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Summary Since Google was founded in 1998, the marketing world has been disrupted more than ever. Google has had such a large impact that Google was named The Most Important Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2002. Consumers have realized that they can research nearly anything before making a purchase, and they do not hesitate to do so. For this reason, it is very important for organizations to make sure that their content can be found by search engines. The guide will cover a few tools that can help marketers stay ahead of the search technology curve. 3
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A Good Way to Think About SEO Onsite SEO Offsite SEO Website Architecture Content Quality Information Analysis Social Signals & Brand Signals Link Building User Interaction Keyword Research & Selection Domain and Page Authority 5
SEO Tools Chart Google ranking success often depends on a company s awareness and measurement of each of the above categories and the resulting strategy of what action steps should be taken. This must be done while also avoiding costly penalties imposed by Google for the use of black hat tactics such as buying links or other tactics that are for the manipulation of the algorithm. (ADD definition: According to Webopedia In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.) This toolkit will briefly explain some of the key tools that can help marketers make sense of all of the information available to them as they strive to maximize SEO success. Here are the top 10 tools that should be in every marketing team s toolkit to help ensure success for both onsite and offsite SEO as well as Information Analysis and Reporting. 6
Top 10 Tools Goal Tool Starting Cost Description Link Building Ahrefs $79/Mo This is the largest database of crawled links that displays the entire backlink profile of a website. It allows a company to see its own incoming links as well as its competitors. The tool uses a unique algorithm to score each backlinks quality. Link Building Raven Tools $99/mo This tool can be used for link management among many other things. One of the key features is the ability to alert the link builder when a link is set to active or inactive. This helps determine the ROI on link building efforts by seeing when links comes to fruition and determine who helped purpose the link. Social/Brand Signals Sprout $39/mo per user This tool creates trackable links that monitor social media interaction, and brand signals. It is also a dashboard and all in one posting platform for social media outlets. Social/Brand Signals Post Beyond varies PostBeyond is a tool that engages a company s employees to share blog posts, trending articles, and other information to their social network. Content Quality Yoast SEO Plugin (WordPress) Free A plugin for wordpress that analyzes content in relation to a selected primary keyword. The algorithm is constantly updated to match Google s ever changing best practices. 7
Goal User Interaction Web Architecture Tool Starting Cost Description Kissmetrics $179/mo Kissmetrics reports on who is doing what on the website. Once a user is identified, the entire path of the visitor is revealed. This helps identify keywords and trends that are attracting visitors and allows the organization to concentrate SEO efforts where needed. Kissmetrics is also known for it s superb reporting feature. WordPress Free WordPress is used more than any other CMS for websites and blogs. It offers an architecture that is continually optimized for and easily navigated by Google. Keyword Research & Selection Mysetool $49/mo Myseotool shows performance and ranking improvements of selected keywords. This tool allows page by page keyword analysis and will provide with suggestions for how to improve keyword rankings through onsite content modifications. Domain & Page Authority Moz Pro $99/mo Moz allows condensed reporting from a variety of tools, that show progress of Domain authority with the ability to compare directly to competitors. Information Analysis Google Analytics Free This tells what is happening on a website, and allows goals creation, visitor tracking (anonymously), and reporting of website KPIs. 8
Link Building Link building and link management are crucial to SEO. Think of the website as a node within a massive web. The more connections the website has, the more trusted it is by the search engine. Trust is the fastest way to improve domain authority, which leads to keyword ranking improvement. Moz believes that 50% of SEO effectiveness is measured by the quality and quantity of inbound links to a website. The quality of the link depends on the following characteristics of the external site that links to the organizations website: How much the search engine trusts the website How many other backlinks are on the page (fewer is better) The quality of the content on the page How well the content on the page relates to the domain that is linked to 9
