Milestone drives online discovery and customer acquisition with our proprietary digital presence platform (MPC). The Milestone platform combines Website CMS, Schema Manager, Local listings, Reviews management, FAQ Manager, and Analytics in one easy-to-navigate space. In addition, Milestone offers Performance Marketing Services for clients with content, design, SEO, paid media marketing, and analytics needs.
Over 2,000 companies across hospitality, retail, fintech, and automotive industries trust Milestone to drive online growth. Milestone is proud to be a trusted partner to large enterprises, mid-market companies, and SMBs, including Marriott, US Bank, One Nevada Credit Union, VMWare, Nissan, McDonald’s, Motel6, Preferred Hotels, Sun Outdoors, and SeaWorld.
Annually, over 300 million visitors use websites developed on the Milestone CMS, 540 million consumers click on content powered by Milestone Schemas, and 3.7 billion consumers search for businesses powered by Milestone Local. The Milestone platform is amongst the highest-rated MarTech platforms with awards and recognition from Forrester, G2, Adrian Awards, US Search Awards, Search Engine Land, CMS Wire, and many other organizations.
MILESTONE INC. Bringing Visibility with SEO-First CMS, Schema, Local, and FAQ Platform
Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone Inc., was with the View CEO to share details on how they are addressing technology challenges.
The Problem
Of the major challenges most brands face is how to get online content discovered by their target audience. Better discovery of content leads to higher engagement and conversion from online channels. When customers search online for products, 80% of the time is spent in the discovery phase and only the final 20% in engagement and conversion.
The challenge for content discovery comes primarily from three areas:
▶Most content management systems are meant for developers to create content efficiently. Often, they are not focused on how the end consumer of content is going to find the content. Further, they are not technically optimized for driving organic content discovery.
▶ Often, content is distributed amongst multiple marketing platforms, making it difficult to drive consistent content visibility across multiple search channels. It is also very inefficient for brands to maintain consistency and accuracy. This is a significant problem for brands with multiple content sources for different channels, such as websites or their Google Business Profiles (GBP).
▶ One of the key issues brands face is identifying the content that is important for their consumers to make decisions. The content on the brand site is typically not adequate for what their target audience is searching for.
▶ Mid-market brands are often not able to afford an enterprise-class content management system. Alternatively, they are unable to leverage high-quality professional service agencies to deliver the right experience to their customers due to budget constraints. And even if they do, coordination across all teams to achieve a global presence with a consistent brand identity is a tall ask.
To make up for this lack of organic content visibility, brands spend significant amounts on paid advertising. While paid advertising is one of the most effective channels, it is expensive. Not surprising, according to the Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, 92 percent of consumers trust organic, user-generated content (UGC) more than they trust traditional advertising1.
Milestone Solution
Milestone recognized that the key reason most businesses have a website is to drive business. Website discovery is critical to driving business, and while paid advertising can be used effectively, it’s critical to get visibility through organic search. Organic search leads to a higher return on investment and more effective use of paid advertising dollars. Milestone developed a suite of tools and platforms for brands to drive higher organic visibility.
Milestone CMS
Milestone CMS is the world’s only SEO and discovery-first content management platform. Some of the key characteristics of the platform include:
- Milestone hybrid: The headless architecture offers the perfect solution for the mid-market to large-sized enterprises, especially where the technical maturity of the organization is not
- Search and embedded website discovery technology is natively built into the platform resulting in high indexability and crawlability of
- SEO-enabled asset library
- Full funnel analytics with customizable views for corporate and regional
- AI/ML-driven insights for performance and website
- Natively built best-in-class mobile experience, including progressive web
Milestone offers an end-to-end website development flow with enterprise-class infrastructure and security features which is a big need for mid-sized organizations with low technical maturity. The agility of the platform enables organizations to maximize their web presence with low investment in resources with ease.
Milestone Schemas
Milestone Schemas is an extension to the Milestone CMS platform that is used by brands to optimize discovery on websites that are on 3rd party platforms. Schema enables brands to tag all their content with structured data so that search engines can understand the content on the website. Search has evolved from focusing on keywords to understanding natural language, with users turning to mobile, tablet, and desktops. Through these massive behavior shifts; we have found that structured data markup has shaped how search engines understand website content. Milestone Schemas platform leverages entity optimization to build knowledge graphs using schemas & entity attributes. Milestones clients drive a 28% average increase in traffic from organic channels; scaling schema markup offers the fastest time to success in SEO. Also, find below some of the challenges that brands face to scale schema implementation:
- Tackling the complexity of entity search algorithm and architecture
- Keeping up with Schema.org and Google attribute revisions that lead to errors — Search engines ignore pages with
- Having significant website IT resources and technical know-how for the deployment phase and ongoing
- Ability to demonstrate and report on
The failure of schema projects is often due to error-prone deployment and the lack of teams equipped to handle challenges. Successfully scaling schema projects can be done through deployment with a nested architecture that is followed by ongoing schema management and regular error monitoring.
Milestone FAQs
Another module within the Milestone Content Platform enables brands to curate and manage their verified FAQs at scale. Customers seek answers from search engines, websites, and their networks. Search engines are surfacing direct answers to user queries. FAQ platform enables brands to restructure content on their websites in FAQ format and distribute the answers not only to their website but also their Google Business Profiles (GBP) and chatbots.
Investing in relevant answers and FAQs drives the highest CTR and improves search visibility, ranking on SERPs, impressions, and clicks.
Milestone Local
Milestone recognized the importance for local businesses to reach their audience via hyperlocal content and near me searches. To improve SERP visibility and reach a local audience, Milestone Local is an ideal platform for managing your business profiles on Google, Apple, Bing, and Facebook. The Milestone Local platform enables multi-store brands to manage and update content on their profiles from a centralized platform. The platform enables advanced features such as making and scheduling posts, updating images, and responding to reviews.
Milestone Analytics
Milestone analytics platform provides full-funnel performance reporting. The biggest benefit is to multi-location brand as the platform offers easy-to-configure brand level reporting as well as local and regional views for each of the locations or for regional heads.
Conclusion
Milestone is a pioneer in content management solutions with heavy focus on search and discovery of content. Brands typically experience significant increase in revenue performance, search visibility, and leads upon using Milestone platform. Over 2000 brands and businesses use Milestone platforms to drive engagement and revenue. The platform has won numerous awards winning the best MarTech platform award in hospitality industry from the prestigious Adrian Awards and several awards for its search capabilities and the ROI driven by Search Engine Land, US search Awards, etc. To learn more about Milestone’s products and services, contact
sales@milestoneinternet.com or visit https://www.milestoneinternet.com/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nine-out-of-ten-consumers-trust-ugc-more-than-traditional-advertising/
