• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 3, 2011

BrightEdge integrates panel-based data from comScore Marketer into its SEO platform through a Web services open standards-based API. The integration enables marketers to discover keywords by market segment, and show keywords, pages and clicks. It took about three months to integrate the two platforms.

Through this collaboration, SEO professionals can tap into comScore's competitive insights to increase revenue from organic search. The panel data captures patterns by which about 1 million people search. The actual search behavior highlights keyword data and the number of clicks and conversions.

Jim Yu, BrightEdge CEO, explains that companies such as clothing retailers can identify direct competitors' keywords driving traffic and SEO performance to their respective Web sites. The comScore product exposes keyword data that feeds into the BrightEdge SEO workflow platform. The automated system takes the guesswork out of identifying competitive keywords. "I can look at a Web page and kind of figure out the keywords a competitor goes after," Yu said. "The comScore data looks at the behavior of millions of users and identifies the keywords."

There are a variety of ways to identify competitors' keywords. Yu said SEO professionals can guess by analyzing a Web page. This provides accuracy by having collective intelligence.

BrightEdge already integrates analytics and competitive intelligence, but the company has begun to enable the integration of a company's internal data and other data channels. Recently, it enabled the integration of social data. Other channel data in the future may include mobile, video and multimedia.

The North American search marketing industry is expected to grow 16% in 2011 to $19.3 billion compared with the previous year, according to the Search Engine Marketers Professional Organization.

The report, released earlier this year, estimates that 54% of companies expect to increase spending on SEO this year, while 10% expect to spend less. On average, companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO in 2011 than they did in 2010 -- the same average increase anticipated for 2010 in last year's survey.