BACKGROUND

Founded in 1932 Rocky Brands, Inc. designs, develops, manufactures, and markets premium-quality Outdoor, Work, Western, Duty, and Military footwear as well as Outdoor and Work apparel and accessories. The wholesale side of the Rocky Brands family of brands includes, Rocky Boots, Georgia Boot, and Durango Boots. Prior to a year ago, there had not been a dedicated focus on creating SEO-friendly content and optimizing for organic search across these three sites. Now, with a dedicated in-house SEO specialist, Rocky Brands has seen organic growth across the three ecommerce sites.

THE SOLUTION

The Data Cube has been an essential research resource for the foundation of any SEO-friendly content Rocky Brands has put on their sites. They use the keyword and domain research to make informed decisions about what keywords should be the target for each page as well as to conduct competitor research. The Data Cube also proved essential in making sure that the sites are tracking the proper keywords for reporting purposes and highlighting growth to the top-level domain for Rocky, Georgia, and Durango.

Using BrightEdge Recommendations, they optimized the page title and meta tags and enhanced existing content to improve SEO performance. Where content didn’t exist, they developed SEO-friendly content explaining the features of each boot or boot category using the language their consumers use when searching with both direct and semantically-related target keywords. Lastly, they added internal links with appropriate anchor text.

From the beginning of every project to the end, they use StoryBuilder dashboards to track the performance of their content and share successes with the broader team and executives. Having the ability to customize each report to fit the needs and KPIs of each brand has proven instrumental, and the visuals in each chart supplement the data. The Keyword and Page Reporting capabilities have also provided quick on-the-fly metrics when in meetings or when they have needed data for a specific page or group of pages and keywords. On top of this, these reporting features show insight to granular data when a keyword fluctuates in Blended Rank and aids in problem solving and explaining the trends in the keywords that are happening. This has allowed Rocky Brands to edit content to reflect the appropriate target keywords.

THE RESULTS>

Across the primary brands they saw an increase of 1,479 organic keywords on page 1 in Google US in 2018. Organic search revenue is up 30% since January 2018. During the critical holiday shopping month of November, all 3 brands saw an average lift of 13.3% in new users and an average growth of 73.6% in revenue vs. the prior year.

BrightEdge has allowed us to collect research and then implement informed SEO techniques and content on our sites with detailed reporting capabilities that highlight growth in a way that is easy to follow.

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THE PROBLEM

MERITENE®, a brand of Nestlé Health Science, offers nutritional products designed to meet the needs of adults over 50 years old, such as ready-to-drink beverages and flavored powders. Due to the characteristics of its target audience, often not being actively digital, Meritene needed to increase its organic relevance through enriched content that added value to its consumers. One of the territories to explore was focused on “Healthy Living” and the food components -- a strong demand territory with an average of 388,000 searches per month.

THE SOLUTION

Working with its seo agency, NEO, to obtain the desired relevance in search engines, the team’s strategy was based on prioritizing keywords with the highest search volume. They first used BrightEdge Data Cube to discover high-value keywords with a minimum of 29,000 monthly searches.

Using BrightEdge Recommendations, they optimized the meta tags and existing content to improve SEO performance. Where content didn’t currently exist they developed SEO-friendly content based on “habits of healthy living” and food suplements using the language their consumers use in search.

From the beginning of the project to the end, Meritene used StoryBuilder Dashboards to track the performance of their content and share successes with the broader team.

THE RESULTS

Meritene understood and responded to the concerns of its audience in the health space, positioning itself above Wikipedia for terms such as “Resveratrol” or “Healthy Life.” They started from being unranked on generic terms on page one to ranked with more than 90 terms related to health on page one. This increased traffic from a nascent 435 users in Q1 to 67,735 in Q4. Additionally, Meritene has managed to reach 73% more users in its target age range of 45 to 65.

Through BrightEdge data, we are able to create ranked content that allows us to connect with our audience and establish a conversation, to be top-of-mind, and become their main option when making purchase decisions.

