do SEO platforms help marketers to be found in search engines? //

Search engine optimization (SEO), according to BrightEdge, is the most effective of all tactics to drive traffic to websites. 53% can be attributed to organic searches. The practice of SEO is more complex today and involves a greater number of considerations.

SEO is no longer just about creating and promoting content. It involves adapting to new ways of displaying and delivering search engine results on different platforms, such as voice assistants. Traditional SEO practices remain relevant. Even in an ever-changing landscape, keyword research, page analysis, tracking backlinks and acquisition, and ranking tracking are essential.

SEO platforms offers a wide range of capabilities, including competitive intelligence, social signals integration, workflow rights and roles, and .

Enterprise-level platforms can also offer more comprehensive link audits and analytics, including predictive scoring systems that identify opportunities to improve link authority or page performance. Vendors can differentiate themselves by offering data updates that are more detailed or frequent, or features such as content marketing. These may require an additional investment.

This section from our SEO Platform Guide for Marketing ( download here) discusses these capabilities as well as the main considerations when choosing an enterprise SEO platform.

Link Analysis and Acquisition

Links remain one of the most important external factors, or “off-the page” factors, that can improve a site’s ranking in search engine results. As part of their core platform, most enterprise SEO platforms offer link analysis (i.e. what sites link to yours), suggestions for link building or removal based on competitor analysis, as well as other reports that indicate opportunities for getting links.

Keyword analysis/research

Effective SEO begins with keyword research. This involves determining what people search for to find your site, which pages are ranked by different queries and how these terms should be used in your copy. Most platforms for enterprise SEO provide keyword research tools to help marketers better understand how users search for content and which keywords bring traffic for their competitors.

Vendors get their data in different forms. Some vendors license data from ISPs or point solutions, as Google’s Terms of Use limit the use and percentage of results with “keyword” (not provided) in search results. Others build and maintain their database of keyword terms. The availability of reliable keyword data is becoming more difficult and expensive.

It is also important to note that ranking analysis has become more complex as Google’s search engine result pages (SERP) have become more dynamic and visually appealing. Marketers don’t want to be limited by a numeric ranking; they also want to know whether their page is displayed in a Carousel or Knowledge Panel, Sitelinks, or in any other way crawled pages are being displayed in the SERPs. Visibly, one of the newest additions to the category, provides a different perspective on rankings. It categorizes pages based on the content they contain.

This data is meant to help brands understand how they are perceived by searchers, even when the brand-related activities occur on third-party websites.

Search intent-based analyses

Google’s algorithms are now more focused on the search intent than on matching keywords. SEO platform vendors are creating more tools that analyze search intent, predict or recommend content most likely to meet searcher needs.

Customized site audits and crawls

The quality of the content is crucial for success. Therefore, marketers should use site audits or crawls to evaluate their website. Enterprise SEO platforms are able to help with suggestions on improving keyword density, page layout, and accessibility. They can also score and rank different elements on the web page, such as HTML tags or meta-tags.

SEO platforms vary in the frequency at which they crawl sites. Some crawl the site daily while others only do so weekly. The best tools will be able scan the entire site and not just a few pages. They should also support mobile friendly and AMP pages. Some sites are simply too large to be crawled in full by any tool.

Tracking and integration of social signals

Social Media Activity Although social media activity is not directly considered in search engine algorithms, pages that receive a lot of traffic and are shared often benefit from increased traffic. Observing social activity helps inform content creation strategies.

The majority of enterprise SEO platforms measure and incorporate social signals in their dashboard and analytics reports. These capabilities include social signal tracking, correlations with site traffic, conversions and social profile monitoring, sentiment analysis and contact-relationships management.

Currently, while most vendors track organic traffic well, very few monitor paid social media activity.

Analysis of content marketing

Google’s updates and features such as BERT and RankBrain(Hummingbird) have made the quality of content more important for SEO. Marketers need to produce relevant and new content in order to rank well.

To help marketers, enterprise SEO platforms have enhanced their marketing and content optimization tools. These platforms offer features such as page management, content reports, influencer campaign, and real-time suggestions.

Some platforms analyze content and compare with competitors in order to identify gaps and suggest improvements. They can assist marketers in creating better content and more depth on relevant topics.

Vendors are now recommending topics automatically for content creation to save marketers time and effort. Some vendors even assist with creating content that matches target keywords.

Tracking international search

They need international search coverage as more U.S. businesses are operating online and off in other countries and languages. They can then optimize their website for different languages, alphabets, and regions. This is possible with most enterprise SEO platforms, which offer features such as international keyword research, data on global search volumes and markets, and data on global CPC currencies.

Mobile/local analytics

Google is working to improve mobile and local search for its users. Google favors mobile-friendly sites. Marketers will need better and more data to make their websites mobile-friendly, and help them rank higher. Many vendors offer features that allow marketers to check their site for mobile issues and rankings. They can also view metrics and metrics by device, such as desktop, tablet or phone.

Search engine optimization crawling

Marketers need to fix any problems that could cause their pages to load slowly or appear bad on mobile devices. It also shows how the pages rank in Core Web Vitals. Schema markup is also required if you want your page to appear in a special display, such as featured snippets. There are many tools that can help you fix schema errors.

Cross-device attribution

Marketers are aware that SEO isn’t the only way to promote brands, and paid media can have a significant impact on search traffic. (Especially for brand keywords). Vendors are developing features that help marketers determine which marketing activities bring visitors to their site or increase sales. This is made more difficult by the decline in third-party cookie usage.

Benefits of SEO platforms

Enterprise SEO is becoming more complex and time-consuming as there are hundreds of thousands of pages, websites, social conversations and images to optimize.

An SEO platform increases efficiency and productivity, while decreasing the time and errors associated with managing organic search campaigns. Managing SEO via an enterprise toolkit can offer the following benefits.

• One interface, many tools. A single system performs multiple tasks. A dashboard that is comprehensive can be used to monitor your SERP rankings, trends and how your company compares with your competitors. Enterprise-level SEO operations can benefit from the integration of tasks, user permissions, and reporting.
• Intent insights. Due to the increased focus of search engines on user intent and behavior, enterprise-level SEO tools are developing machine learning algorithms that analyze site content and user behavior in order to assist marketers with answering searcher’s questions.
• Improved management of global operations Enterprise-level SEO tools include diagnostics which can be extremely useful on a global level to identify issues that affect the entire site, regardless of language, country or region. These tools reveal macro and micro issues in pages, templates and infrastructure.
• Keep up with search engine changes SEO vendors employ teams of engineers and developers to monitor the frequent algorithmic changes in search engines and the impact they have on SEO reporting requirements for enterprises.
• Automated reports to provide data near-real-time. Most brands end up manually updating spreadsheets. This doesn’t give a complete picture of the data. Most enterprise SEO platforms provide highly customizable reporting features that are widget and wizard driven to make reporting easier and faster. Most platforms allow data export to other software, such as business intelligence or analytics.

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