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Content marketing and analysis

Google has made content quality more important for SEO with its updates and features like BERT and RankBrain (Hummingbird). So, marketers need to create relevant and fresh content to rank well.

Enterprise SEO platforms have improved their content optimization and marketing tools to help marketers with this. They offer features like page management, content performance reports, influencer campaigns, and real-time content suggestions.

Some platforms also analyze the content and compare it with competitors to find gaps and suggest improvements. They can help marketers create better and deeper content on relevant topics.

A new trend among vendors is to automatically recommend topics for content creation, saving marketers time and effort. Some even help with developing the content that matches the target keywords.

International search tracking

As more U.S.-based businesses operate online and offline in different countries and languages, they need to have international search coverage. This means they can optimize their websites for different regions, languages, and alphabets. Most enterprise SEO platforms can do this by providing features like international keyword research, global market and search volume data, and global CPC currency data.

Mobile/local analytics

Google wants to make mobile and local searches better for users. So, it favors sites that work well on mobile devices. Marketers need more and better data and analytics to help them make their sites mobile-friendly and rank higher. Many vendors have features that let marketers check their sites for mobile issues, rankings, and metrics by device (like desktop, tablet, or phone) and by location.

Technical SEO crawling

Mobile traffic is very important, so marketers need tools to find and fix problems that may make their pages load slowly or look bad on mobile devices. This includes showing how their pages rank for Core Web Vitals. Also, schema markup is needed if a page wants to show up in one of the special displays like featured snippets. Many tools can spot schema mistakes and help fix them.

Cross-device attribution

Marketers know SEO is not the only way to promote their brands and that paid media can also affect search traffic (especially on brand keywords). Some vendors are creating features to help marketers figure out what marketing activity is bringing visitors or sales to their sites. But the declining used of third-party cookies is making this more difficult.

The benefits of using SEO platforms

With hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, social conversations, images, and keywords to manage and optimize, enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming.

Using an SEO platform can increase efficiency and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in managing organic search campaigns. More specifically, managing SEO through an enterprise toolset can provide the following benefits:

• Many tools, one interface. SEO platforms perform many tasks in one system. A comprehensive dashboard can help your organization monitor SERP rankings and trends, how you measure up to competitors and your share of voice. The integration and prioritization of tasks, reporting, and user permissions can offer substantial benefits to enterprise-level SEO operations.
• Intent insights. Because of the search engines’ increased focus on user intent, enterprise-level SEO tool vendors are developing machine learning models that analyze user behavior and site content to help marketers answer searchers’ questions.
• More efficient management of global operations. Enterprise SEO tools have built-in diagnostics that can be invaluable on a global scale to identify site-wide issues across languages, countries or regions. These tools uncover macro and micro issues with pages, templates and infrastructure.
• Keeping pace with the search engines. SEO software vendors have dedicated teams and engineers to follow frequent search engine algorithm changes and their impact on the SEO reporting required by enterprises.
• Automated reporting to provide data in near real-time. Many brands end up trying to put a lot of data in spreadsheets and manually update them. But that doesn’t provide a complete view of the data. Most enterprise SEO platforms offer highly customized reporting capabilities that are widget- and wizard-driven to make reporting faster and easier. Many also allow for the export of data to business intelligence tools or other analytics software.

The post What do SEO platforms do and how do they help marketers get found on search engines? appeared first on MarTech.

MarTech’s latest publication of the “Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for SEO platforms and the considerations involved in implementation. The 65-page report reviews the growing market for SEO platforms, plus the latest trends, opportunities and challenges.

In this report you will learn:

• Who the leading players are in enterprise SEO platforms
• What you should look for in an SEO solution
• What trends are driving the adoption of SEO platforms
• About the capabilities enterprise SEO platforms provide

Also included in the report are profiles of 15 leading enterprise SEO platforms vendors, pricing charts, capabilities information and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

Vendors profiled in this report:

• AgencyAnalytics
• Ahrefs
• Botify
• BrightEdge
• Conductor
• Dragon Metrics
• Lumar
• Moz
• Quattr
• Searchmetrics
• Semrush
• seoClarity
• SE Ranking
• Serpstat
• Siteimprove
• Visably
• WebCEO

Who should read this report:

• Internet marketers and agencies doing their due diligence in selecting a SEO platform for large and enterprise level organizations
• Analysts and vendors looking for current intelligence about this dynamic marketplace
• Anyone who needs to be up to speed on the key players and major trends in the market for SEO software

Editorial Advisor:

Kim Davis, Editorial Director, MarTech, Third Door Media

Researcher / Writer / Editor:

Pamela Parker, Research Director, Content Studio, Third Door Media

This report was prepared by conducting in-depth interviews with leading vendors and industry experts. Research took place in the first quarter of 2022. These, in addition to third-party research, form the basis for this report.

This research report is sponsored by Lumar.

An important note about our sponsors

The post Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide appeared first on MarTech.

