Software

The Wild Web: How SEO Can Draw In, Engage and Retain Consumers for Brand Name Structure

The Wild Web: How SEO Can Draw In, Engage and Retain Consumers for Brand Name Structure

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In our linked world, nearly every company has an online presence they count on heavily to support the bottom line. Amid the ongoing crisis, that hasn’t been more true than now. While the web can simplify endpoint processes like sales, it also functions as a crucial entrance for consumer engagement. That’s why business require to place increased focus on their online existence for brand name building– and where SEO tools can make all the difference.

SEO has constantly been an important tool for optimizing a company’s brand name online in order to drive leads into the sales funnel. With a congested landscape and more content completing for customer attention than ever, it’s important that brands utilize SEO technology to ensure they’re maximizing brand awareness online in order to continue creating income by transforming leads into loyal clients.

Encourage brand-new client recruitment and acquisition
Building a brand name starts with converting audiences from being “brand-new visitors”– taking a look at a site to discover the business– to a “brand name visitor”– checking out the webpage because of what they understand about the company. This indicates increasing the volume of non-brand-traffic, which can be done by leveraging SEO insights to understand what consumers are searching for and discovering the best path to exposure to rank high in their searches. And the more familiar consumers are, the more likely they are to keep returning– a current study from Econsultancy discovered 82%of consumers click brands they recognize with first prior to taking a look at other choices. With significantly more brand name alternatives to turn to than ever, a sense of familiarity and consistency will assist you produce an engaged and faithful client base.

Boost client engagement through improved online experiences
A brand’s homepage might not have the appropriate information or the call to action needed which satisfies their preliminary intent. SEO can assist evaluate which pages have the least amount of bounceback– such as, what pages customers click on that influences them to check out another page and likewise what may be most appropriate to assisting customers attain their objective. The experience ends up being tailored to the customer, improving conversions per see, click-through rates, and rankings, which in turn increases conversion.

Ensure business can reduce online complexity
At the end of the day, the best method to develop a lasting online brand existence is to supply a seamless and constant virtual experience for your audience. Consistency can be difficult to handle online, where consistent upgrades and changes to innovation could easily impact the source code for a website and in turn, how the audience communicates with that business online. Safeguarding existing SEO performance is less expensive than replacing it if something goes wrong. As such, SEO technology can provide companies with increased control over their online existence by considering search optimization at every stage. This ensures that SEO, and as a result, prospective consumers, are never ever lost in the shuffle due to human mistake.

SEO requires to be part of the web advancement process from the start, and new tools can allow SEO teams and designers to evaluate for unfavorable SEO impact prior to releasing a modification to the site. Brands should also attempt planning out dynamic material within the site– maybe customizing by language or previous engagement with the website– however ensure SEO is leveraged throughout the process for a seamless experience for the end user.
SEO software is one of the main contributors to motivating brand-new customer acquisition and increasing customer engagement through boosted online experiences. And with online channels presently being the main– and for some, only– methods of interaction between brands and clients, it’s crucial that brands get it.

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Upgrading Content: Here’s Why Your Old Material Requirements a Refresh

Upgrading Content: Here’s Why Your Old Material Requirements a Refresh

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Best practices for upgrading material

The process of updating old content can be time consuming, specifically if your website has been around for a while. It’s finest to plan to deal with this project on an ongoing basis, instead of all at once.

Before you begin, here are some basic best practices to follow:

Conduct a content audit

Reasonably, you’re not going to have time to offer adequate attention to every post that needs to be updated. To make the best usage of your time, it is very important to determine which pieces of content are most likely to have the biggest effect. This is where a content audit can be found in.

A content audit is created to evaluate all the existing material on your site and examine its performance. Material that was when effective is a lot more most likely to bounce back. Goal to pick content that was composed to target high volume, evergreen keywords.

Develop a list to follow

No two pieces of material are the exact same and some will require more work than others. By now, you’re probably questioning precisely what changes are essential to make in order to see a significant enhancement in content efficiency. Research shows that modifications made to the body text of the article are more important to online search engine.

To keep your work organized and uniform, produce a checklist to follow for each short article that you upgrade. Here are some modifications to think about adding to your checklist:

  • Validate the reader intent of the keyword you’re targeting. Does the message of the short article directly line up with what readers are searching for when they look for this term?
  • Examine the catchiness of the headline compared to the completing short articles. How can you enhance your heading to stand out?
  • Update graphics and other visual elements that no longer fit your brand name design standards.
  • Sort through all of the internal and external links to make sure the content that you’re connecting to is upgraded and accurate. If there are broken links, fix them.
  • Identify opportunities to upgrade on-page SEO components such as the meta description and image alt-text.
  • Check for grammatical errors and writing design. When it concerns composing, there’s no right or wrong however you ought to aim to have a unified brand voice throughout all of your pieces.

Some modifications are quick fixes, while others can take a number of hours if a full reword of the article is deemed required. Once you think the piece remains in good condition, re-publish it and upgrade the post date. This is done differently based upon the web content management system you use, so make certain to consult your particular software service provider on how to do this.

Promote updated pieces on social media

As soon as your short article is republished, promote it throughout your social media accounts. If you already use a social media suite tool, scheduling old material into rotation should be a relatively basic step.

Track development and adjust accordingly

If you haven’t already purchased SEO software, now is the time to do it. This type of option is important to tracking the performance of the material you’re upgrading so you can understand if your efforts are making an effect. In addition to user traffic, most SEO tools enable you to determine the variety of backlinks and keywords picked up by your articles. When you have the ability to track progress, you can reproduce the procedure if it’s working or make adjustments to your strategy if you’re not getting the outcomes you expected. Provide your recently upgraded posts a month or so to see how they’re carrying out.

Bottom line

New is not constantly much better. If your marketing technique needs a much-needed boost, consider investing time in updating old material no matter if you’re targeting basic SEO or regional SEO If carried out correctly, a content refresh can assist you generate notable traffic results, keep your audience engaged, and reveal search engines that your article deserves the # 1 spot on the SERPs.

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Here Is Why You Should Pay More Attention To Marketing Automation Software

Here Is Why You Should Pay More Attention To Marketing Automation Software

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Marketing automation is the process of handling you repetitive marketing tasks like sending weekly emails, new product notifications, alerting customers about new sale or discounts, and many more such tasks. By automating such tasks, you can easily make time for coming up with the right replies for the right customers at the right time. Here are some details about the marketing automation software that you should know about.

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How Does Marketing Automation Software Work?

Depending on the industry marketers deploy different software strategies from which the popular ones are as follows:

Specifying Criteria

Using a marketing automation tool, you can set goals and plan tasks to achieve those goals. The criteria entered by the user are then interpreted, analyzed, stored, and executed by the marketing automation software. This way, the software helps you score leads, and in the end, the leads are entered into the Customer Relationship Management software and passed on to the sales team to make sales.

Tracking Where The User Goes

As a business owner, you have to be acquainted with what your consumers are interested in. Marketing automation takes care of this by using tracking cookies on the website visitor’s web browser. The website owners can collect data when a visitor visits a website and build an ideal profile which they can then use to attract new customers to their platform.

Using Forms For Collecting User Information

The marketing department needs to generate quality leads for the sales team. For this purpose, they use forms to collect the user information that later on qualifies as leads—based on the information filled you can have the marketing automation tool in place to generate leads in their respective categories. Then you can determine which strategies to use on leads to ensure higher closing rates.

Features That Marketing Automation Software Includes

Lead Management

Lead management is one of the essential features of marketing automation software; with this feature, it is easy to identify prospects and capture leads. It handles all the vital functions from lead scoring to lead assigning. Allowing marketing and sales teams to work together using the marketing automation tool allows you to gain more leads, nurture them effectively, and increase your sales exponentially.

Integration

Marketing automation has many potentials and can offer plenty of excellent insights that can improve your business. Still, you are only going to get the most out of it if your automation tool can adequately integrate with Customer relationship management (CRM) software, Content management system (CMS), analytics tools, etc. The integration will allow you to easily track the behaviors and determine which marketing strategies are working and what you can do to boost the results.

Progressive Profiling

One of the biggest goals as a business owner for you is the generate leads and collect their information. Marketing automation allows you to take this process a step further. By progressive profiling, you learn more and more each time they fill out a form.

With this, you don’t need to present every time a user visits your platform, you can set it up once and just let it ride, which is excellent. The data collected from this then can help you segment better emails and configure more targeted email campaigns. It enables you to bring in more leads.

Social Media Automation

Social media engagement is essential if you want to grow your business today. Using a marketing automation tool, you can schedule posts in advance and send alerts to your audience about any special discounts or sales. You can use social media automation to:

  • Keep your social media accounts up to date with fresh content
  • Engage with customers to discuss your products or services
  • Keep track of your social media campaigns
  • Schedule and push timed updates
  • Gather customer feedback through comments and insights
  • Run targeted advertisements

Segmentation

An enterprise automation software should be able to manage data efficiently and filter customer information whenever required. Segmentation is the ability to select a target audience based on a specific criterion. Marketing automation tools segment the database by a combination of key interests of a targeted customer base.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the last must-have feature of marketing automation software. This is one feature that requires a lot of time and effort from the user end. As a user, you will have to spend time developing marketing campaigns that take the customer from one stage of your buying cycle to another.

This requires a lot of research and content creation from your end, but once in place, it can help you create more opportunities from your product or services and nurture your existing leads until the sales team engage with them.

Author Bio: I am Greg Wilson, a content writer working with GoodFirms, a research and review platform for service and software companies. I am passionate about blogging, creative writing, social media, and content marketing. I write blog posts for GoodFirms about SEO software, Cloud computing, IoT development, and many more such categories.

If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.

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Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Raven Tools: SEO Software Comparison

Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Raven Tools: SEO Software Comparison

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In this blog post, we’ll be comparing three of the market-leading SEO tools: Ahrefs, SEMrush, and yours truly — Raven Tools. There are a lot of review sites out there, but having built an SEO platform ourselves, we have a deep understanding of what makes these tools different — and the ways in which they might suit certain marketers more than others.

We can tell you where Raven Tools shines, and where Ahrefs and SEMrush keep us on our toes. Hopefully, this helps you make a decision about which tool is most suitable for you.

In the following comparison, we’ll give you information about:

  • The unique features of Raven Tools, Ahrefs, and SEMrush
  • The main uses for each tool’s unique SEO features
  • What kind of SEO professional is best suited to each tool

All of these SEO tools are successful for a reason; digital marketers find them to be robust and effective. So, rather than critiquing our competitors, we’ll focus on each software’s main differentiators, and see how they cater to the needs of SEO professionals in their own unique way.