Highlighted Tools for Link Building Raven Tools Raven tools is another great resource link management. It is used for monitoring specific link statuses as active or inactive for each URL tracked. For example, if an organization has requested a link be added to a particular external blog post where the organization was mentioned, the web page, contact information date requested, and origin of the request can be added to Raven Tools. This information will be saved and the status will be inactive until the link is posted on the blog. If the links gets posted it will automatically be updated and an alert will be sent. This makes it easy to see which categories Ahrefs.com Ahrefs.com is arguably the strongest resource monitoring all inbound links to both the competitor and the company s domain. This tool can reveal opportunities where one or more competitors are mentioned and where their efforts are focused. For instance, a compare and contrast article is written about companies in a specific niche where the organization is not mentioned. It would be possible to email the author, request to be added, and then estimate how important the link will be if obtained all inside of Ahrefs.com. This information can then be saved in a link management tool. of link building are effective, total amount of new active links per month, and how much juice an active link passes 10
Social / Brand Signals Social signals are picked up by feelers that Google uses to determine how important a brand is, how many people are engaging with the brand, and how trusted the brand is. This feeds into keyword rankings often times much faster than link building. Increasing the amount of positive social and brand signals is crucial to growing a company s online presence. 11
Highlighted Tools for Social / Brand Signals PostBeyond This is a great tool for increasing social media growth through utilizing employees and their personal social networks. Generally individual (versus business) posts are more likely to be clicked due to perceived motives and greater trust of individual share. Depending on the size of the company and the level of employee interaction, PostBeyond can be quite a powerful tool for content dissemination. This tool tracks each users potential and creates a level a competition among employees through a point Sprout This tool is great for linking a company s social profiles together in an easy to use dashboard. The links are shortened automatically and made trackable to measure the performance of the content across each social media channel. The dashboard displays a social metrics summary and total number of social followers in one place in order to easily see social network growth. Since Google values high traffic volume and social signals, the traffic that Sprout can help generate socially is great for SEO. based system to encourage consistent use. 12
Content Quality Quality content is the counterpart to link building. Without quality content, it is nearly impossible to obtain high quality links. Quality content is unique, current, and appeals to the target market. There is no single tool that magically creates quality content, however, there are tools that will help optimize the current content and ensure that it receives the highest possible grade by search engines. 13
Highlighted Tools for Content Quality Yoast SEO Plugin for Wordpress Yoast is a one click install within WordPress to analyze a website s content in relation to a specified keyword on a particular page. Webpage content should be designed with a keyword strategy in mind. Essentially the marketer should ask themselves, What keyword or phrase would l most like to ensure this content ranks highly for? A tool like Yoast can then help the marketer understand how this page will perform when that keyword is searched. After the keyword is set, the plugin runs the keyword through an algorithm based on Google s best practices and past success. A green light is assigned to SEO optimized pages, a yellow light is assigned to partially SEO optimized pages, and a red light is assigned to pages that are not optimized or do not have a specified keyword assigned. This plugin also allows mass editing of page meta titles and meta descriptions as well as an auto generating an XML sitemap that can be uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google how to crawl the website hierarchy. 14
User Interaction User interaction and engagement is crucial to a company s success. Simply driving a high volume of traffic to a website does not improve SEO. Now Google can determine how engaged a user is with a site by how many pages a visitor interacts with, how long the visitor spends on the website as a whole, and how long the visitor spends on each page. Understanding and optimizing the paths users follow through a site is essential for keeping those users engaged. 15
Highlighted Tools for User Interaction Kissmetrics This tool is similar to Google Analytics, except instead of telling only what is happening on the website, it tells who is doing it. Kissmetrics identifies a user by any means possible. It will attach a phone number, email address, or even caller ID number to a specific visitor s profile which is tracked the second they land on the website. This is incredibly useful for tracking converted traffic patterns to see what works and what doesn t. It also tracks what pages these customers visit, how long they were on each page, and even how many times they visit the website and where they came from each time they visit. 16
Keyword Research & Selection Picking the right website keywords is critical to SEO success. Without this, it can be very hard to generate content that will attract the target audience no matter how high quality the content is. It is very important to know if and when it will be possible to rank for a keyword. The SEO strategy will vary depending on the competition of the keywords that are being targeted. If an organization wants to target low hanging fruit and see results within three to six months, a very different strategy will be used when compared to selecting a very broad keyword that is the target of many other organizations in the same ecosystem. These keywords can take years to rank highly for depending on how much ground the organization needs to make up and how much momentum the top competitors have. 17
