The agencies include Performics, a performance marketing agency owned by Publicis Groupe; Resolution Media, an Omnicom Media Group digital marketing agency; and Rosetta, named one of the top 10 U.S. interactive agencies.
Jim Yu, BrightEdge CEO, said the agencies are not the first to sign up with the company, but they are the largest, with an estimated 200 marketers across the three companies worldwide. All can access the BrightEdge platform, which supports everything from desktop to social to local to mobile search. "All these variations of SEO make it important for companies and agencies to have technology to support the changes," he said.
The Web-based system, accessible through the cloud, gives marketers access to make quick changes to campaigns. BrightEdge's platform is done via an open API.
Yu points to the changes Google made in social earlier this week with the launch of Google+, and eight weeks prior with +1. Then there's Google's Panda algorithm update that aims to rid the Internet of duplicate copy and spam.
Search engines continue to accelerate the rate at which they make changes to the structure of search, requiring brands to become more vigilant in the way they build and run SEO campaigns.
Earlier this year, brands focused on "safe" SEO practices. For instance, the J.C. Penny paid link fiasco. Global, local and mobile SEO will become important, too.
"Seven of the top 10 retailers are BrightEdge customers," Yu said, quoting industry numbers that suggest mobile is 15% of the search queries today. "In the last six months, mobile has begun to drive purchase volume in ecommerce. First you see the volume, where traffic comes from the channel, and then you start to see revenue."
"Then there's Google's Panda algorithm update that aims to rid the Internet of duplicate copy and spam."
Panda is not about duplicate copy and spam. It's about "low quality Websites", the nature of which even Google seems to be uncertain about.