Raven Tools

Overview of Raven Tools:

Let’s start with Raven Tools. Our suite helps SEOs do site audits, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research — and we tie this together with world-class reporting functionality. Raven Tools helps agencies, consultants, and in-house digital marketing teams to do the SEO work and report on results beautifully.

Our subscription plans start at just $39 per month (when paid annually). We offer a 7-day free trial — so you can check out Raven Tools with zero risk.

Main Differentiator: Raven Tools is a Reporting Powerhouse

All of the SEO functionality that we feature in this guide is woven together by one common thread: reporting. You’ll need to have effective reporting capability in your locker if:

  • You’re a consultant or agency reporting results to your client(s)
  • You’re an in-house team reporting results to senior management
  • You’re an in-house team that needs to justify investment or resources
  • You want to monitor results for yourself in an easy and consumable way

Whether you’re in-house or a service provider, you have to build a narrative and tell a story with your SEO research and reporting — beyond simply showing the raw numbers. Raven gives you the tools you need to do the actual work, and also the means to communicate the results efficiently and effectively.

What Makes Raven Tools a Reporting Powerhouse? 

Dozens of Data Sources, and Customized, Automated, and Visual SEO Reports:

Raven Tools: All Traffic, All Referrals, Goals

  • Totally customizable: Your SEO reports are customizable down to the tiniest detail. Firstly, in terms of the metrics, you report on. For example, you can choose your data source (e.g. Raven’s Site Auditor), and show a single selected metric from it if you want (e.g. desktop page speed).Secondly, they’re customizable in terms of the report’s structure and branding. They can be white-labeled with custom URLs, text commentary, images and screenshots, favicons, and logos.
  • Access data from 30+ platforms: You can plug Raven Tools into the data sources you need — Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads, and Bing Webmaster Tools.You can even connect third-party APIs (e.g. SEMrush and Spyfu) for keyword data, and use Moz and Majestic metrics to assess the strength and quality of a site. And of course, you can feed in Raven’s own metrics from the platform into your reports — e.g. site audit fixes, backlink acquisition, and rankings performance.
  • Automatic: You can build reports from scratch, or create templates that auto-generate on any timescale that you need. For example, if management needs a weekly backlinks report but a monthly traffic report, you can set up templates and they’ll generate and send automatically.By integrating various data sources, you can automatically build data-rich reports that tell a story — either to measure your own progress or to communicate ROI to other stakeholders.
  • Visual: With Raven Tools, you can create SEO reports that are quickly digestible and easy on the eye. You can demystify SEO data by pairing certain custom metrics with others to show ROI (for example, keyword rankings and a number of inquiries via blog posts), and share online SEO reports via shareable URL — or in PDF format to email if preferred.
  • Dynamic and flexible: You’re not limited to Raven’s metrics, nor the third-party platform integrations. You can dynamically feed in Google Sheet data and/or upload CSV data manually. For example, if a report is scheduled for every Friday, Raven can scrape a Google Sheet and automatically feed fresh spreadsheet data into the report before it sends.

Which SEO Research Tools Connect with Raven Tools Reporting?

Site Audit:

A first port-of-call for many SEOs is to check the health of your website to uncover high priority technical issues that need to be fixed. This is where the Raven Tools Site Auditor comes into play.

SEO site audits can be messy affairs, so we’ve focused on keeping ours clear, concise, and actionable.

Raven Tools: All Issues such as redirects, speed performance, duplicate page titles, missing meta description, low word count, etc.

You can tick off the tasks as you go through, and you can also easily share a link with non-technical stakeholders. Site Auditor can be used by any SEO professional, and due to our annotations and directions on the dashboard, the importance of each technical fix can be understood by everybody else.

Rank Tracking:

Businesses hire SEOs to improve rankings, so rank tracking — and effectively reporting on rankings improvements — is crucial. Naturally, as SEO research tools, both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer rank tracking, and they’re both pretty good at it. But here’s where Raven Tools differs from the others:

  • You get the choice of how often to update keyword rank tracking — daily, weekly or monthly — as default, without paying extra. This means you can prioritize the most important keywords to update daily, while the others can stay on the monthly monitoring backburner.
  • You can track all of the major Google alternatives in one dashboard. This includes Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex (Russia), and Baidu (China). We’re one of the only SEO tools to give you this view on your performance in the different global search engines.
  • You get flexible on-demand keyword rank tracking, above-and-beyond your current Raven Tools plan. Put simply, if you need extra rank tracking functionality but don’t want to upgrade to a higher-tier plan, you can add keywords for a tiny fee ($0.003/RPC).

As with other SEO tools, Raven Tools offers localized rank tracking (you can track keywords per zip code if you want) — and you can also see desktop vs mobile rankings in one place.

Keyword Research:

In Keyword Research Central, you can research specific keywords to see their search volume and competition and monitor them on your Keyword Manager or Rank Tracker.

While this is standard practice for most SEO tools, we differ because we open up keyword data to third-party APIs through our Keyword Suggestions feature:

Raven Tools: Keyword Research Suggestions

By default, Keyword Suggestions uses Data For SEO keyword data — but you can also plug your SEMrush or SpyFu account into Raven, and tap into multiple data sources when doing keyword research. This means you can enrich your keyword research and cross-compare metrics between data sources.

Link-Building:

Ahrefs and SEMrush both focus heavily on backlink analysis. Similarly, Raven Tools uncovers backlink data on any URL through the Backlink Explorer. However, we do things a bit differently by allowing SEOs to do link-building management on our platform, too.

  1. Link Manager: With Link Manager, you can manage the links you have and the links you want. You can import current backlinks directly from Backlink Explorer and upload new links as you target them. This helps you implement and track your link-building campaigns.
  1. Link Spy: With Link Spy, you can enter a keyword or phrase to reveal the domains that link to the top 10 results for that keyword or phrase. This helps you know which backlinks you acquire if you want to break into those top SEO results.

As with all of Raven’s SEO research metrics, you can feed backlink data automatically into SEO reports — meaning you can show clients or senior management the progress of your link-building campaigns in the context of other metrics. For example, to drive the link-building message home, your reports could show how keyword ranking positions are climbing in correlation with your backlink acquisition activities.

Summary: Raven Tools as an All-in-One SEO Platform

Raven isn’t just a reporting tool — though that’s the thread that runs through much of our functionality. Raven Tools is a platform to research the most crucial SEO metrics, get actionable insights about website health and campaign performance, and actually implement and manage important SEO work.

Raven Tools lets you tell a story and communicate data in a way that clients and non-technical stakeholders can clearly understand. With other SEO tools, this requires more effort and manual finesse. Raven is built to be intuitive and flexible — both for SEOs themselves, and the people they report to.

You can try Raven for free for 7 days and get access to our all-in-one SEO platform: Site Auditor, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research, and of course — automated reporting.

Ahrefs

Overview of Ahrefs

Ahrefs has built a reputation as a robust SEO software, and one which is particularly solid for backlink analysis and keyword research purposes. Ahrefs is mostly focused on tracking, monitoring, and research — so it isn’t really a reporting tool, aside from its automated rank tracking updates.

You can pull data from the software by exporting information to CSVs, but there’s no intuitive method to report all SEO results automatically to clients or other stakeholders.

Currently, the smallest Ahrefs plan (Lite) is $99 per month, or $82 per month when billed annually. You can register for a 7-day trial and pay $7.

Main Differentiator: Ahrefs is a Backlink Analysis Deep Dive

Ahrefs has always placed a high value on backlinks for SEO, and therefore the main dashboard emphasizes a lot of information about backlinks and referring domains:

Ahrefs: Backlink Analysis Deep Dive

In the Backlinks section of Ahrefs, you can check out the new, lost, or broken dofollow and nofollow backlinks for any domain — whether it’s yours, your competitor’s, or your client’s website.

The Ahrefs Backlinks dashboard shows the referring page, plus the anchor text and the backlink in situ with a snippet of its surrounding copy. You can assess the strength of each particular referring domain through the proprietary Ahrefs scores — Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR).

When you dig further into your website’s Referring Domains, you can see more detailed information about the sites that link to you — from the aforementioned DR score to their number of referring domains, their volume of organic traffic, and their Ahrefs Rank.

Referring IPs: Revealing Low-Quality Private Blog Networks

Ahrefs: Referring IPs can show the health of backlink profile

The Referring IPs feature on Ahrefs is a further deep dive into the health of a website’s backlink profile (note: a similar feature is also available on SEMrush). Users can see referring domains grouped by network, and pick out the IPs with the same c-class that commonly link to their site. If there’s a high volume of links from the same c-class, it might suggest that a Private Blog Network (PBN) has been used.

Private Blog Networks are targeted by Google as a black-hat SEO tactic — punishable by a penalty. So, if you’re kicking off a client campaign, you need to be able to spot these red flags in time.

What Else Does Ahrefs Offer to SEOs?

Aside from in-depth backlink analysis, what does Ahrefs offer to SEOs?

While it doesn’t have much intuitive reporting prowess, it does provide automated rank tracking — and their keyword research functionality (Keywords Explorer) is certainly a key strength:

Ahrefs: Keyword Explorer and Keyword Difficulty

In the above screenshot, you can see the data you get when you search a specific keyword (including their proprietary keyword difficulty score). And below, you can see the keyword ideas overview. These keywords can be added to lists and exported as CSVs:

Ahrefs: Keyword ideas by search volume

Ahrefs Site Audit:

Like Raven (and SEMrush), the Ahrefs Site Audit tool crawls your site for performance blockers, broken links, indexability errors, meta issues, and on-page problems like missing headers and duplicate content.

Ahrefs: Site Audit Overview (Crawled URLs, Health Score, Top Issues, Found Links, etc.)

Due to the vast number of datapoints and filters, the interface is far more complex than Raven Tools. This can present a challenge to non-technical folks but allows technical SEOs to get into the nitty-gritty of website structure and performance. You can even look at the JavaScript and CSS to check for errors.

The Ahrefs site audit can be bulk exported to CSV or added to a ”to-do” list — which itself can be bulk exported to a CSV file.

Summary: Ahrefs for SEO Professionals

Ahrefs has mainly built its reputation on backlink analysis and keyword research for SEO, and for good reason. These features still represent the most solid parts of the tool. The Site Audit feature is impressive in its detail, which probably makes it most suitable for technically-minded marketers.

Compared to Raven Tools, Ahrefs has limited reporting capabilities and no white-labeling option. This means SEOs need to export their data into spreadsheets and build reports manually or limit their reporting to the automated rankings updates alone.

SEMrush

Overview of SEMrush

SEMrush has a reputation as a heavy duty digital marketing tool, and due to its wide array of PPC and SEO features, they describe themselves broadly as an “Online Visibility Management Platform”.

