BrightEdge Content Marketing and SEO Industry Certification

Welcome to the beta BrightEdge industry certification and exam. It will take you about 2 hours to review the information and 1 hour to take the 75-question exam. You do not have to finish the exam in one sitting. If you stop in the middle, it will remember where you were and begin again from there. You can take the exam 3 times.

STUDY GUIDE: Please review this introductory material below and if you need additional content to understand a topic, look in the BrightEdge Blog and the BrightEdge Resources section.

The exam will cover digital marketing, content marketing, and SEO. Please read these articles and papers before taking the exam:
HTTP and HTTPs
8 SEO Basics You Need to Get Started
Benefits of Content Marketing
Meta-Description Tips
Timeline of Google's Algorithm Updates
Machine Learning and Rankbrain
Hyperlocal
Quick Answers Paper
Marketing Campaigns Paper
SEO Management Best Practices

SEO is the largest channel with sites seeing an average of 51% of traffic come from organic search. Once they arrive at your site you need think about the customer journey from Awareness to Purchase because around 40% of consumers conduct research online before they purchase in store. Mobile traffic now comprises on average 62%+ of traffic to most sites and brands have to create content that appeals to the mobile-device audience and advances the needs of persona groups which represent the goals and behaviors of segments of the market.

SEO as an industry undergoes regular changes with the algorithm updates and is entering a new phase of artificial intelligence. You need to understand the impact of the Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates. Google created RankBrain to help it understand the context of unique searches better. Review the top 10 on-page and in-site tactics, like titles, meta descriptions, alt-text, advanced tags and tactics, like hreflang, rel=canonical, robots.txt, sitemaps, and the different types of redirects.

Know and understand off-page factors, like backlinks and domain authority. You will need to be familiar with site and social analytics. Social media can be an important channel, but how important will depend on business and objectives. In addition to user-generated content, social channels rely on a high viral factor or share rate. Be clear on how Mobile and Local and SEO interact and affect the user experience.

Content and SEO have already converged and quality content that is evergreen can continue to engage customers regardless of time. Content that has low engagement will show a high bounce rate. Creating content in longer formats and atomizing it into different asset types allows more value to be captured by more systems and users. Integrating content across the channels, including PR provides better leverage and results and puts you in a position to newsjack current events. Familiarize yourself with marketing attribution and contextual advertising.

You should be familiar with industry concepts and acronyms and their function, like CTA, CRM, HTTPs, Google Quick Answers, and Rich Snippets. In the display area, you should know what DSP, SSP, RTB, and DMPs are and do. You will also need basic knowledge of Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You will not need any knowledge of the BrightEdge platform to take this exam. That is a separate product certification we administer.