• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 11, 2021

BrightEdge on Wednesday announced the release of a new engine — a suite of products aimed at changing the way marketers look at search engine optimization per industry and competitiveness, especially as Google rapidly makes changes to its ranking factors.

Brands need to know what matters when driving performance and improving visibility in search to stay competitive.

Each industry has its own criteria. For a long time, SEO experts have focused on making the same types of changes. That no longer works, because what matters varies per industry — keyword by keyword and content by content, says Jim Yu, CEO at BrightEdge.

“We also looked at what improving search visibility means for several industries,” he says. “If you look at page-load speed, it turns out that in travel it’s a big factor. In education, it’s not. In education, technical SEO is a much biggest factor. In healthcare, on-page factors are important.”

In 2020, companies spent $70 billion on search advertising trying to master the art of being at the top of Google search results, according to BrightEdge. It's not a secret that paid search and SEO work together.

To do well in SEO, marketers must understand out of thousands of potential ranking signals, which are actual factors impacting the keywords targeted. They also must understand how to compete with competitors across different keyword sets, know how algorithm updates impact specific keywords being targeted, and what strategies others employ to compete.

More than two years in the making, the organic search and content performance company released BrightEdge SearchIQ, integrated into the BrightEdge platform, today at its Share21 virtual industry event. The platform, which comprise several technologies, analyses search signals and hundreds of key ranking factors to translate intent into actionable outcomes that align with the business goal of the organizations.

Search IQ Fasttrack, Smart Schema, Challenger IQ, and TimeMachine are the modules includes in the platform. These tools become a module within the engine of the S3 platform.

TimeMachine helps marketers to determine how their strategies impact performance over time; whereas Fasttrack lets marketers identify things like ranking factor for their keywords or pages and identify the element, such as CLS or FCP, to optimize per industry.

“As search gets more complicated, everything is optimized through artificial intelligence, so we had to invest new technology to help marketers pinpoint what matters,” he said.

All BrightEdge customers will migrate to this platform.

Yu said AI is the future of search. It must be done this way, he said, because the old way no longer works.