At the moment, SEMrush plans start at $99 per month, or $83 per month when billed annually. A fair amount of the more advanced functionality is limited to users on higher-tier plans ($199 or $399 per month). These features include read-only access, white-labeled reporting, competitor intelligence ($200 extra), multi-device rank tracking, third-party integration, and many of their content marketing features.

Main Differentiator: SEMrush Covers a Lot of Bases

Each SEO tool in this comparison has its own identity, even if some features are similar to one another.

With Raven Tools, the emphasis is on reporting and management — and bringing all the key SEO metrics together in an intuitive platform. With Ahrefs, the emphasis is on digging deep into backlink data and tracking the impact of link-building on keyword rankings and website strength. But with SEMrush, it’s a bit more challenging to pick out a clear area of focus — partly because it’s such an expansive tool.

SEMrush: Dashboard (very extensive)

Key Features of SEMrush:

As you’d expect, SEMrush offers all the important SEO research features on the standard $99 plan:

  • Domain research (Domain Analytics): A snapshot of a website’s authority, traffic, and backlinks
  • Site audit: Errors, warnings, and notices to guide technical SEO fixes
  • Rank tracking (Position Tracking): Visibility, rankings distribution, and rankings trends
  • Backlink analysis (Backlink Audit & Backlinks Overview): Backlinks, ref. domains, and more
  • Keyword research (Keyword Analytics): Similar to Ahrefs in terms of UX and data

Let’s take a look at a couple of SEMrush’s unique features.

Backlink Audit, Shining a Light on Toxic Backlinks:

SEMrush focuses heavily on helping users avoid toxic backlinks in their Backlink Audit feature — with their unique Toxic Score reflecting the danger of you suffering a Google penalty for bad backlinks.

SEMrush: Overall toxic score, Referring domains, Analyzed backlinks, etc.

Just like Raven Tools, SEMrush incorporates some management capability into its backlink analysis. After you’ve picked up the toxic links, you can add them to a file — and later upload that file directly to the Google Disavow Tool. If there are any links that have been marked as toxic but you know they’re ok, you can whitelist them, so SEMrush won’t see them as a danger anymore.

Monitoring Search Engine Algorithm Updates:

SEMrush keeps a keen eye on the search engine algorithms to give their users a heads-up when an update is launched that could impact their rankings. First, there’s the Notes list. This is a live miniblog in which SEMrush lists the notable activity in different regions and on different search engines:

SEMrush: Notes list and updates

Then, you have the SEMrush Sensor. This measures the global SERP volatility across different industries and website types — providing live updates on a daily basis. You can also check the deviations based on average monthly volatility, and see who the current “winners and losers” are in the SERPs.

SEMrush: SERP volatility for the last 3src days

This feature also allows you to input your own URL and get a “personal score” from the SEMrush Sensor, which shows how SERP volatility is affecting your website and your selected target keywords.

Summary: SEMrush for SEO Professionals

SEMrush offers a lot of functionality, and this might make it a slightly overwhelming platform if your scope is more precise. The core SEO research functionality is available on the $99 plan, including the keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and site auditing — but read-only access and reporting, plus competitive intelligence and some advanced rank tracking features are on pricier plans.

Conclusion: Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Raven Tools

The choice between these tools comes down to your personal preference. Each software has robust functionality for in-house, freelance, or agency SEOs — albeit with slightly varying emphasis and usability.

Raven is available on a 7-day free trial, and so is SEMrush. You can try Ahrefs for a week for $7. This means you can test without risk, and see which tool suits you. If you have any questions during your Raven trial, don’t hesitate to check out our Helpdesk or get in touch to speak to someone on our team.

When compared to Ahrefs and SEMrush, Raven Tools offers more flexibility in terms of pricing plans. And our simple dashboards make doing SEO work and communicating results much easier. These aspects make Raven Tools suitable for a wider range of SEO professionals while giving them everything they need to succeed with site auditing, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research — and reporting.

You can try Raven for free for 7 days and get access to our all-in-one SEO platform: Site Auditor, rank tracking, link-building, keyword research, and of course — automated reporting.

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Fifty Creators on SaaS Platforms They Still Use

Fifty Creators on SaaS Platforms They Still Use

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We will introduce a SaaS platform into one of the worst economies of perpetuity. Like every startup, we believe we’ve discovered the holy grail of tech – something that every business will one day consider important to their success. To learn what SaaS platforms companies presently find central to their survival and which tech products are thought about ‘nice-to-have’, we asked over 50 creators to tell us. Jointly, they discussed more than 70 distinct platforms, 6 shades of Google, and several software application shifts to complimentary tiers or less expensive options.
Here’s what we discovered.

What We Learned about SaaS

Finding # 1: SaaS is Core

Above all else, SaaS platforms are vital to running a company today. Every business requires a website and an email address. These are the very first memberships every startup utilizes. While only 18%of respondents mentioned web hosting, it’s indicated the rest are using some sort of platform to keep their websites up.

Email on the other hand is something that can be cut if absolutely required, though nobody discussed getting rid of G Suite or Outlook. They’re both low-cost and they’re both part of day-to-day interactions for most, if not all business.

Finding # 2: Freemium rates requires mindful analysis

A more unexpected finding on interactions software is that individuals are four times more likely to spend for Slack Pro than for Zoom Pro Speculatively, this is due to the paywall points in each program. Slack blocks your old messages as soon as you strike 10,000 If you’ve ever used Slack, you understand how important past discussions are, so you want to invest a bit to get them back. Zoom’s primary time out point is amount of time on a call. You get 40 minutes, then the call is automatically ended. Obviously, there’s a simple workaround of beginning a brand-new call afterwards, which indicates you ‘d have to care about having numerous hosts and over 100 participants to bother spending on Pro. Lesson found out: select your freemium bottlenecks carefully Evaluate them if you can.

Finding # 3: Email marketing lives and well

Business that get freemium right are big winners. Simply take a look at the email marketing industry. Tons of differentiation, great deals of competition, and all considered secret to service. Seventy-eight percent of software applications pointed out in this category were distinct and eighteen percent of participants considered their e-mail marketing tools for transactional emails, deserted cart tips, newsletters, and even cold outreach too important to get rid of.

Finding # 4: SEO is more important than ever

One in every three participants stated their SEO software is a huge part of their continued presence. In today’s digital market landscape, the largest impact Covid has actually had is on sales and marketing procedures. Getting consumers is difficult offline as evidenced by the meager 8%of creators utilizing sales software application.
While everyone is stuck home, with less commute times and more downtime, they’re browsing the web more often. They are likewise searching for solutions to issues otherwise solved through more traditional methods. As an outcome, there’s an uptick in SEO software application. More fascinating is the truth that there’s one SEO software application to rule them all: Ahrefs Nearly half of all SEO users utilized Ahrefs, a single person switching from SEMRush to Ahrefs, and 3 others cutting SEMRush altogether. A couple individuals hung on, however it’s clear what service supplies the most worth. More than anything, the dive in SEO use shows how powerful Google is to today’s financial landscape. They control web traffic which means they control growth.

Finding # 5: Google is a shape-shifting behemoth that remains on the tech throne

The single largest shift in services to conserve costs is from Microsoft 365 to Google Docs, getting four discrete mentions. While that’s a relatively little number, it only adds to the 5 other forms of Google that appeared on the master list: Google Analytics, Google Apps, G Cloud Computing, Google Alerts, and obviously G Suite. That’s not including Google Domains and Google Ads, two services most founders utilize without thinking much about, though they might not be conventional SaaS platforms by meaning. In any case, Google continues to control the progressively digital market.

Finding # 6: There are many kinds of successful SaaS business

Most SaaS platforms apply throughout lots of markets. Take style tools for example. Any company that requires marketing products – advertisements, flyers, branding, site design – needs tools like those of Adobe Creative Cloud. From e-com to automobile dealerships, all companies need excellent design. That’s why sixteen percent of participants called their design tools vital. Now consider payments software, cloud storage, client support, information analytics … these are all tools that business throughout any market can utilize. That’s what makes SaaS platforms truly prosper. SaaS platforms are so large reaching, 8 percent of participants require combination software application to gather all their info in one location.

Finding # 7: SEO platforms are likewise the least popular

However that’s mostly on the local level. Individuals are no longer attempting to get their businesses to appear initially on Google Maps, Yelp, or comparable services. SEO also hosts the winner of the majority of cut platform: SEMRush. Significantly, Ahrefs, SEMRush’s direct rival, won the Most Important Platform (MIP) Award (tied with Slack naturally). Aside from that, Social network Management tools and Sales Tools are getting cut, lined up with Finding # 4, content is getting rid of standard sales techniques. It also boosts Finding # 5 that Google runs the web. While other social networks platforms are thought about non-essential tools, getting to Google’s audience is still vital.

Finding # 8: Optimism

We surveyed individuals over the last few weeks, when Covid had actually currently taken its toll on the economy. While great deals of companies have been seriously impacted, SaaS companies are still around and its now clear are here to remain. Many people said they ‘d take their software application to their business’s graves if necessary. There were more than 3 times as many platforms considered important than were canned as high-end. Even some of those services thought about unworthy of paying were kept in free variations or the performance was moved to a cheaper product. That all goes to show how pertinent SaaS is today.

The Caveats

These responses were gleaned from HARO – a list of journalists and blog writers, Slack communities, social media sites like Reddit, and individual conversations with founders. So the truth that SEO tools and Slack were the main platforms discussed comes as less of a surprise. That being stated, the present economy is made primarily from SEO advocates, social media mavens, and material producers. The outcomes are still extremely generalizable as trends.
Below you’ll find the actual list of platforms listed by our audience. Where it says General Reference, this refers to somebody saying ‘SEO tools are vital’, but not naming a particular tool. They were not consisted of in the unique counts, however they were consisted of in the percentage of respondents who utilize a SaaS tool because classification. To see full comments, struck the Sources button at the bottom of the page.

