BrightEdge: Search Marketers Want Tools to Interpret Social Signals

With a variety of digital marketing tools at their disposal, 73 percent of search marketing decision makers still plan to increase their focus on search engine marketing in the coming year

San Mateo, Calif - January 11, 2012 - BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today issued the findings from their annual search marketers survey. Assessing the priorities for more than 300 leading brand search marketers and retailers, the 2012 survey found that marketers plan to invest more in search engine marketing (73 percent), and need both better tools to interpret social signals/data (83 percent) and an enterprise-grade infrastructure with redundant data centers, and ISO certification.

When it comes to top SEO priorities, digital brand executives are making sure that they understand the impact on search marketing and optimize for social signals including Likes, tweets and Google +1s, indicating that they have an increasing need for tools to leverage these insights in the coming year. In the past year it has become widely recognized that social signals are a new form of backlinks that drive search rankings, and leaders are committed to succeeding in this new arena.

The report also uncovered that brands are expecting their search marketing systems to have the enterprise-grade technology championed by cloud pioneers like salesforce.com. This includes security and associated certifications like ISO 27001, reliability and proven strategies for disaster recovery, and scalability to support customer needs.

The need for global support increased by more than 55 percent, with more than 70 percent indicating that their search programs are being run in multiple countries.

"The fact that so many executives are looking for things like enterprise-grade infrastructure, social signal measurement and global reach means that brands are focused on leveraging this technology for mission critical operations," said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. "At BrightEdge we have focused our technology team to be sure that we have what leading search marketers need in 2012."

For more on BrightEdge's annual search marketers survey, please visit www.brightedge.com/2012-search-marketers-survey-results. To join the discussion about the findings, please visit us at www.facebook.com/seoplatform, or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.