BrightEdge surveyed over 500 SEO and marketing professionals about the future of marketing—and their responses made one thing clear:
SEO for enterprises is changing—and it's never been more critical to drive SEO performance at scale.
Easier said than done.
Search moves faster than ever. Last year, Google did almost 600,000 search quality tests, 44,000+ side-by-side experiments, 15,000+ live traffic experiments, and 3,200+ launches. It's almost impossible for SEO professionals to keep up and implement at scale.
In fact, almost every professional BrightEdge talked to faces three huge obstacles to driving SEO performance at scale.
1. Lack of resources.
SEO isn’t a side project for enterprises anymore. In one survey BrightEdge conducted, over 200 SEO pros and digital marketers said SEO was informing every aspect of their marketing organizations, from content marketing to email to social to paid.
Furthermore, they said that SEO is quickly moving out of the shadows as a silo. Instead, executives are seeing the value SEO brings to the table—and their expectations around SEO performance are dramatically increasing.
The problem is, SEO professionals simply do not have enough resources and time to do SEO right.
Enterprises face a massive shift in how quickly brands need to react to search trends. Namely, enterprises need to be equipped with real-time search insights while the searches are taking place, while a big event is driving product sales, or while a seasonal trend is unfolding.
For example, brands increasingly have the ability to understand how a major entertainment event, like a Super Bowl halftime show, is affecting product demand while the event is happening across social and search. Then, brands have the ability to run real-time campaigns accordingly.
Keeping up with real-time search just isn't possible for many professionals, no matter how talented they are.
2. Silos.
Even if resources were available, most brands still have too many silos to move as quickly as today's SEO demands. There is still massive lack of communication between departments, which makes fast, coordinated SEO implementation almost impossible.
This also impacts the data that enterprises have available to drive SEO performance. Departments aren't just siloed—so is their data. The datasets across organizations represent untapped goldmines. Enterprises need to be serious about unifying this data, but the siloed nature of organizations today prevents that.
3. Repetitive processes and tasks.
Lack of resources and data silos aren't the only problems. The actual business of SEO today requires professionals to do too many repetitive processes and tasks. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but repetitive processes and tasks take humans too much time and take too long to capitalize on real-time SEO trends.
Not to mention, human professionals are far better at creative and strategic tasks that drive real business value. In fact, most SEOs surveyed by BrightEdge would prefer to be working on impactful activities that drive performance, not mundane activities that don't matter.
Unfortunately, too many professionals aren't free to leverage what they're actually good at.
BrightEdge realized that there had to be a better way. And that begged the question:
What if we could automate the most complex, time-consuming SEO tasks, so that SEO work was simple, impactful, and rewarding?
To do that, SEO had to become self-driving.
BrightEdge looked at what matters across all industries, all company sizes, all types of site designs, and all types of page structures, with a laser focus on the top challenges SEOs face managing content across channels such as PPC, desktop and mobile, global and local search engines, and vertical search engines.
The sheer size of the task was gargantuan—and took years.
BrightEdge analyzed 345 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to 57 times the number of photos on Instagram. Put another way, if every single person on Earth had a webpage, this would be like crawling all of them 17 times.
Those findings were integrated it with existing technology investments (Data Cube, DataMind, and BrightEdge Instant) to create a self-driving SEO system.
The result is BrightEdge Autopilot, which ties together all BrightEdge's digital assets, machine learning, and AI to create auto-optimizing, self-driving SEO—with zero touch.
BrightEdge Autopilot compresses the time it takes marketers to do many daily performance-critical activities, so you can focus on what matters most. Here are just a few of the things Autopilot can handle for you:
So far, BrightEdge has deployed this self-driving SEO across 1,000+ sites in every industry, and seen stunning results—including a 2X increase in conversions and 21% more keywords ranking on Page 1 of results.
To learn more about how BrightEdge Autopilot can help you automate SEO at scale, click on the link below.