Kept & Crucial: 57 Special SaaS Platforms

SEO: 34%Respondents

Ahrefs x8
SEMRush x2
ScreamingFrog
General Mention
Google Analytics
Yoast Premium
Sitecheck Pro
Mangool
Hotjar

Communications: 32%Participants

Slack x8
GSuite x6
Zoom x2

Payments, Payroll, & Accounting: 22%Participants

Stripe x2
General Mention x2
Zoho Invoice/Subscriptions
Shopify Recharge
Quickbooks
ChurnBuster
Everhour
Gusto
Zelle

Email Marketing: 18%Respondents

MailShake x2
Mailchimp x2
Active Project
GetResponse
Unbounce
Sendgrid
Klaviyo

Web Hosting: 18%Participants

General Mention x6
AWS x2
Heroku

Style: 16%Respondents

Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Glow
ManyPixel
Sketch
Mural
Canva
Figma
Croow

Auxiliary: 16%Respondents

Airtable x2 – Spreadsheets
Google x2 – Free Apps
Typeform – Survey Types
OAuth – Security/Authentication
AdEspresso – Advertisement Spying & A/B Testing
Grammarly – Grammar Correction Plugin

Cloud Software Application: 12%Participants

Cloudflare x2
DO Cloudways
Cloudinary
Atlassian
Oracle

Sales Outreach: 8%Participants

LinkedIn Sales Navigator
General Reference
ProspectIn
Hunter.io

Integration: 8%Participants

General Reference x2
Sector
Zapier

Job Management: 6%Respondents

Asana
Wrike
Trello

CRM: 4%Respondents

General mention
Salesforce

Assist Desk/Ticket Software: 4%Respondents

Helpjuice
Help Scout

Analytics: 2%Respondents

Mixpanel

Transitions and Downgrades: 10 Special SaaS Transitions

Microsoft 365 -> Google Docs x4
TalkWalker & Social Searcher -> Free Google Alerts
HR, Advantages, payroll software application-> GoCo.io
Cloud Server Automation -> Single Server
G Cloud Computing -> Firebase
Right Signature -> PandaDoc
Basecamp 3 -> Free version
Intercom -> Chatbox only
Adobe -> Sketch
SEMRush -> Ahrefs

Cuts: 18 Special SaaS Platforms

SEO: 18%Participants

Local SEO General Reference (e.g. Google My Organisation) x3
SEMrush x3
Proxies for Scrape Box
Bright Local
MozPro

Auxiliary: 12%Respondents

Financial Investment Software
ClickFunnels
LucidChart
Contently
Glance
Spyfu

Social Network: 10%Participants

General Reference x3
Youtube for Influencers
Buffer

CRM: 6%Participants

General Mention
Pipedrive
Hubspot

Project Management: 4%Respondents

Monday.com x2

Style: 4%Respondents

Adobe Creative Cloud
Stock Photo Libraries

Email Marketing: 4%Participants

General Reference
Mailchimp

Entertainment: 4%Respondents

Audible
Spotify

Learn More

Best SEO Tools: Free and Paid – Markigence l Marketing Agency

Best SEO Tools: Free and Paid – Markigence l Marketing Agency

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With so many SEO tools available, SEO experts have long debated the supremacy of their favourite ones. But it’s hard to avoid a common question – how did we get to this situation. 

Come to think of it. This started after Google led SEOs to a “100% Not Provided” world to bolster their privacy and security efforts. The NSA-Snowden controversy soon following this made it even crucial for Google to present itself as a non-vigilant brand. 

With Google cutting-off the lifeblood for search engine marketing by encrypting search data in the name of privacy, SEO professionals who were a part of core marketing teams by now. They were helping them to shape content and design around search engine optimization, were now basically shot in the foot. 

Why’d Google done this, though?

Some say it was a calculated tactic by Google to get onboard marketers on their Adwords (Now re-branded and called as Google Ads) platform as the same data was still available on the said platform. Now, is it entirely accurate? Maybe, maybe not!

But this is an entirely logical step on Google’s part as this is what they have been saying about search engine marketing from the earliest of days: 

“…make sure that you’ve got high-quality content, the sort of content that people enjoy, that’s compelling, the sort of thing that they’ll love to read that you might see in a magazine or a book and that people would refer back to, or send friends to, those sorts of things…”

Now, having this mission in perspective can help understand these decisions by Google. It commands a certain level of appreciation as it will curb the marketers and SEO professionals who resort to less-than-ethical practices in a desperate attempt of gaming the system and outranking their competition. 

Following this, it was being speculated that search engine marketing would start to revolve around content, design, and the readers. So far, so good. 

There’s one tangle, though. 

Data was still going to be crucial. If it isn’t for gaming the system, it is vital for knowing what the customers need to read. 

Enter SEO Tools! 

tools in the industry

In this post, we are going to focus on the best SEO tools around and how you can leverage them to drive growth and deliver results. This is, in no way, just another review of SEO tools as a part of our “strategy” to rank for keywords like “best SEO tools”. 

I’ll tell you what it is though – a thorough and helpful piece of content on how businesses (the audience) can leverage these tools in different ways (value), so we can rank for keywords like “best SEO tools”. 

While it’s true that a lot of these SEO tools existed long before these updates by Google and other search engines, they were never as crucial as they were now. 

With cutting-edge crawlers and third-party companies entering, the SEO professionals got the help they needed. 

Even Google understood this and launched some tools afterwards. Tools under Google’s Lighthouse project are one of the most popular and powerful SEO tools being used by search engine marketers across the world. 

Using the best SEO software for various Requirements

From tracking keyword performance of competitors to using the SEO tools for reporting campaigns, SEO professionals are always using one or more of these tools that are used by SEO professionals. 

No SEO task can be completed without these tools. So, for any SEO’er worth his salt, it is important to keep up with the best software for SEO in the industry. 

In this part, let’s look at the various tools based on their function and contribution to the overall SEO process. Let’s start with technical SEO: 

Best SEO Tools for On-Page/Technical Optimization

SEO experts, or Webmasters as we like to call them while performing technical SEO, use several tools for Technical SEO. In technical SEO, a lot of site architecture and design issues are included. This makes it all the more sophisticated and tough for professionals to crack.

The first challenge in picking the best SEO tools for technical search engine optimization is to understand the requirements properly. Following this, the SEO consultants have to co-ordinate with web devs to craft an action plan. 

Yes, it is more marathon than the “sprints” most marketing managers believe it is!

The most crucial SEO tool for the technical SEO category would be Screaming Frog.

1. Screaming Frog is THE crawler to have! 

Touted rightly as one of the best SEO tools around, Screaming Frog is an army of frogs that crawl the web and help SEO experts in finding the right answers. 

The feature that makes Screaming Frog a stupendous success is the amount of time that one can save by using this fantastic tool. From finding pages with no titles to eros in canonical URLs, you can do it all with this incredible software for conducting an SEO audit. 

Not only this, but a lot of SEO experts can also find it helpful to troubleshoot a client’s assets and look more aware. 

Whenever an SEO project is started, the first thing SEO professionals want to do is try and find the problems that might hold their progress back. Only then can they start making efforts for improving the SEO. 

This is where the time-effort continuum needs to be accelerated. And Screaming Frog is the tool we need. 

Apart from technical SEO, Screaming Frog can also help with link-building. This makes it an even more critical tool for the SEO experts out there.

Broken Link-building using Screaming Frog: The first step for using Screaming Frog to perform broken link-building is switching to the list mode. Now, since all we need to do is find external links that are not working – we can save some time and limit the crawl in numbers as well as just to the outer pages. 

To limit the crawl, refer this:

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Following this, you need to follow Configuration> Spider> Crawl, and then select external links. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Once you have uploaded the URLs and started the crawl, you will get the broken links along with their source pages. Here’s what it would look like: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Following this, you can perform a bulk export and start reaching out to the relevant sites you discovered. 

2. Search Console – Google still has some of the best SEO tools

For the best SEO consultants, Search Console is probably the go-to SEO tool that they use daily. 

If you haven’t already added your website as a property in Search Console, we suggest you do it soon. All you need to do is click on “Add Property”. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

And type your domain name in the “Domain” field. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

They’ll complete the verification in 7 days or so, and you’re good to go. 

The most important, after setting the property – is to link it with Google Analytics for the given website so both the platforms can verify the data. 

As we discussed at the beginning of this post – when Google decided to hold the keyword data back, the valuable data for each keyword that generated traffic was turned into this: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Pretty sad, right? 

But there’s a way out!

Website owners can get their all-important keyword data back by linking Google Analytics with their Google search console account. 

3. Google PageSpeed – LightHouse for SEO professionals

It is unsettling to keep Pagespeed in the third position of any list. It’s that great!

With so much emphasis on mobile and progressive apps these days, the tools need to adapt, too. Just like the website owners got to do. 

Pagespeed provides vital information on how one can optimize their sites for better performance. 

Also, these insights are in the form of “tips” with detailed explanations available. It’s very helpful for professionals who aren’t very savvy with the search engines, or web development in general. 

4. GTMetrix Page Speed Report

GTMetrix is another SEO tool for technical SEO. The page speed report provided by this tool is quite comprehensive and has better insights than any other tool in terms of direct and detailed comments about a website’s performance. 

With detailed insights from even the most complicated factors such as Javascript files for loading and even CSS style guides, it offers no less value than the best SEO software out there. 

Not only this, but the developer toolkit provided by GTMetrix can also be a blessing for SEO professionals who wish to work closely with web devs and optimize their site’s performance.

For optimizing the mobile performance of a site, you can simulate the site on various devices with GTMetrix: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Apart from this, you can draw insights about site performance based on screen size and pixels too: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

The key here is to test the site for various screen sizes and simulate for as many devices as you can. By doing this, you can be sure of leaving no stone unturned. 

5. Majestic, truly! A great SEO software

Majestic is another one of the important software that the best SEO professionals use on a daily basis. 

Touted as the tool that brings link intelligence data, this is a prolific tool for technical aspects of SEO too. 

Majestic uses a comprehensive and multi-weighted evaluation system to calculate and provide technical link attributes such as Trust Flow and Citation Flow that help us to gauge sites and links based on relevance, trust, and authority. 

Majestic has recently added Link Context to their pool of features, and the SEO professionals are lovin’ it!

With Link Context, you can find the links to your site or one of your competitors and also know the context related to those links. 

As the demo for this feature shows, you can put the domain name, and it’ll show you the links with details on each of them. So you can save time and effort from going through the links individually. Here’s a snip: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Have a look at some of the links to the given site here: 

As you can see, it tells you crucial details about the link and even the domain from which the link they are getting. Not only this, but it also tells you essential information on the domain that is sending the link back. 

6. Barracuda Penguin

This is another excellent SEO tool that can easily feature in any agency’s workflow. Even if you are a freelance SEO professional, it can be a handy tool.

Barracuda is famous because it helps site owners to prepare themselves for Google Updates, which is a unique feature honestly. 

With this tool, site owners can link their GA data and get alerts as and when the data seems to show a potential penalty is imposed on the site. 

Link-Building

1. Majestic, again.

I know we mentioned Majestic in technical SEO, too. But that should not stop us from explaining its utility in link-building activities, right?

Because of the trust flow and citation flow metrics provided by Majestic, SEO professionals can quickly identify high-authority sites that they should try and get a link from. 

The primary method that Majestic helps you with is – Broken Link-Building. 

An overused method? Perhaps, yes. 

But an effective method? Definitely!