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THE PROBLEM

For two years IBM utilized an internal tool for their SEO needs that limited their capabilities in two main areas: 1) It did not allow them to track categories, making it difficult for their team to properly track data effectively, 2) The lack of data integration limited their ability to view trends to properly track the performance of their pages.

THE SOLUTION

Many of the IBM team members were already familiar with the BrightEdge platform from previous roles, making it an easy choice to select BrightEdge due to its access to robust data points and integration capabilities with other platforms to achieve their reporting goals. With the assistance of the BrightEdge team, IBM was able to seamlessly migrate a massive amount of data from their internal tool to the BrightEdge platform.

THE RESULTS

With the shift to BrightEdge, IBM is now able to:

• Create a clear page hierarchy to manage the amount of URLs for a large enterprise organization.
• Create a newly formed SEO framework to break down their priorities to a product level and enable their team to define what they want to achieve from an optimization perspective.
• Leverage dashboard capabilities to capitalize on integrated analytics data to accurately track their new product performance, providing their product owners with an end-to-end journey. Product owners can now focus their attention on which keywords they should be leveraging and how their pages are performing.
• Roll out an international expansion of their SEO solutions to key geographical teams by leveraging BrightEdge’s ContentIQ to prioritize technical fixes.

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PRIOR TO BRIGHTEDGE

UL, a global independent safety science company with over a century of expertise innovating safety solutions, had no former SEO practice prior to Brandon joining their team. Within a few years, the need to create more SEO awareness around their business became critical. Leveraging his prior experience in SEO, he brought in the BrightEdge platform as an investment into their practice to easily show the value in tracking key metrics for their business. These were vital metrics that aligned with their executive team and created an SEO champion within their CMO. Two of the biggest areas their marketing team struggled with were identifying which keywords they ranked for and understanding their competitors’ performance.

DELIVERING SOLUTIONS WITH BRIGHTEDGE

By utilizing the power of Data Cube, Brandon has been able to provide topical research and keyword gap analysis to instantly provide a clear idea of what their marketing teams should target. The result of these insights have increased their page impressions by over 2 million within the last six months (compared to previous 6 months).

In addition, StoryBuilder reports have been able to cater to the dozens of divisions within their large company. This allows Brandon’s team to create over 60 monthly reports for the various sections and owners of their website. For a super-lean team, BrightEdge provides a scalable solution by enabling unlimited access and training to empower internal teams to report their own metrics and self-serve their various needs.

FUTURE INITIATIVES

UL is planning a large-scale site migration in the next year. This initiative will involve new URLs, revised site architecture, updated taxonomy, and a content overhaul which makes maintaining SEO performance a critical goal. Brandon’s team will rely on BrightEdge to make SEO a main focus and identify areas to prioritize within the migration.

Our SEO program received the kickstart it needed, since bringing BrightEdge on about a year and half ago...it helped build a champion within our senior leadership by enabling us to capture the key metrics our marketing teams care about.

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THE PROBLEM

Finish Line had a focus to make digital strides in promoting their back-to-school initiative for the months of July and August. This is a prime time for families and students to make purchases in advance of the school year. The goals were to surpass last year’s performance and cut into the market share of their largest competitors.

THE SOLUTION

The Finish Line team ran a site audit using ContentIQ for targeted page groups and found multiple technical issues to address. They used the Data Cube to identify target keywords and universal content opportunities for which they developed and enhanced their content. The Recommendations feature greatly assisted in generating specific on-page optimization tactics to implement. With StoryBuilder, they built a customized dashboard to measure success and review YoY data.

THE RESULTS

The results started showing momentum with page-1 keyword rankings in the middle of July. Conversely, one of the larger industry websites experienced a relatively flat ranking for the same targeted keyword set. By the week of August 5, Finish Line had delivered a 56% increase on page-1 rankings. 