Highlighted Tools for Keyword Research & Selection Myseotool.com This tool tracks an organization s targeted keywords and performs daily searches for each word to monitor increase or decrease for both Google and Bing. This makes it very easy to track many keywords and report on the results easily. This tool also shows how competitive each word that has been selected is, how much traffic the word receives, and how many total competitors are listed for the word or phrase. One of the best features of this tool is ability to select a website page, pick a keyword, and then have an audit of that page performed 18
Website Architecture With the rise of content management systems (CMSs such as WordPress, Magento, etc), website architecture has become more accessible and easier to master. Many people are familiar with the advantages of using a CMS from an ease of use standpoint; however they are not familiar with the SEO benefits from using an SEO friendly platform such as WordPress. SEO friendly CMSs will automatically structure the Header Tags (H1,H2,H3) for posts and pages, include input fields for meta titles and descriptions, and help structure the content in a logical hierarchy fully crawlable by Google. 19
Highlighted Tools for Website Architecture Wordpress WordPress has become the leading CMS among SEO experts due to the customizability, the easy to use plugins, and search engine recognition of the infrastructure of the platform. Almost a quarter of new domains registered use WordPress. WordPress.com gets more unique hits per day than Amazon.com according to Managewp.com in 2013. Many hosting providers offer one click installs for WordPress making it easier than ever to install. With so many websites using WordPress, extra security precautions must be taken such as: changing the WordPress admin URL, deleting the admin user, and installing a captcha plugin to lock out unauthorized access attempts. Search engines will blacklist hacked websites very quickly, so this is a very important step. 20
Domain & Page Authority Domain and page authority is determined by mainly inbound links and social signals, however, there are other factors that make an impact. The domain authority transcends to each page diminishing in value the further it is away from the homepage in relation to the taxonomy. The individual page score that is related to the domain authority is called the page authority. Tools such as Moz or Ahrefs, use different algorithms to calculate these figures; however generally they are very similar. Google does not update their page rank score as often as they have in the past, but they still use the system to determine how important links are that come from websites which can determine how high the website ranks within Google. 21
Highlighted Tools for Domain & Page Authority Moz Pro Moz Professional uses their own algorithm to calculate domain authority. Moz is a massive tool that has many overlapping features included in the other tools described above as well as APIs to several of the tools. Moz has great reporting features and allows an organization the ability to compare domain authority to that of competitors and monitor that domain authority on a monthly basis. Automated reports can be set up and delivered on a recurring basis to include fields that are relevant to the success of SEO campaigns. 22
Information Analysis There are many metrics used by marketers in many different tools. Ultimately all these tools are being used to gain insights in order generate more traffic by increasing search engine rankings. Trial and error is an essential skill set to being successful at SEO. A lot of effort is put into trying new things, monitoring these new things, and then noting the success or failure over several months. Reports make this much easier to make sense of key factors. Highlighted Tools for Information Analysis Google Analytics Google Analytics is arguably the most powerful SEO tool there is, however it comes at the cost of sometimes being challenging to use and master. Many prefer to use other simplified tools that specialize in a particular area of SEO. Google Analytics tracks visitors to the website and supports goal tracking based on anything from phone calls to thank-you page visits. It also integrates with many different software tools, so there is a good chance someone at the organization has seen or used data from this tool before. Google Analytics integrates into Moz, allowing top notch reporting. 23
Salesfusion is a leading provider of marketing automation software that is designed for B2B companies who are committed to driving more revenue by aligning marketing and sales. Salesfusion anchors around the belief that a well integrated CRM and Marketing Automation pair is the foundation of all B2B marketing. Contact Information: 855.238.6522 sales@salesfusion.com www.salesfusion.com facebook.com/salesfusion plus.google.com/+salesfusion linkedin.com/company/salesfusion twitter.com/salesfusion youtube.com/user/salesfusionmarketing pinterest.com/salesfusion 2014 Salesfusion Inc. Sources for the data in this ebook: internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ Searchenginewatch.com, Searchenginejournal.com Hubspot.com/marketing-statistics