The first step here is to find relevant sites. You can do this with Majestic by going to the” Majestic Millions” module and browsing ahead of the select industry leaders in your niche. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Once you have found these relevant sites, you now have to find the 404 gems that they’re linking to. And get started with the reach out. 

To get better results, you need to find the broken links with the highest number referring pages. Those should be easier to replace. 

2. Muck Rack

We’ve all known the benefits of blogger outreach and helping out journalists (HARO). Muck Rack is a tool that helps SEO and link-building professionals with this. 

With Muck Rack, however, the key is to help reporters and journalists indeed instead of employing simple tricks for a link-back. 

Think of it as an influencer outreach or PR campaign, instead of dull link-building campaigns.

3. Group High

Another vital tool for building link backs, GroupHigh is used by marketers and link-building professionals for blogger outreach in their respective industries. 

Also touted as the world’s most prominent “blog search engine”, GroupHigh can deliver thousands of results for almost every niche. 

So, the first step is to find an exhaustive and actionable list of blogs that are worth reaching out to. 

You can also perform influencer search here: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

As you can see here, the number of results it shows is in thousands. So, you do get an exhaustive list of bloggers and publications:

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

With the metrics and data provided by GroupHigh, you can also separate the more relevant ones and focus on select publications and bloggers. 

4. Ahrefs, yes!

Apart from being widely popular for functions such as keyword research and rank tracing, it is one of the best SEO software for folks who wish to drive better results with link-building. 

By using the link-intersect feature from Ahrefs, you can find websites that are linking to your competitors. But not to your site. Here’s how it looks:

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

You will get a list of sites that are linking to the given targets, but not to you. 

Once you have that list, you can get started with some good-ol’ link-building. 

Best SEO tools for Keyword Research

1. SEMRush to the rescue.

SEMrush is, by far, one of the best tools for keyword research. 

With SEMrush, not only you get a list of keywords for your website and industry, but it also gives you an in-depth and comprehensive report on the keywords that your competitors are doing well at. 

Another feature that gives SEMrush the upper hand is its reliable data for different countries and time-zones. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

With SEMrush, you can assess the traffic, authority, and relevance of various sites and links more holistically and transparently. 

It also gives a SEMrush Rank that is calculated based on organic search traffic to the given website. 

The UX and UI considerations are all covered, too, with this tool. This makes it an even better tool for SEo’ ers who already have a tough job – great UX and high ease-of-use quotient in their SEO software is the least they deserve!

Apart from doing domain-wise analysis for keyword research, you can also input a particular keyword to get a string of related keywords that one can target.

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Once you input a keyword phrase in SEMrush, it will send out a “Phrase match report” that has the same sentence. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Apart from this, the “Keyword Magic” feature adds a lot of value to SEO professionals.

top SEO software for successful SERP campaigns

With the “Keyword Magic” tool, you get a plethora of keyword suggestions, derived from SEMrush’s database of around 800 million data points.

2. KWfinder

Without much fanfare, this is an incredible tool with really great insights and reliable data for avid SEO professionals out there. 

The best part about using this tool is that it tells you actionable details about a keyword, making the process of keyword research intuitive for you. 

Apart from the keyword difficulty feature, you can also look at metrics such as “Trend”, “Pos”, and “EV”. More importantly, you can trust these metrics provided by KWfinder. 

3. Keywords Everywhere

For experts who always wish to stay close to their keyword research, Keywords Everywhere is undoubtedly one of the best software for SEO to have in their arsenal. 

With Keywords Everywhere, you can look at the data from the top 10 websites, so you don’t have to copy and paste keywords from your Google Keyword Planner. 

Another exciting feature called “People also search for” is incredibly useful for marketers. The best thing about Keywords Everywhere is that even folks with limited SEO knowledge can use it to simplify their lives. 

For example, if you are writing a post and need secondary keywords for the given post – all you need to do is look at the “People also search for” section. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Rank Tracking

Checking your rankings by googling it and searching for your positions is not ideal!

Especially when you’re working with multiple clients that you help rank for tens of keywords. 

Let’s start with one of the best SEO software for rank tracing:

1. AccuRanker

AccuRanker, one of the fastest rank tracking tools, is used by webmasters across the world for tracing the rankings daily. 

Not only this, but it also tells you if your link has made it to the featured snippets and other related Google features such as “Related Questions” and “Important Links”. 

Not only this, the clean dashboard and the ease of use is also commendable: 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Let’s hop on to the next tool that you can use for tracing rankings. 

2. SE Ranking, see!

The reason this tool made it to our post is that it is not just a standalone tool for tracing ranks. It offers much more than that. 

In a way, it makes up for the shortcomings in comparison to AccuRanker by letting you perform a website audit, link-building tasks, and a few important SEO functionalities with pretty high accuracy. 

Another significant benefit of using SE Ranking is that it allows you to track progress and even helps you with overall project management of SEO projects. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

Now, if you have been working on SEO for multiple clients, you would understand the importance of rank tracing reports when you raise that invoice. It can take up a good amount of time sometimes. But SE ranking can help you with that. 

So, these were all the tools that we could discuss for each SEO function. Now, let’s take a look at how non-SEO marketers can leverage the best SEO tools and drive results for their projects. 

What else can SEO Tools do for Non-SEO Marketers? 

One of the most critical tasks in marketing – competition analysis can be easily streamlined if you can get hands-on the best SEO tools for the given job. 

Let’s look at the process of how you can use these SEO tools to perform an in-depth competition analysis:

Using the best SEO tools to gauge the competition

Ground-breaking ideas in marketing come with in-depth research and long sessions of continuous brainstorming. But ideas of incremental growth, too, add up into sizeable gains. 

While conducting a thorough market study is one way to go, marketers must try some of these tools to find insights from their competitors’ strategy. 

The first step to do so will be setting up the right KPIs. Based on who the competitor is, and what exactly you are looking to emulate, you will need clarity about the KPIs. Here’s what some of these KPIs can look like: 

Audience Growth: This is one of the most underrated metrics/KPIs that us marketers tend to ignore while conducting competitor analysis. By benchmarking audience growth around your competition can be a helpful KPI as it will get your team out of the echo chamber. 

Dissemination/Promotion of Content: By using tools like BuzzSumo, you can find the social media channels where your competitor is getting the bulk of its traffic from. 

Following this, you need to assess their promotion schedule for those platforms and figure out ways of capitalizing on this. 

Engagement/Interaction with the audience: Most marketing campaigns today are judged by the number of interactions they garner. Not only this, but you can also validate/rule out ideas of content that you have been unsure about. 

The next step would be to segment your audience into sizeable but workable chunks so you can generate genuine insights from the datasets hence created. By targeting specific segments of your audience based on demographic or localization, you can even grow your revenue while reducing costs at the same time. 

Best SEO tools for SERP marketing

In this part, we will be using SEMrush for performing the competitor analysis. The first step would be to input your competitor’s domain into the dashboard. Let’s take the example of Feedough. A relatively new website with decent growth over the last couple of years. 

You can also tweak the country settings for more accurate data according to location. 

domain overview in semrus

On the right side of the dashboard, you can check out the insights about search rankings, advertising, PLA, Display Ads, or even backlinks as per your requirement. 

right side bar in semrush

The first step is to go for Organic Search, and it will show you the keywords that your competitor has been ranking for. As you can see, most of the traffic from the organic search they get has started only after May 2019 – almost a year after they began putting content out regularly. 

organic search analysis by SEMrush

The best thing about SEMrush as an SEO tool is that it shows your data from various perspectives. For example, it will not just give you a list of keywords that the given website is ranking for. It goes on to share some insightful information about position changes for the given site. With this, you can draw better conclusions and hence make better decisions. 

SEMrush keyword analysis

With SEMrush, SEO professionals can dive deeper into the “SERP Features” to find the pages that are featured into various programs of Google. 

Say some of its pages are linked as a featured snippet. Now, if you were to use any other tool but SEMrush, you would not even get a hint about this. But SEMrush tells us which pages of Feedough are in the featured snippet. Here’s an overview of the “SERP Features” section:

SEMrus, a great tool for SEO

Once you have found the keywords and pages that are driving organic traffic for the competitor, you can use some other tools such as AccuRanker and Ahrefs to dig deeper and find more actionable insights. 

Tracking and Reporting Marketing KPIs

At the beginning of this post, we mentioned how everyone takes help from SEO professionals with a multitude of tasks. Well, that doesn’t have to be the case all the time. 

Even the non-SEO marketers can use these SEO tools and use them from time to time. One main application of these SEO tools is into tracking and reporting marketing KPIs for presentations and meetings. 

Large or small, every digital marketing agency or marketing team should have access to the best SEO tools for reporting and tracking their performance. 

Apart from showing proof of progress to the clients, it also helps you to discover hidden insights from the raw that you might not make much from if you were to rely entirely on Google Analytics or your good-ol’ search console. 

From identifying critical action items in your campaigns to tracking the performance of pilot projects in your overall marketing strategy, these tools can do it all for you. 

SE Ranking

As we discussed earlier, SE Ranking is a tool that’s more than just about tracking ranks of your pages. It is, infact, one of the most important tools for agencies and marketing teams use to create reports in a hassle-free and elegant manner. 

One of the biggest hurdles toward adopting a software – knowledge transfer to the team, is irrelevant when it comes to SE Ranking. The self-explanatory nature of this software can save a lot of time for your team while adopting the software. 

Not only this, but the clean reports generated by this tool is also known to impress clients. Add this to the fact that there’s not much hassle in creating reports with it, and you have found yourself the perfect tool for reporting and tracking KPIs for your marketing campaign. 

SEMrush, still.

SEMrush is another vital tool for creating reports. Especially when the report is all about SEO efforts.

SEMrush allows you to create marketing reports that are thorough and comprehensive, covering everything from backlink monitoring and keyword tracking to social media analysis. 

Although most folks would not think of SEMrush as a real SEO reporting tool, the white-label, as well as branded templates for generating reports, help it dismiss those claims. 

While not the complete reporting and tracking tool one might be looking for, it helps if you do not wish to buy access to another software specifically for creating reports. 

Google Data Studio

Like most tools by Google, the power of Data Studio is relatively unknown. Well, doesn’t get the same credit as it deserves. 

Also, getting ahold of all the features and being an expert with Google Data Studio can be tough. But it’s worth it!

With data studio, you get access to data from various Google properties and their assets in one place. 

Google Data Studio can be helpful for SEO

Along with the data, it also provides robust and engaging visualization tools that you can use for reporting purposes. 

