Did you know that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine? Given this astonishing fact, it’s not surprising that both large corporations and small businesses invest a great deal of effort into building a solid SEO strategy and implementing it alongside other digital marketing practices.
If you are planning to optimize your rankings in search engines on your own, your paramount goal should be hiring an in-house team of SEO experts, including project managers, link builders and content developers. However, this is just half of the job done. The other half lies in choosing adequate SEO tools in accordance with your business needs.
Only this way will you be able to increase your team’s productivity, drive more traffic to your website and boost your conversion rates.
Tailor your SEO Strategy to your Business Needs
Over the years, marketers have taken SEO for granted. These practices have become synonymous with building links all over the internet, regardless of their quality and relevance to your industry. However, as Google gets smarter on a daily basis, these practices have become not only pointless, but also quite risky.
That’s not for you.
In order to set yourself apart from your competition, you need to develop a profitable SEO strategy, backed by proper software. However, as the number of SEO tools has risen in the last few years, choosing one that meets your business needs is not an easy task.
Most marketers make the same mistake of choosing SEO tools based on their features and pricing. However, the most expensive options with the widest range of features don’t necessarily have to be the best solution for you. If they cannot meet the requirements of your business, there is no point in investing in them.
Therefore, the choice of SEO tools comes down to the demands of your business. For instance, if you need a platform that will help you discover and research your keywords, you could go with some free solutions. On the other hand, if you’re focusing on in-depth SEO analysis, you will definitely need a tool that is more complex and has a wider range of features.
Compare Tools with Similar Features to Find the Best Solution
Just because you’ve found a perfect SEO tool it doesn’t mean that it is the only one. Every aspect of your SEO strategy is supported by a myriad of tools and each of them offers something innovative.
So first, you need to determine which aspect of your website you want to optimize for search engines. Once you do that, you have to do research, find several tools you could use to solve the problem and compare them to find the one that meets your needs.
1. Want to Keep Track of Industry-Relevant Keywords?
It all starts with a user typing a few words into a search box. Similarly to a compass, these keywords determine in which direction their searches will go, as well as tell you whether your digital marketing efforts are making progress or not. This is why they play a fundamental role in your online marketing campaign.
By researching keyword requirements in your niche, you will not only figure out what terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your target audience. In other words, to stay relevant and get the right kind of users, you shouldn’t look for the keywords relevant to your industry only, but also focus on what your customers usually type. Matt Cutts explained this beautifully in a video a few years ago.
“You don’t want to just say ‘Mount Everest elevation.’ You want to say words like ‘how high is Mount Everest’ because people are going to type ‘how high is Mount Everest?’”
Only by implementing this type of research will you be able to foresee the shifts in keyword demand, keep track of the ever-changing market conditions and, most importantly, offer the content your target audience is expecting from you. And, in order to do this efficiently, you need to have proper keyword analysis tools.
Logically, Google AdWords Keyword Planner is the first choice of many marketers. Even though it is specifically designed for advertising, this platform can also be used to analyze organic keywords. With Keyword Planner, you can search for new keywords, receive search volume and traffic forecasts for a list of keywords, determine the cost of running a paid marketing campaign, as well as expand keyword lists to get new keyword ideas.
Another immensely important tool is Moz Keyword Explorer that facilitates the way marketers discover keywords. It also delivers precise information on monthly search volume, calculated click-through rate, a score that shows your potential to rank and suggests related keywords.
2. Planning to Optimize your Content Efforts?
Ever since its emergence, content marketing has become the holy grail of every successful digital marketing campaign. It provides small businesses with the opportunity to drive traffic to their sites, generate more sales and, above all, raise their conversion rates. This is exactly why 93% of marketers have employed or are planning to employ at least some content marketing strategies.
The first step towards boosting your content marketing strategy is, of course, creating relevant, top-quality and industry-specific content that will draw your reader’s’ attention. This way, you will manage to demonstrate your competence in your oversaturated niche.
Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi pointed out the importance of focusing on content relevant for your niche:
“Stop writing about everything. So many brands create content and try to cover everything, instead of focusing on the core niche that they can position themselves as an expert around. No one cares about your special recipe… Find your niche, and then go even more niche.”
However, in order to improve your content marketing effectiveness, you need to understand your keywords and know how well similar content performs. When it comes to content optimization, some of the most significant tools are BuzzSumo and Content Explorer by Ahrefs.
With both of these tools, you will be able to find the most notable influencers in your niche, assess keywords, analyze backlink sources and social media shares. This way, you will discover the most shared content based on the keywords you entered and figure out how it has gone viral.
3. Having Trouble with Link Prospecting?
Google says we should stop building links. However, statistics tell us the opposite. According to a recent research, 64% of respondents claimed that over 25% of their SEO work is dedicated to securing links. So, it’s clear that link building is still one of the greatest ranking factors today. As quality backlinks are the foundation of your SEO strategy, you need to find a number of quality link building prospects.
Of course, you could do this manually. This practice is based on detailed research, Google search, as well as advanced search options. But, why waste your precious time on manual searches when there are dozens of link prospecting tools that can do the boring part for you.
One such tool is Dibz, specifically designed to simplify your link building efforts by letting you choose from a set of predefined queries or enter custom ones to find the most relevant results. Apart from offering numerous results, it also provides you with a number of other SEO metrics, such as spam factors, domain authority, referring domains and pages, social shares and website preview.
Always Sign up for a Free Trial
It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to decide between multiple tools with similar features or have found just one tool that seems perfect for your business, you need to test it before you make a purchase. Since the majority of tools offer some form of free trial, ranging from seven to thirty days, this won’t be a problem.
There are several important factors you need to keep in mind when choosing a tool, including your budget, the size and needs of your team and the size of your website. Most importantly, you need to use the tool every day until the trial ends in order to make sure that it is user-friendly and easily integrated with your other digital marketing platforms. Otherwise, you might waste both your time and money on training your employees to use a tool they simply don’t understand. Consequently, this will affect their productivity and, of course, your entire digital marketing campaign.
For example, many marketing specialists recommend SEO tools that have been already implemented into Wordpress, such as the Yoast SEO Plugin and the Google Search Console. So, if you use Wordpress, this might be the right solution for you.
Conclusions
What we can conclude from these examples is that choosing the right SEO tool for your business is a complex process that requires conducting a thorough research, drawing comparisons and making various decisions.
Hopefully, this guide will help you implement the right set of tools for your digital marketing efforts and, in this way, drive more traffic to your website and boost your conversion rates.
Author: Nate M. Vickery is a business consultant and Editor-in-chief at bizzmarkblog.com. His fields of expertise are company management and efficient work environment through latest technology trends.
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