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.

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 a guideline to determine the answers.

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

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.

SEO platforms offer numerous capabilities that range from keyword research and rank-checking to backlink analysis and acquisition, 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 discusses some of these capabilities and the key considerations involved in choosing an enterprise SEO platform.

Link analysis and acquisition

Links continue to be one of the most important external or “off-the-page” signals that can help a website rise in search engine rankings. Most enterprise SEO platforms provide link analysis (i.e., what sites are linking to yours), link building or removal recommendations via competitive analysis, and other reports that reveal opportunities for obtaining links (i.e., what sites should you solicit links from) as part of their base platforms.

Keyword research/rank analysis

Keyword research – knowing what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for various queries, and how you should use those terms in your copy – has been a pillar of effective SEO. Virtually all enterprise SEO platforms provide keyword research tools that allow marketers to discover the ways that consumers search for content, and what keywords are driving traffic for competitors.

Vendors source this data differently, however. Some vendors license data from point solutions or ISPs, due to Google’s restrictions on scraped data in its terms of use and the percentage of search results that are “keyword (not provided).” Other vendors develop and manage a proprietary database of keyword terms. As a result, reliable keyword data has become less of a commodity and more expensive.

It’s also important to note that rank analysis has grown increasingly complex as Google has upped its use of more dynamic and visual SERPs. Marketers are no longer satisfied with simple numeric designation of how their page ranks for a particular query; they want to know if it’s displayed in a Carousel, in a Knowledge panel, with Sitelinks — or any of the other ways in which crawled content is being displayed on the SERPs. One of the newest entrants to this category, Visably, offers a very different look at ranking, going so far as to look at all of the content on pages that rank for a particular keyword and then categorizing those pages.

With all of this data, it seeks to give brands a sense of how they’re coming across in search generally, even if the brand-related activity is happening on third-party sites.

Search intent-based analysis

Google’s search algorithms are focusing less on keyword matches and more on search intent. Recent algorithm updates, including the addition of BERT, have reduced the value of keywords in SEO. To counter the lack of keyword data, SEO platform vendors are developing more “search intent”-based tools that analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that would meet the searcher’s needs.

Custom site crawls/audits

With content quality becoming the lynchpin for many marketers’ SEO strategies, site crawls or audits are important tools offered by enterprise SEO platform vendors. Some platforms offer optimization recommendations for keywords, page structures, and crawlability; prioritizing and assigning scores for such factors as HTML title tags, body tags, and meta-tags.

Most SEO platforms provide daily site crawls; others offer a weekly frequency. Ideally, the tool should be able to crawl the entire site, not just random pages, and should support the analysis of mobile-optimized and AMP pages as well. However, some enterprise sites are so large it’s unrealistic to expect a tool to crawl it in its entirety.

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.

Sites that experience strong social sharing typically perform better in organic search results. 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

SEO and content marketing have become closely aligned, as Google has raised the content quality bar through developments like BERT and RankBrain (Hummingbird), and its regular algorithm updates. As a result, relevant, up-to-date content has become integral to SEO success.

Many vendors have upgraded the content optimization and content marketing capabilities of their enterprise SEO platforms and expanded the tools’ content marketing features. These include page management tools or APIs to monitor on-page content and errors, reports on content performance and traffic trends, influencer identification and campaign management, and real-time content recommendations.

More advanced platforms perform analysis to help improve the depth and quality of content by performing topical analysis of content and comparing it against competition to identify potentially important gaps and make recommendations for improvement.

One emerging area in which vendors are investing is the ability to automatically and proactively suggest topics that marketers should create content about — eliminating the need to spend lots of time on analysis. Some even provide assistance with developing the type of content that will show up in queries for target keywords.

International search tracking

International search coverage has become a critical capability, as the global economy leads more U.S.-based enterprises to conduct business online and offline in multiple countries and languages. Most enterprise SEO platforms offer some level of international search coverage that crosses borders, languages, and alphabets. The capabilities include international keyword research, integrating global market and search volume data into the platform, as well as integrating global CPC currency data.

Mobile/local analytics

Google’s search engine updates are increasingly focused on improving the mobile/local search user experience. As mobile-friendly sites rise to the top of the SERPs, marketers are demanding more and better mobile and local data and analytics to help them optimize their sites for mobile users and improve search engine rankings. Many vendors offer features such as mobile audits, rankings, and metrics by device (i.e., desktop, tablet, iPhone, and Android) as well as by location.

Technical SEO crawling

The increasing importance of mobile traffic is also driving the development of tools to identify problems that may be slowing page load or affecting mobile-friendliness. This includes providing information about a site’s ranking for Core Web Vitals.

Additionally, technical implementation of schema markup is necessary if a page is to be used in one of the featured snippets or other advanced displays. Many of today’s tools can identify schema errors and advise on correcting them.

Cross-device attribution

Recognizing that SEO is just one aspect of a brand’s marketing efforts, and also that search traffic (especially on brand keywords) is influenced by paid media, some vendors are developing capabilities that help marketers determine what marketing initiative is driving site visits or sales. This is becoming increasingly difficult, however, as third-party cookies are no longer being supported by many companies.

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.

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.