What SEOs Can Learn From Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg L.P. understands opportunity. He’s built an empire on being able to recognize trends, and offer solutions at the right time to the right people. When Bloomberg’s company hit the scene in the ’80s, it provided computer systems to Wall Street firms. But what it did differently than its competition was change the target audience.

While the competition was focusing on marketing to the IT people, Bloomberg saw the real audience was the traders and analysts — those in charge of the money. So Bloomberg modified its product strategy to cater to the audience that mattered.

That single shift in mindset changed the game forever for Bloomberg L.P. And right now, marketers are in the midst of a similar shift. For years for many SEOs, search engine optimization had been centered on the keyword, and the value a word brought to the website.

Enter Secure Search

But things changed in the blink of an eye last year when Google moved to a total secure search environment, leaving little to no keyword data behind in analytics. Instead, marketers would now see keyword “(not provided)” as the majority data point. Bing and Yahoo followed suit earlier this year.

Like Bloomberg, BrightEdge saw a change on the horizon long before it was a key focus for many. Content is what every website and marketer is ultimately centered on, not the keyword. Focusing on the content rather than the keyword means the real target audience is taken into account. And that shift in mindset changes the way we market the product: the content.

Adapting To Change A La Bloomberg

Enter page-based SEO. For search marketers, adapting their practices to operate within secure search isn’t an an option, it’s a necessity. We cover this idea and more more in our Secure Search White Paper, and the new paradigm is pages, not keywords. Let’s look at pillar one of our Secure Search Methodology described in the white paper – Start With Pages.

Shifting the Marketing Mindset to Pages

Pages are where people visit and where they convert. You can track just about any user behavior, and how your content is performing by looking at pages as a whole. I’ll show you how.

Let’s go over just some of the ways you can measure your search engine optimization and beyond by looking at the value of pages.

1. Rank for the page. With all the entry points your website could have from pages, images, video and news results, it’s important to look at your page’s rank in the results. We know that more visibility and higher placement increases click-through rate, and so continuing to optimize for that visibility is important.

2. Page traffic. Let’s face it: Traffic is the ultimate goal of your SEO efforts (while conversion is the next important step). Understanding the pages that are performing from a traffic and engagement perspective tells you which parts of your site are most successful. Here, you can look at things like bounce rate, time on site and pages viewed to see how users behaved once they got to your Web page. This and other indicators should give clues on where adjustments need to be made.

3. Page value. We know that marketers struggle with showing exactly how SEO has contributed to performance versus just a natural growth over time. That’s why we’ve built in reporting features that help marketers better understand the value various channels are bringing. The final goal of any marketer’s efforts is of course, the conversion. Page reporting allows marketers to see the real ROI of individual pages or groups of pages. This can work for both ecommerce businesses and B2Bs, if the right technology has been integrated for the latter.

Getting Comfortable with Content

Bloomberg made another brilliant move for his brand in 2009. It bought the dying BusinessWeek publication, rebranded it as Bloomberg and effectively widened the net to capture a larger audience. This is one of many examples of content marketing before content marketing had a name.

Bloomberg understood the power of publishing on the Internet. And so should you. Your brand’s content online – useful content that understands what your audience needs – is the core of your marketing. And making that content available in as many ways possible in as many places as possible expands your reach to the people that matter.

So to compete in today’s SEO, content needs to be at the core, not keywords. You’ve started with a great product or service. Now make like Bloomberg and tell the right people about it.

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