But the practice of SEO has become more complex and it involves more considerations than SEOs enjoyed in the “ten blue links” era. Today, SEO includes everything from content marketing and distribution to user experience, and even the core job of gathering and interpreting search intelligence has become more challenging as the search engines continually change their display of results and port them over to other media like voice assistants.

This doesn’t mean that the well-established SEO best practices should be cast aside, however. Keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition, and rank tracking are still of critical importance, even as the environment continues to change.

Learn more about the evolution of SEO platforms by downloading our MarTech Intelligence Report!

The new face of search results

One important factor SEOs now face is having what was once organic space on the search engine results pages (SERPs) taken over by engines’ monetization efforts — in the form of larger more dynamic ad placements — and also by so-called “zero-click searches,” where the user doesn’t need to click to another page to get their question answered, because the answer is displayed right on the SERP.

What impact this is having isn’t entirely clear. A SparkToro analysis of SimilarWeb data from January to December of 2020 found that nearly two-thirds (64.82%) of searches on Google now end without a click on a result. “Zero-click searches …. have been on a steady rise for years, and I don’t expect that to reverse or plateau anytime soon,” said Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, his look at the same phenomenon 2019.

Google disputes this study as misleading, however, saying so-called zero-click searches often represent people reformulating their search queries, connecting with businesses directly from results or navigating directly to apps in addition to seeking quick facts that can be delivered directly on SERPs.

“While we do show website links for many queries today when they are the most helpful response,” Google said in a blog post, “we also want to build new features that organize information in more helpful ways than just a list of links. And we’ve seen that as we’ve introduced more of these features over the last two decades, the traffic we’re driving to the web has also grown — showing that this is helpful for both consumers and businesses.”

In any case, data on these special displays (even if not exact) can be helpful to marketers seeking visibility on the SERPs, including within these features.

For example, the analysis showed that searcher behavior varies based on the device being used to search. The researchers found that, in aggregate, searches resulting in a click are much more likely to occur on desktop devices (50.75% organic CTR, 2.78% paid CTR), while zero- click are much higher on mobile devices (77.22%).

A Perficient Digital analysis of AuthorityLabs data on nearly 2M searches provides even more granular data. On queries with ads — and ads are likely to be served on the great majority of commercial queries — the ads attract about 28% of the clicks, “stealing” from no-click searches. Perficient concurred that searchers on desktop were more likely to click-through.

Google employs more than 1200 unique features (up from 810 in the last such count) — such as the Knowledge Graph, Direct Answers and FAQs — on its search engine results pages, seoClarity estimates, with each tailored to a certain type of search or search intent. They’re not all displayed at once, of course, and some are actually quite rare. Overall, out of those 1200 features, only 200 are found on more than 0.2% of keywords, according to seoClarity research.

Needless to say, features like these affect the way users respond to search results and influence what they click on — or if they click at all. Because different types of searches generate different layouts and types of displays, Nielsen Norman eye-tracking studies find that users need a moment to process the SERP before making a decision.

“Because search-results pages are now so inconsistent from query to query, users are often forced to assess the page before digging in and making a selection,” according to the report described in Search Engine Land. (Perficient Digital data finds this inconsistency to be a much bigger factor on mobile, noting that desktop results aren’t nearly as volatile.) This results in what the user experience company called a “pinball pattern” in eye movement.

The special, visually-rich displays are viewed by 74% of searchers, Nielsen Norman Group found. And they seem to be having a significant impact on click activity.

Back in 2006, the first search result (defined in this study as the first item appearing on the page, which means it could be an ad) attracted 51% of clicks. In their most recent look, only 28% of clicks go to the first result under the search box, the UX researchers found.

Nielsen Norman Group researchers also noted what they call a “love at first sight” behavior pattern on SERPs, where 20% (up from 17% in 2006) of searches result in people focusing on a single result on a page, presumably finding it sufficient to answer their question. The UX researchers said one reason was that, “people trust that the search engine’s pick for the best answer will be pretty close to the true best answer. It’s become a common belief that search engines are good at finding the best answer to a query and presenting it at the top of SERPs.”

The researchers didn’t segment their analysis to look at different types of searches, though. Perficient Digital has found that whether the query contains a brand name or not seems to have a significant impact. The agency found that the click-through-rate for the first result on branded queries averages 69%, whereas for non-branded queries the first result only achieves a 18% click-through rate.

This suggests that there’s more opportunity for marketers to attract clicks even if they aren’t in the very top spot, but, between more aggressive monetization of results and special features, there’s just not as much room for organic listings. Consequently, there’s an increasing need for enterprise SEO tools that help marketers identify where their pages are showing up (especially in these special features) and identify opportunities for optimization.

We explore these developments and more in our MarTech Intelligence Report on Enterprise SEO Platforms, updated for 2021. Download now!

The post As SEO changes, so do the tools that serve practitioners appeared first on MarTech.