Data Studio can help you with almost every source of data in Google’s ecosystem. It includes:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Ads
  • Youtube Analytics
  • Search Ads 360
  • Google Search Console
  • Display and Video 360
  • BigQuery
  • PostgreSQL

Irrespective of your technical knowledge about site performance and SEO, the Data Studio allows you to create near real-time reports on issues such as JavaScript loading, page speed, and 404 errors.

For beginners, I would suggest to start with some of the default templates and get comfortable with the multiple visualization tools. 

Once you have gained considerable experience in working with Data Studio, you can switch to creating your custom themes for reporting performance. 

SEO Tools for a higher #Hackerman Quotient for SEO professionals.

We’ve discussed almost every one of the best SEO tools out there. But some SEO tools save more time and effort than any of the expensive tools but stay under the radar somehow. 

These tools are the unsung heroes for many SEO professionals who are scrambling to save another 15 minutes for the extra task on our list. 

One such tool is the search analytics add-on for Google Sheets.

Search analytics for Google Sheets

What this tool does is bring you all the data, with better visualization and customization, to your google sheets directly. So. SEO professionals short on time do not have to export data and bear the pain of cleaning it and adding it to their reports. 

It’s all a click away from you. Just set up the “Search Analytics for Google Sheets” and you are ready to go!

Using search analytics for Google Sheets

You can also group your data with higher granularity and find actionable insights into how all this data can help you. If you feel there has been a significant drop/rise in your traffic, you can just find the data for those two-time frames, put it in the sheet, and perform VLOOKUP to get clarity on indicators that have changed. 

Similarly, in case you notice, there has been a drop in rankings – just go out and look for any 4xx or 5xx errors that might have crept in. 

Add-ons for Mail-merge in Google Sheets

SEO professionals have to run a lot of e-mail outreach campaigns regularly. 

Using an e-mail marketing tool can save some time, but interoperability is a big issue there. 

Whether you use Mailchimp, Hubspot, or SendGrid, you are bound to have one hiccup or the other. And end up spending time on it. 

Enter Add-ons for mail merge in Google Sheets. 

My personal favourite is YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge). Because of its ease-to-use and great analytics, this should be your first choice. But you have to buy a premium subscription if you plan on sending more than 50 e-mails a day. 

But if you are looking to save some bucks here, you can go with the add-on “Mail Merge with Attachments”. There is no cap on the number of e-mails here, but you still got to buy premium for analytics. 

Which great tool did we miss?

So, these were some of the best SEO tools that can make your lives much more comfortable. 

Did I miss any good ones? 

Perhaps one that the rest of us need to start using ASAP.

Let us know in the comments, and I’ll feature it in the next edit. 

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A Brief Guide To Effective SEO Link Structure In 2020

A Brief Guide To Effective SEO Link Structure In 2020

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As the CEO of a full-service digital marketing firm, I see far a lot of online marketers and website owners signing up for out-of-date link-building practices in an effort to enhance their SEO. Unless these practices are nipped in the bud early, they can in fact have the opposite impact.

The reality is that numerous link-building strategies are either unhelpful or outright hazardous to your SEO efficiency. While many marketing specialists understand much better than to utilize black hat SEO tactics, not everyone comprehends how backlinks vary in value.

While one backlink can do wonders for your ranking efficiency, a dozen other links might barely budge the dial. That’s why I create this brief guide to enhancing your SEO link-building strategy while staying compliant with Google’s updated Webmaster Standards for 2020.

Listed Below, I’ve made a list of the leading link-building techniques for 2020 that will make an obvious influence on your ranking performance and will not get your site punished.

Start regional.

Regional SEO should be the beginning point of any effective link-building strategy.

A regional citation is any reference of your business’s details on the web, including name, phone number, site URL, address or zip code.

Building local SEO backlinks is simple since there are a host of pc registries and directories where business owners can input their business info. Here are a couple of outstanding places to start developing local citations:

– Google My Service.

– Apple Maps.

– Foursquare.

– Yelp.

– Bing.

– Acxiom.

– Facebook.

– Better Business Bureau.

– Yellow Pages.

Invest in value-driven material.

Driving links to your website’s landing page can help improve your page’s domain authority, but it won’t make as big of an effect on your bottom line compared to article within your marketing funnel. Before developing out links or visitor posting, purchase sound SEO content production where you have at least 30-50 online search engine optimized blog posts on your site that offer real original worth to readers in your specific niche.

Having a strong foundation of post on your website enables you to produce backlinks to articles that direct readers towards a money page. For example, if you’re an e-commerce supplier offering fitness equipment, developing backlinks to an evaluation of treadmills, ellipticals and fixed bikes hosted on your site can help drive sales. Nevertheless, the blogs you link to need to always match the user intent of the searcher– to put it simply, do not link to a sales-oriented page if the reader simply wishes to discover more about a provided product.

Start visitor publishing.

Contact the hosts or administrators of high-authority domains within your site’s specific niche about composing a visitor post for their site.

Guest posts are an efficient part of a link-building technique because they’re equally advantageous. On one hand, they benefit the site host by including complimentary content on their site. On the other hand, the guest poster gets a totally free backlink or 2 to their domain, which will help bolster their SEO efficiency by transferring domain authority.

Repair broken links.

If you’ve erased a page on your site, any of the incoming links that directed to it will now produce a 404 mistake. You can discover these broken links quickly by running a link audit with third-party SEO software application such as Ahrefs or SEMrush.

Once you have determined any damaged links to your site, you can redirect (“301”) the destination of each broken link to a new, appropriate location on your website. Never leave an error-404 link on your website– instead, pass the PageRank to a different residential or commercial property on your site.

Usage HARO or Qwoted.

Assist a Reporter Out (HARO) and Qwoted are services that put reporters in touch with industry experts. They’re likewise among the easiest ways to accrue premium backlinks from major publications such as the New York Times, Boston World and Wall Street Journal.

Press reporters working with tight deadlines compose questions (” source pitch”) on these platforms, and users can share their proficiency in their action. Professionals whose responses are used in the last short article are typically rewarded with a backlink to their web residential or commercial property. This is a method we have actually used effectively for several years at my agency.

Don’t forget to keep it genuine.

The key to an effective backlinking technique is to produce initial, value-driven content that your readers can’t assist but show their networks. Without incredible content, it’s not likely that domains with significant PageRank will be willing to link to your website.

It’s equally crucial that you keep in mind to always keep your backlinking method authentic. If you buy backlinks or utilize a private blog site network (PBN), you’re likely going to get a Google penalty for violating its Webmaster Standards.

The truth is that there are no faster ways to successful SEO. Rather, you need to be willing to develop content deserving of being shared, and not be frightened by the prospect of pitching your material to high-authority domains or thought leaders within your specific niche. In time, they will pass PageRank to your domain. The next thing you know, you’ll be the idea leader.

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The Type of Content to Produce at Every Lifecycle Stage (Part 3)

The Type of Content to Produce at Every Lifecycle Stage (Part 3)

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In part one and part two of this three-part series, we discussed what kind of content early-stage SaaS companies and companies that have found a PMF should publish. In the final part, we’ll do the same for SaaS companies that are scaling.

Even though scalability when building a SaaS company is what interests most founders, scaling isn’t easy. This is why most companies don’t ever get there, even if they’ve managed to find a product-market fit.

What gets you from product-market fit to scaling is different, so the ingredients of the recipe have to change. As you can imagine, one of the things that changes is the kind of content you create and publish.

Some facts about this stage:

  • You have authority in your niche—and an audience that follows you and consumes your content
  • You’re looking for repeatable and scalable ways of generating new product-qualified leads
  • You have both the budget and the resources to execute complex content strategies
  • You’re probably introducing new features that don’t belong to your core product
  • Your website has a high domain authority and gets a considerable amount of traction
  • Your competitors know you and—based on how you play the game—they respect you

This stage is completely different from the previous two. Here, everything you do must be scalable and repeatable. For example, guest posting—which is a great way to gain exposure and earn some valuable links in earlier stages—may not be the ideal way to grow after finding a product-market fit since it isn’t as scalable. (That’s not definitive, but it does apply in most cases.)

So the question here is: What kind of content should you publish? As a Content & SEO agency working with clients who belong to that category, we’ve identified the following areas you should focus on.

1) Create original research and studies

Unfortunately, most content out there isn’t original. In certain industries, things are worse since you don’t get to see anything innovative about the content that companies publish or any new approaches as to how companies create and distribute that content. So we witness a recycle of the same topics without anything worth noticing or paying attention to.

But publishing original content can be beneficial when you’re in this phase. To give you an example of what truly original content looks like, we can once again look to SEO software Ahrefs.

If you take a look at Ahrefs’ “Best by links” report in Ahrefs itself, you’ll notice a pattern: most of these pieces are studies and original research done by Ahrefs. This shows us that people value original content that includes statistics and data, and thus feel the need to mention or use it in their own online content.

On top of establishing yourself as a thought leader, this type of content also attracts many links, which is why it’s usually referred to as linkable assets. Such posts may not be getting as much organic traffic, but that’s not the objective here. The intention and overall objective behind them is different.

This type of research costs a lot of money, but by this point, you’ll have both the resources and the capabilities to correctly execute and come up with research findings that will be of genuine interest to your industry.

2) Surveys and annual reports

Another type of content that fits the needs of this stage is annual reports and industry surveys. Even though execution for this type of content isn’t easy, SaaS companies that use it usually have both the resources and the experience to do it correctly.

But why surveys and annual reports? Why not more of the same thing (e.g. blog posts)? It’s simple: By this point, you’ll have covered a wide number of topics around your product and the industry in which you’re operating, so you need to find ways to grow your audience and generate even more awareness.

A good example here is HubSpot’s State of Inbound annual report, which is considered one of the industry’s standards for sales and marketing. (HubSpot is a public company and doesn’t quite belong to this particular stage, but their execution on the State of Inbound report is still worth mentioning.)

Image Source: State of Inbound

3) Focus on product marketing

As you probably know, scalability comes with a variety of business problems. Customer education and continuous training around your product is one of them. As your product grows and evolves, so does the need to educate your customers on how to use it.

Your team (e.g. customer success) may be growing as well, but it won’t be enough to cover your customer education needs. So at this stage, pay attention to creating more product-focused content. After all, most content and keyword gaps will be filled by now, so you have to focus on your own product.

A good example is Moosend, who started as email marketing software. However, the needs of the market and the company’s growth helped it explore other ways of adding value to their thousands of users. One of these ways was to introduce new features, like the landing pages below.

Image Source: Moosend Blog

Introducing new features isn’t as easy as just announcing the feature. This is why the company goes the extra mile to create in-depth and feature-specific content, such as educating users on how to create a landing page.

Would this have been possible or necessary earlier? No—it would be a waste of time and resources. But as a company scales and the product evolves, the need to improve the level of education for users increases.

