2021 dawned upon us unlike any other year in the recent past. For the first time, businesses and people across the globe stepped into a new year with a high level of uncertainty. 2020 witnessed the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic rage across the globe and the situation taught us to stick together. To help businesses get back on their feet and look past the turmoil, we launched the crisis, recovery, and growth framework. Our immediate step towards recovery paid dividends for businesses we’re associated with and we were even recognized by HSMAI with two Adrian Awards – the first for the framework and the second for our crisis-communication websites to restore customer trust and traffic during the pandemic.
Q1 of 2021 was business as usual for Milestone. We carried on our quest to bring businesses under the spotlight on search to improve their reach, engagement, and conversions, with the new features we added to Schema Manager, Local & Reviews and Analytics. Of course, the highlight being the launch of Milestone CMS 6.5.
Yes, you heard right. We’ve taken it up a few notches with CMS 6.5. Better than ever, version 6.5 of our CMS comes with an improved user experience. It’s sleek and easy-to-use design makes navigation across any feature a breeze. On a single dashboard, you can view every feature you’d need to manage your website, and with over 20+ key features, the left-hand navigation bar (on the website editor screen) and the Quick Access Bar will help you find any feature with ease – making sure your workflow is methodical and time saving.
The excitement doesn’t stop here. Over the next few months, we’ll be adding improved flows to publish images, and manage your assets and push notifications. With these additions, you wouldn’t need guidance as the process itself will give you a hand holding.
Let’s now give you a sneak peek into some of the cool features we added to Schema Manager, Local & Reviews and Analytics.
Schema Manager: Introduction of the Schema Navigator, Distribution widget, and more
With these fascinating features, your schema workflow has gotten way better and simpler, plus you can now identify how you’ve tagged your schemas, learn to create a nested schema architecture and improve the trust of your tagged content with the search engine. Take a look at these cool features we rolled out in Q1:
- Schema Navigator – Visualization for published schemas and entity relationships
The Schema Navigator offers an easy-to-understand representation of entity relationships based on the schemas published to help visualize and create a nested schema architecture. This tool will help you realize the relationship gaps of your schemas, its properties and its relationship with the schemas that you’ve tagged. By plugging the relationship gap with the help of the visualizer, you can give the search engine the best possible understanding of the content on your webpage. And you know what that means right? Rich results, SERP saturation, and better real-estate on search results for your business.
- Schema Distribution widget – A quick look at the schemas deployed and their health
The Schema Distribution widget will give your business a bird’s eye view of the schema types that have been deployed on the website to date and the health of the schemas by offering focus on schema types that have errors and warnings.
- View Schema performance by categories – What’s your best performing schema combination?
We won’t just show you the performance of schemas on each webpage or the rich results, we’ll also display which schema combinations and categories are working best for your web pages in terms of URL clicks, impressions, and overall CTR.
- Improved Schema Editor with wizard-based workflow – You’ll know your next step
With the wizard-based workflow you will know exactly which step you have to take next. From selecting a URL, tagging, generating, and publishing the schemas, the wizard-based workflow will take you through each step. If you’re tagging schemas for the very first time, the Schema Editor will display the most relevant schemas to choose from based on your web page content. The content tagged on the page will be highlighted, you can view the schemas you have added, the number of instances of each schema type, and lots more.
- Global Schemas – Tag once and use across all your URLs
The Global schema feature saves you the effort of tagging common schemas multiple times. Save it once and you can reference it across all the URLs of your website with ease.
- Wikipedia integration when adding Schemas – Improve trust with the search engine
To improve your trust with the search engine for the content tagged and inevitably influence the Knowledge Graph results on search, you can use this cool feature and integrate Wikipedia pages/entities (one of the top sources of truth for Google) to your tagged schemas and website content.
- Potential Cost Savings Report – Know exactly how much you’ve saved using schemas
This report gives you an insight into the dollar value that you have saved just by implementing schemas based on the clicks your web pages received on search against what you would have spent to gain the same amount of traffic with paid campaigns. It will give you a summary as well as a breakdown of the clicks, impressions, and savings your business benefitted from, for each web page.
Local & Reviews: Improved reviews summary dashboard, addition of non-US service regions, and more..
With these features, we’ve made online reputation as easy as it can get and have taken key steps to improve the relevance and visibility of your business on search.
- Reviews Summary Revamped Dashboard – Online reputation management made a breeze
With the all-new Reviews Summary Dashboard, your business has a single screen to view its reviews performance and take key actions for all or select business locations. The Reviews Summary dashboard will allow you to assess the average performance of your reviews across all business profiles, view top review sources, and take actions for reviews needing immediate attention. In addition, to ensure you’re on top of what customers are saying about you right now, you can view the most recent reviews and trending keywords across all reviews to help you identify and filter similar type of reviews.
- Addition of services for non-US regions – Improve the relevance of your business on search
Whether your business is functioning in the United States or not, using Milestone Local you can now add up to 20 service areas that will be reflected on your business’s GMB profile thereby improving the relevance of your business for ‘near me’ and ‘things to do’ type of searches.
- Profile completeness widget – Align your business profile with Google’s ranking factors
Milestone Local’s Profile completeness widget will call out everything that you need to do to rank on search. It will give you key insights as to whether your business needs to update its categories (to improve relevance), respond to reviews and GMB Q&As (to improve trust), upload photos (to improve clicks), and update you to publish Google Posts to ensure your business has fresh content to improve its engagement.
Analytics:
- Paid Media reporting for Google, Meta, Bing, and Facebook Ads – All on one screen!!
Using Milestone Analytics, your business can track the performance of your Ad campaigns on Google, Bing, Facebook, and Meta Ads on a single screen. You can deep dive into the key metrics such as clicks, impressions, cost of the campaign, and conversion metrics such as ROAS (return of advertisement spend), revenue, leads, clicks to call, bookings, etc. With all the key campaign information in your grasp, your business can make the right strategic steps to improve your reach and conversions with every campaign.
To know more about our products and solutions, the innovative features we have in store for businesses in the coming months, and how we could give your business the boost it needs to reach your audience anywhere and everywhere, contact us at [email protected] or call us at 408-200-2211