SUMMARY OF RESULTS

• 65% increase in page-1 rankings
• 258% increase in visits
• 160% increase in page views
• Surpassed key competitors in Share of Voice for tracked back-to-school keywords
• Owns 32% more keywords on page 1 compared to a key competitor for tracked Back-to-School keywords 

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THE PROBLEM

OnDeck's mission: To create and promote informative, educational, and inspirational content for the purposes of acquisition, brand awareness, and customer retention. Created to support and empower small businesses, OnDeck is 100% committed to serving its customers with the smartest financing solutions and world-class service. The company offers small business loans, issuing over $10 billion dollars in financing, providing business loans, lines of credit, and equipment financing. Its thought leadership content was available within the Small Business Blog Resource Center; however, it was not performing as expected. OnDeck had bypassed the first pillar of SEO success -- establishing the technical foundation for OnDeck.com.

THE SOLUTION

OnDeck used ContentIQ to audit the site and identify areas that needed attention. The audit found the following opportunities:

1. Resolve technical issues, like hreflang
2. Improve page load speed
3. Resolve 404s and other redirect errors
4. Make sure technical SEO will support content efforts
5. Improve on-page elements
6. Optimize their landing pages to increase engagement
7. Implement measurement capability for RC pages (current Google Analytics efforts)
8. Once completed, continue to scale

The team confirmed what they saw in ContentIQ with a separate tool and subsequently created an action plan to resolve those issues.

THE RESULTS

Improvements from January to July 2018:

• 970% decrease in minor errors
• 82% decrease in moderate errors
• 79% decrease in severe errors
• 231% increase in Quick Answers (13 in Jan vs. 43 in July)

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THE PROBLEM

Labconco Corporation is a mid-sized, privately held company dedicated to building superior laboratory equipment. Labconco sells through worldwide distributors and needed consistent messaging and organic rankings across multiple third-party websites. As Dealer Marketing Specialist, Allison Schach works mainly with 15-20 global distributors but provides content to more than 100. Allison was recently awarded the Edgie for Best International SEO. Using BrightEdge, she was able to determine what keywords their competitors were outranking on and focus on those specifically when creating content for all distributor websites and www.labconco.com.

THE SOLUTION

Allison writes the content and provides it to each distributor so it can be similar without being exact, and the target keywords become associated with their brand name. In addition to the SEO channel, Allison is also responsible for distributor print materials, direct mail, print and digital advertising, and social media. She also shares responsibility for website management, and general content for labconco.com. Labconco.com consists of more than 11,000 product pages and is always growing.

Using BrightEdge recommendations, Schach and the rest of the SEO team optimizes hundreds of articles and product pages on labconco.com. The Ignite Report from BrightEdge is particularly useful in determining keywords to target when creating new content. Keyword Reporting shows the best ranking pages for each keyword. This allows them to determine if they should adjust their preferred landing pages to try and direct more traffic to the page that’s already ranking, rather than a page they would like to be ranking. The Executive Dashboard Report they receive every Monday gives the extended team a quick snapshot of their progress.

THE RESULTS

Labconco has seen an increase in traffic and sales (the numbers are proprietary, but they are significant) with their top distributors over the last year since Allison has been optimizing these pages and creating content for their distributors.

Since taking over responsibility for those product pages, and Labconco unveiling a website redesign, Labconco has seen an increase in traffic and about an 8% increase in contact submission forms where customers are looking for more information on their products or requesting someone contact them.

While conversions and purchases are more difficult to track with capital equipment, Labconco did see two additional conversions (quote requests) per week in the first six months of using BrightEdge, on two separate pages for freeze dry, and this has continued since. Traffic has been steadily increasing on their optimized pages; Labconco's homepage saw an increase of 463 visits and 7,604 page views per week in the first year of using BrightEdge.

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BACKGROUND

In the past, UC Davis degrees were not treated like a core product of the institution. Director of Web Communications Adam Napolitan knew he and his team needed to improve the communications strategy around majors and programs. In addition, they had ample research showing that one of students’ top concerns is outcomes, as in ”what job am I going to get” by going to “this university” or by taking “this major.”

THE SOLUTION

By combining the core product with the prospective student audience’s highest interests, they have created a content strategy that has become their most successful marketing project to date with regard to its cost-to-benefit ratio. Their blog was named in a very straightforward way. The blog is titled the “What Can I Do With My Major? Blog.”