The content game never ends. As one of our clients once described it, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” What changes is the way you’re going about it, based on the stage you’re at at any given time.

When you’re at an early stage, you may miss a lot of things, but you can and must create content. Finding PMF may be important on a business level, but it doesn’t mean you should stop creating content—you should just change the way you’re doing it. Similarly, scaling doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create any new content—it just means you have to do it differently.

The guidelines I’ve provided here are just that: guidelines. This means that you can (and have to) create other kinds of content for each of the three stages mentioned throughout this article. These are just the types of content we see working better, based on our experiences.

Final thoughts

Every day, I see companies struggling with content. They don’t know what to do or where to start. Interestingly enough, most of them have the resources and capabilities to invest in such endeavors. The fact that they can’t manage to move the needle shows us that it’s not a matter of resources so much as it is one of guidance and good execution.

Did you miss parts one and two of this three-part series?

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7 Ahrefs Alternatives (Free and Paid)

7 Ahrefs Alternatives (Free and Paid)

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This is a list of legitimate alternatives to the popular SEO tool, Ahrefs

In this post I’ll:

  • List out 7 SEO tools that you can utilize rather of Ahrefs
  • Show you how each of them compares to Ahrefs
  • My personal experience with each tool

So if Ahrefs isn’t an excellent fit for you, check out the list below for your finest choices.

The 7 Best Ahrefs Alternatives

1. Ubersuggest

In my viewpoint, Ubersuggest is among the very best complimentary SEO tools on the market.

Ubersuggest – Homepage

Why?

Since it has a vast array of features, including:

  • Keyword research
  • Topic research study (like BuzzSumo)
  • Backlink analysis
  • SEO audit reports
  • And more

And each of them are solid.

In truth, if you’re simply starting with SEO, Ubersuggest is a solid option.

Now: Ubersuggest used to be 100%totally free. But they recently presented a paid strategy

Ubersuggest – Pro Version Pricing

The free variation is still strong. But if you wish to access more features or get more reports, the paid strategy might be a good alternative for you. With a paid strategy you get endless SEO audit reports.

Ubersuggest – Pro Unlimited Reports

Which is helpful if you have SEO clients or handle a bunch of websites.

How Ubersuggest Compares to Ahrefs

Like I said above, Ubersuggest is a top quality tool. That stated: it’s not rather as feature-rich as Ahrefs.

So if I needed to compare Ubersuggest and Ahrefs side-by-side based upon functions alone, I ‘d choose Ahrefs.

But there’s another essential factor to consider: cost

Ahrefs starts at $99/ month.

Ahrefs – Lite-Pricing Monthly

Ubersuggest is a flat $29/ month.

If you have a large marketing budget, I ‘d still most likely choose Ahrefs. However in terms of pure value, Ubersuggest absolutely triumphes.

2. SEMrush

SEMrush is among the most popular SEO tools on the market.

SEMrush – Homepage

And for good factor: it’s REALLY good.

In reality, I’ve been a paying SEMrush customer for over 8 years now:

SEMrush –Profile Registration Date

Over that time I’ve seen it evolve from a keyword research study tool for Pay Per Click to a full-on SEO software suite.

Today, besides its standard keyword research functions (like search volume, CPC etc.), SEMrush likewise has a lots of useful functions like:

  • Traffic analytics (where a website gets its traffic from)
  • Backlink analytics
  • Rank tracking
  • SEO site audits
  • On-page SEO analysis
  • And lots more

In my opinion, SEMrush is most likely the closest tool to Ahrefs out there (both in regards to function quantity and quality).

How SEMrush Compares to Ahrefs

I currently composed a total SEMrush vs. Ahrefs breakdown here So if you want a super-detailed list of how Ahrefs and SEMrush compare, have a look at that review.

However the bottom line is that Ahrefs and SEMrush are VERY similar.

Similar in terms of features. Similar in terms of quality. And even similar in terms of pricing.

Ahrefs And Semrush Pricing

I do personally choose Ahrefs.

So even if SEMrush has the same exact function as Ahrefs, they’re harder to find and more difficult to utilize.

For instance, when you analyze a website in Ahrefs, you have a SUPER valuable sidebar that links straight to important reports (like broken links, internal links and anchor text).

Ahrefs – Site Report Sidebar

In SEMrush, you likewise have a sidebar. It only links to functions.

SEMrush – Domain Overview Sidebar

To discover something particular, you require to dig into each feature to find the precise thing you need.

Now, this is undoubtedly a personal choice. Some people really like SEMrush’s UX better than Ahrefs.

But in regards to pure features, Ahrefs and SEMrush are basically tied. If you desire an Ahrefs option with a list of comparable features, I suggest trying SEMrush.

Display Backlinks claims to have “The very best monitoring tool for backlinks and keywords, period.”

Monitor Backlinks – Homepage

I initially registered for Screen Backlinks in2015 And I just provided the tool another shot today.

Now: it does have some pretty cool features. For example, a disavow tool.

Monitor Backlinks – Disavow Tool

However the primary issue with the tool is that there’s really nothing unique here. Monitor Backlinks essentially just pulls data from Majestic and Moz. And includes a couple of bells and whistles (like a rank tracker).

How Screen Backlinks Compares to Ahrefs

In my viewpoint, Display Backlinks doesn’t start to compare to Ahrefs. They’re not close.

For example, with Ahrefs you can pull 10 k rows of backlink data.

Ahrefs – Rows Per Report

With Display Backlinks, you only get 4k.

Monitor Backlinks Daily Rows

There’s likewise the truth that it does not have a keyword tool, competitor analysis feature, domain contrasts, organic traffic reporting … and a laundry list of functions that you get in Ahrefs.

Screen Backlinks does have a totally free trial. Which can provide you feel for the tool. If you desire to provide it a spin, go ahead.

However in my opinion, Screen Backlinks is so limited that it barely qualifies as an Ahrefs alternative.

4. Mangools

Mangools isn’t your normal SEO software application suite.

Rather of a lot of incorporated features, Mangools is really 5 entirely different tools.

Mangools – App Shortcuts

For instance, let’s state you wish to see the keywords that a site ranks for in Google.

Well, you ‘d open up “KWFinder” hit the “Search by domain” tab, and type in the domain you want to take a look at:

KWFinder – Domain Search Backlinko

And now you wish to see that site’s backlinks. Well, now you require to go back to your dashboard, struck “LinkMiner” to open their backlink tool, and begin the whole procedure over once again.

Link Miner – Search Backlinko

So yeah, this setup isn’t perfect. And it makes using the tool MUCH harder than it needs to be.

That said: as I compose in my recent Mangools review, the tools themselves are actually pretty solid. Not quite at the level of SEMrush. But not bad.

I just wish the tools weren’t stitched together.

How Mangools Compares to Ahrefs

In my viewpoint, Mangools isn’t even in the exact same universe as Ahrefs.

And I’m not just speaking about the reality that it takes 3-5x more clicks to do something in Mangools than in Ahrefs.

The features themselves also aren’t nearly as strong as Ahrefs.

For example, the backlink analysis feature Mangools does not have that many filters.

You basically have filters for dofollow vs. nofollow, active vs. deleted … and that has to do with it.

Link Miner Analysis Filters

With Ahrefs, you can filter by actually numerous things, like link type, language, to URL Rating, and more.

Ahrefs – Backlinks Search Filters

Which is very helpful if you want to drill down on a particular kind of backlink.

So it’s clear that Ahrefs is overall a better SEO tool than Mangools. However is it a better value?

Mangools’s “Fundamental” plan is about half the cost of the Ahrefs “Beginner” plan.

Mangools – Basic Pricing Monthly

( Note: if you register for an annual strategy, the price of Mangools Basic goes down to $29).

I personally don’t believe the tradeoff in price is worth it. I rather pay 2x more for a tool that’s 10 x much better. Which is why I happily pay for Ahrefs monthly.

But it’s ultimately your call.

5. Moz Pro

I’ll cut right to the chase:

Moz Pro isn’t a bad SEO tool.

MOZ Pro – Product Page

But it’s not rather at the level of its two main competitors: Ahrefs and SEMrush.

The primary issue with Moz Pro is that it’s features haven’t truly stayed up to date with the competitors.

While Ahrefs and SEMrush are constantly presenting improvements, Moz Pro has actually just rolled out one current feature enhancement: their keyword tool referred to as “Keyword Explorer”.

Given, Moz’s keyword tool is terrific.

How Moz Pro Compares to Ahrefs

I recently put a bunch of the leading backlink checkers to the test.

Backlinko – Best Backlink Checker Post

And we found that Moz was in fact on the very same level as the other tools. Both in terms of findings links rapidly. And the overall number of backlinks in its index.

Backlinko – Site Data Table

The main concern with Moz Pro is that they charge $99/ month. And in my opinion you’ll get far more from that investment with SEMrush or Ahrefs.

6. Majestic

Even though it’s getting a little dated, Majestic SEO is still one of the top SEO tools on the market.

Majestic SEO Homepage

Majestic is 100%focused on backlink reports. If you desire a tool that takes care of all of your SEO jobs in one place, Majestic SEO probably isn’t a good fit for you.

However if all you appreciate is backlink data, Majestic SEO is actually pretty solid.

In truth, in that backlink checker contrast I pointed out earlier, Majestic wasn’t too far behind other major SEO tools.

In truth, for some sites, it actually found more backlinks than SEMrush.

MOZ – Truvani Site Data Table

As you can check out in my full Majestic evaluation, I can’t slam the data you discover in the tool all that much. It’s actually strong tech.

The primary problem is that the UX is extremely out-of-date.

Majestic Backlink Search Interface

And I’m not just talking about the feel and look. I don’t truly appreciate that. It’s more that the backend is tricky to utilize. Especially compared to Ahrefs.

How Majestic Compares to Ahrefs

In regards to pure backlink information, Majestic SEO isn’t a bad Ahrefs alternative.

However you can’t truly examine a tool based just on the data it supplies. You also need to take into consideration UX, crucial functions, customer assistance, and more.

And when you take all that stuff into account, Ahrefs comes out method ahead.

For example, you can utilize Ahrefs for practically all of your SEO tasks. Keyword research study. Technical SEO. Rank Tracking. And more.

Majestic doesn’t have any of that things. It’s a 100%pure link building tool.

That stated, the cost of Majestic reflects the lack of features. It begins at $50/ month.

Majestic SEO – Pricing

Which is about half the cost of Ahrefs.

So if you’re somebody that practically JUST cares about backlinks, then you’ll most likely get an insane quantity of worth from that 50 dollars.

But if you want an all-in-one piece of SEO software application, Ahrefs is most likely your best option.

