2021 was a great year for Milestone as we innovated through the challenges of a fast-paced and dynamic market. With the Covid-19 pandemic restricting people’s movement, customers turned to search engines to find local businesses for their needs, and search engines evolved to service these customers by introducing new features and attributes to help businesses connect with their customers.
As a response, Milestone Local and Milestone CMS took center stage when it came to content distribution for thousands of local businesses, allowing them to update details like Phone numbers, Addresses, Hours of Operation, Special hours, Covid services, Covid safety protocols, etc., across business locations from a single platform.
As we grow, we are also disrupting the digital marketing industry with industry-leading products like the Milestone Schema Manager, which was nominated for the US Search Awards 2021, as well as the Growth Champions Awards, 2021.
Let’s review Milestone’s journey in 2021 and how we have provided our clients with unmatched digital marketing products to keep them on top of the game and in front of their customers.
Announcements: Milestone Local Adds New Data Providers
Reach more of your audiences, consistently and accurately
Apple Maps is now the preferred data provider for Mac and iOS users, this allows businesses to grow their visibility and reach a much wider audience. We have also partnered with Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking service that allows users to review and recommend businesses in their neighborhood. With the help of these platforms, we have taken Milestone Local to new horizons and provided our clients with some serious firepower to take on this highly competitive local environment.
FAQ Manager: The latest entry in Milestone’s Product Suite
Now answer your customers most-pressing questions easily and quickly
Search engines receive thousands of questions a day and it is important for businesses to answer questions that are relevant to them in a conversational format. Milestone’s FAQ Manager allows businesses to find Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that are relevant to them and streamline the process of answering them across channels.
The Milestone FAQ Manager lets single or multi-location businesses and agencies bulk publish consistent questions and rich answers as a verified authority across your website, social channels, voice assistants, Google My Business, and chatbots. Milestone’s FAQ Manager is the most end-to-end FAQ management and voice platform that integrates with various channels to crowdsource content and bulk publish Q&As.
Top Feature Releases
Schema Manager: Streamlining the schema management workflow
New and return user experience made even more intuitive
Milestone has changed the new user journey for Schema Manager, making it easier to get started and tag schemas on your webpage. The workflow provides clear steps to start tagging your URLs as soon as you log in. The schema home page has also been updated to provide you with more insights into the performance of your schema and allows you to view ‘actions you need to focus on to become more discoverable across channels.
The new Schema Navigator provides a visualization of published schemas and their entity relationships, and the new Potential Cost Savings report provides a quick overview of the cost savings generated by schema deployment against what a business would have spent for a paid campaign for a similar click gain.
Milestone Insights: SEO Intelligence and comp analysis platform enhances reporting
Now Get access to page experience report and monitor page level performance
Milestone Insights’ Page Experience Report allows you to view the performance of your pages’ Core Web Vitals, which are part of Google’s latest ranking factors. In addition to helping your pages rank on Google, this allows you to ensure that your page is providing users with the best possible experience. The core web vitals of a page are measured against three factors.
Largest Contentful Paint: The time it takes for the majority of a page’s contents to load.
First Input Delay: The time before a user can begin to interact with a page by clicking on a button or inputting text.
Cumulative Layout Shift: The stability of a page once loaded. If a page moves around once it is loaded it will have a poor CLS score.
Competitive Summary: Compare your Pages against your competitors
The all-new Competitive Summary allows you to view the performance of your page against those of your competitors. This allows you to ensure that you are more visible to your customers than your competitors and are providing your website visitors with the best overall experience.
Pages are compared based on five broad categories that comprehensively cover the SEO requirements of the website – crawling and indexing, page experience, schema and clickability, content and relevancy, and local and authority.
Milestone CMS: Manage all your webpages from a comprehensive SEO-first CMS platform
Milestone CMS Powered OTA Rate Comparison Dashboard Launched
Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) have grown in popularity over the years, and now, 65% of all bookings are made through OTAs, which has led to depleting profit margins for hotels and limited access to customer databases.
With Milestone CMS and its new OTA Dashboard, you can view comparative rates for your rooms against top Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) with Milestone’s OTA Dashboard. The OTA Dashboard sources prices from the top OTA to provide you with a bird’s eye view of how competitively priced you are against them. The OTA Dashboard uses this data to update the OTA rate comparison module on your website that encourages customers to make direct bookings on your website and improve the booking revenue of the business.
Milestone CMS Makes Asset Management UI Easier: Centralize Webpage Media
The new Asset Management UI makes updating images on your website a breeze. The centralized repository for all your webpage media elements makes it easy to locate media for your web pages, especially for multi-location businesses. The new user interface provides a thumbnail view of all the images in your repository and allows you to optimize media for all devices. Using the cross-folder image mapping you can use images across folders that are automatically rendered to meet the load and size requirements of the page.
Milestone Analytics: Your hub for omni-channel marketing reporting
Now consolidate your performance across channels and locations
Milestone Analytics now provides you with a Digital Performance Report, which is an automated omnichannel performance report that encapsulates the digital performance of a business location across direct (website), organic, local, paid channels.
Available for revenue and non-revenue clients, the Digital Performance Report compares the performance of the business in the current month against the same period the previous year and includes configurable hard conversions to suit different verticals. In addition, it displays E-commerce revenue, each channel’s summary and breakdown by sub-channels/sources, and offers report automation through the scheduling options.
With this comprehensive suite of digital marketing products, we at Milestone are looking forward to facing the challenges of the digital marketing landscape by keeping a close eye on search and market trends to help our clients always be in front of their customers. To learn more about our products and services, contact us at [email protected] or call us at 408-200-2211.