The Data Cube has been an essential tool for looking at keyword portfolios of our competitors on-the-fly and comparing to our own keyword inventory. Pairing the information from BrightEdge through the integration with Google Analytics has been a powerful forecasting tool, which has helped them to plan and execute a successful editorial calendar. Using artificial intelligence of the built-in Insights in BrightEdge allows to  quickly triage issues on the site with smaller and more targeted efforts. When we are ready to invest more significantly in improving technical SEO site quality, we use ContentIQ to identify technical SEO errors and warnings helping us to get the highest potential rankings with our content.

They use BrightEdge StoryBuilder dashboards as a key part of their in-depth tracking to track opportunities identified for expansion. The Data Cube has been an essential tool for looking at the keyword portfolios of competitors on-the-fly and comparing them to their own keyword inventory as they approach new content creation, identifying the gaps left by competitors in this space.

THE RESULTS

Since its launch, the Majors Blog has amassed nearly 400,000 pageviews and 200,000 users (over 160,000 of which had never been to the UC Davis website before). The "What Can I Do With My Major? Blog" achieved as much as 4.5 times better results than the university's national advertising campaign. This effort has aided in a web traffic increase of 19% to the major pages, and a 32% increase when including the blog in the total amount of traffic.

They have increased rankings of majors in organic search, which has resulted in a 70% increase in traffic to major-related content, a 31% increase in traffic directly to majors pages, an 18% increase to minor pages, and a 222% increase to graduate programs. As a result, most of the majors and programs covered to date have increased in enrollment -- higher than the national averages.

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THE PROBLEM

As recently as three years ago, Cleveland Clinic's focus on SEO for its 20,000+ page website was limited soely to the work of two employees. While SEO performance would grow steadily each year, they struggled to get the necessary traction to make the leap in visibility they felt could be achieved. The team based that sentiment on the amount of content that gets generated in-house on a daily basis by other colleagues within the Marketing & Communications Division. In order to generate that growth, they realized that empowering their fellow caregivers with better SEO knowledge and helping them understand why this was critical for long-term success became one of their top priorities.

THE SOLUTION

After adding on a new member to lead their search marketing efforts, they continued to develop their own skills through online learning, including BrightEdge certification. That was followed by developing and presenting a comprehensive series of ongoing in-house SEO training and measurement sessions that were attended by more than 90 coworkers in the organization over the past three years. These additions to their in-house SEO partners include colleagues from individual service line marketing teams, content marketing, web development, patient education, and website maintenance.

These groups also help spread the importance of the SEO mindset across the organization by connecting directly with clinical staff and leadership. This has been crucial in helping keep SEO as a primary topic when reshaping their content planning strategy. This strategy included gathering feedback that helped writers craft content in a manner used by actual patients instead of relying entirely on complex medical jargon. The approach directly mirrors the organization's "Patients First" mantra.

During this time, BrightEdge has remained a key compotent in their content creation and optimization strategy. BrightEdge Data Cube has been invaluable for keyword research, competitive benchmarking, content gap opportunity analysis, and prioritizing content refresh opportunities for "striking distance" keywords related to key clinical areas of importance. StoryBuilder provides enhanced reporting. ContentIQ helps eliminate redundant pages. BrightEdge also helped them restructure their entire library of health content during their responsive website design project, which ran from the end of 2016 through the first half of 2018.

THE RESULTS

Since spreading the importance of SEO across the organization, these efforts helped drive significant lift in search engine visibility, traffic, and patient acquisition, including the following:

• Two out of every three visits to clevelandclinic.org comes from Organic search
• A 43% increase in SEO traffic over past two years, including a 15% lift in Organic search traffic year-over-year in 2018 alone
• Closed more than 150 content gaps within their Health Library
• Boosted organic sessions by 3.5 million visits to their Health Library (19% year-over-year lift)
• Increased image search visibility by 87% for targeted keywords (July 2018 vs. January 2017)
• Improved page load time by a stunning 97% by completing their website redesign project
• Lifted user sessions by 16% year-over-year for traffic to the online appointment request form after entering our website through organic search

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