7. BuzzSumo

Successive, let’s have a look at BuzzSumo.

BuzzSumo – Content Search Backlinko

Unlike some of the other tools that I listed here, BuzzSumo isn’t super SEO focused. It’s more of a content marketing tool

So why does BuzzSumo make this list of Ahrefs alternatives?

First, up SEO and material marketing overlap. A LOT.

Simply put: your site can be completely optimized. However to rank today, your content needs to be FANTASTIC.

Plus, BuzzSumo does have a few SEO-focused functions (like a good backlinks tool):

Buzzsumo – Backlinks Tool

So yeah, BuzzSumo is among my preferred marketing tools. And it’s enhanced my SEO indirectly by making my material much better.

How Buzzsumo Compares to Ahrefs

To be clear: Ahrefs and BuzzSumo are extremely different tools.

For example, BuzzSumo lacks a great deal of the key SEO functions in Ahrefs, like a site audit tool.

And Ahrefs does not have a great deal of the content-focused functions in BuzzSumo, like reference tracking.

That said, there is some overlap in between the two tools. For example, both Ahrefs and BuzzSumo have features that help you find content with lots of social networks shares.

BuzzSumo Ahrefs Side By Side

So the question here isn’t: “How does BuzzSumo compare to Ahrefs?”. It’s more: “Do you desire a tool that’s concentrated on SEO (Ahrefs)?

Or a tool that aids with content marketing (BuzzSumo)?”.

If you’re 100%concentrated on enhancing your Google rankings, then I ‘d adhere to Ahrefs or one of the other tools that I noted here. However if you desire SEO to be more of a by-product of your content marketing, you’ll get a great deal of value out of BuzzSumo.

So yeah, there’s no right or wrong answer. It depends on the kind of digital marketing that you’re concentrating on today.

I personally utilize both all the time. And since I’m more focused on SEO I tend to use Ahrefs more frequently than BuzzSumo.

But I know a lot of people that use BuzzSumo every day and just login to Ahrefs as soon as and a while. It actually depends.

Bonus. Serpstat

Our last option to Ahrefs is Serpstat.

Serpstat is billed as an “All-in-One SEO platform”.

Serpstat – Homepage

And it largely provides. Serpstat has the features you ‘d expect from an SEO software suite, like backlink analysis, organic rankings reports, and more.

That said, I’m not exactly sure if the features themselves are all that great.

For instance, when I take a look at the top SEO keywords report for Backlinko, it states that my top 3 keywords are YouTube views, pogosticking … and “press released”?

Serpstat – Domain Search Top Keywords

I undoubtedly do not expect this report to be 100%precise. You ‘d need my Google Analytics for that. But these numbers are way off.

That stated, it’s “Backlink Control panel” is pretty great.

Serpstat – Backlink Dashboard Reffering Domains

That pretty much lines up with what Ahrefs’ Website Explorer report.

Ahrefs Site Explorer – Reffering Domains

How Serpstat Compares to Ahrefs

Serpstat has a lot of the very same functions as Ahrefs.

However I do not believe any of them are as great as Ahrefs.

For instance, my natural keywords report in Ahrefs is much more accurate than Serpstat:

Ahrefs – Organic Keywords Top Three

They both technically have the same function. One is way much better than the other.

The one Serpstat function that’s comparable to Ahrefs is their backlink analysis tool. It has a huge index. Plus, it’s pretty easy to utilize.

What Did I Miss?

So that’s my list of 7 Ahrefs alternatives.

Now I wish to hear from you:

Are there any tools that resemble Ahrefs that you use?

Let me understand in the comments area below.


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How to grow your YouTube rankings with the right SEO tools

How to grow your YouTube rankings with the right SEO tools

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We’re all aware that YouTube’s video consumption grows every year, so it’s kind of obvious that YouTube search engine is huge, possibly being outdone only by Google. 

There is also a simple fact: YouTube video content will always have lower competition compared to text.

Still, to rank high, SEO matters. Optimizing for YouTube includes many tasks, and doing them right requires some tools.

From writing the perfect description to looking up what your competition did right, there is SEO software for all aspects of YouTube optimization.

In this list, those tools are organized first by functionality: keyword research, channel audit and competition research — and second by the tools’ complexity.

YouTube SEO tools to choose the perfect keywords and topic

Tool highlights: YouTube Autocomplete, Google Keyword Planner, Rank Tracker, Keywordtool.io, Kparser, Keywords Everywhere.

The topics for your YouTube videos need to be carefully optimized. What you need to do is communicate to the search engine that out of all the videos targeting a particular keyword you are the best one. This is done by filling out your title, description, and tags.

For beginners

If we’re talking about just getting suggestions for this one YouTube video, we don’t need to go beyond the free tools.

SEO is not always about advanced, expensive software packs. Here, we’ll use what YouTube gives to us by default.

Go right on YouTube and type into the search bar the beginning of the topic you may have vaguely in mind. YouTube will then present you with a list of options, showing what people mostly search for connected to that.

YouTube rankings

Simply go through a bunch of letters of the alphabet. You’ll get plenty of video ideas that you can then further research and find out if this is your topic.

So while this is free, which is always a bonus, and it doesn’t require you to go anywhere from YouTube, there are still some drawbacks. Like you can only look up one word at a time, and there’s zero info on your results, and so on.

Sure, if all you’re after is creating one video a month, that method could suit you fine.

But if you’re looking to implement YouTube into your marketing strategy fully, it won’t be enough. You’ll need a more convenient SEO tool covering YouTube optimization.

For a full-on video campaign

To go a little more in-depth, turn to Google Keyword Planner. There, you’ll have an easier time putting in a bunch of possible topics and getting some good results in return.

YouTube rankings

Now, not to be blasphemous. But I was never a fan of Keyword Planner. For example from the screenshot: I searched for “Turkish rap” and the data on searches it gives is “10K to 100K”? There’s a 90K difference in there that really matters.

On top of that, you can only search 10 keywords at a time. And if you’re serious about YouTube SEO, you’ll be looking up dozens of them.

So if what you’re looking for is seriously comprehensive data, turn to Rank Tracker (full disclosure: it’s my project). Since it’s a holistic tool, you’ll get a bunch of things there, but for now, we’re interested in Autocomplete Tools.

There, choose YouTube Autocomplete, and get extended results.

YouTube rankings

As this is the full-on YouTube rank checker and keyword research solution, suitable for SEO in general also, you will get a whole bunch of info.

A useful feature, among other things, is that you can sort your keywords by their length — this helps you better target those amazing long-tail keywords, which usually bring your videos a lot of clicks.

That said, this is a desktop-based tool, and as such, it takes a download and an installation to actually start using its full functionality.

If you can’t spare the time, Keywordtool.io and Kparser work perfectly for this aspect of YouTube marketing.

The catch with them is just that they are actually freemium-based. You can use them for free, but their functionality then is severely limited.

Both these tools give a good number of keyword suggestions specifically for YouTube. That said, they don’t give any additional information about them. They also aren’t free, and require you to cough up some dough to access their full functionality.

That said, as paid software, it fits a digital marketer working with a campaign of pretty much any volume.

If you’re dead tired of using additional tools in general, look into using a nice free tool, Keywords Everywhere. It functions as a nice and light extension to your browser.

You’ll get a slew of SEO information right in your browser, and will be able to do parts of your research “on the fly”.

What’s important is that you implement your keyword research, not just by adding keywords to your title, but to your description and tags, as well.

Tools for SEO audit of your YouTube channel

Tool highlights: YouTube Analytics, Social Blade, Quintly, TubeBuddy, vidIQ, Tubics.

For any kind of business, an audit is paramount. Running a YouTube channel is no different. You need to keep your hand on the pulse of what does and doesn’t work. You’ll be able to use those insights further on when building your YouTube strategy.

For beginners

Turn to the very useful YouTube Analytics (YouTube’s native tool) first. You’ll get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening with your channel.

And for a lot of us, YouTube Analytics is actually quite enough.

You get the info about your viewership, and what they prefer watching overall. You get a neat graph with the history of your viewership all laid out.

It’s not super comprehensive, but it gets the job done if all you want is a little statistics.

A good supplementary tool would be Social Blade. Simply enter your channel’s name and get some numbers on your channel.

There’s also a very fun Future Predictions feature available, which will show you how much your videos are projected to grow.

And although quintly is not a specifically YouTube-oriented feature, it works pretty nicely. In addition to data on subscribers, engagement, watch time of your videos, and so on, it provides a convenient reporting feature, useful for anybody managing a larger team.

For a full-on video campaign

Of course, if you want to go deeper, you should look into a tool like TubeBuddy. It is one of the best supplementary tools to YouTube Analytics, and, really, it deserves the hype.

There is an abundance of features presented here:


You can analyze your channel’s stats, get data on your videos, and perform competition research. You also can edit the thumbnails, annotations, and descriptions of your YouTube content.

From suggesting you tags (which, by the way, doesn’t seem to influence your actual SEO rankings much), to translating your video’s title and description, TubeBuddy is one of the best suites on the market right now, and it comes at an affordable price.

From $9/mo to $49/mo, you’ll get varied functionality. That said, even the free version is good enough to vastly improve your SEO.

Or, maybe you’d like to try something like vidIQ, which is also an all-in-one YouTube SEO solution.

It’ll give you tips on best publishing times, suggest your niche’s influencers to connect with, and so on. A handy browser extension lets you research competitors in the same way.

It also has the bulk editing of end cards for your videos. A small thing, but it’s such a time saver. That’s really the advantage that only those of us working with large-volume video marketing campaigns could appreciate.

Tubics is a similar tool. You get, in the same Swiss army-knife package, instruments for keyword research, and channel audit.

And if you need to check your videos’ and channel’s rankings, you could use a rank tracking tool. The tool can get pricey for a smaller channel, but the trial is free, and if you don’t feel like you’re getting enough out of it, you can just cancel any time.

Research your YouTube competition

Tool highlights: Rival IQ, NoxInfluencer, Socialinsider, Vaizle.

In the exact same way as with more traditional SEO for Google, YouTube SEO includes competition research.

Keeping an eye on what makes your competition’s YouTube content rank is one of the best things you can do for your own SEO.

Here the market leader is definitely a tool called Rival IQ.

With it, you will get a panoramic view of your YouTube competitors and their SEO rankings. Take a close look at what’s been working exceptionally well for their YouTube videos. From the kind of tags they use to title formats, try and learn what the best-ranking people in your niche are doing.

I also found NoxInfluencer to be suitable for competition research. For pretty much any niche or location you’ll see exactly what your biggest competitors’ YouTube profiles are.

There’s also YouTube Competitors Analysis Tool by Socialinsider and Vaizle. They provide a breakdown and comparison of your channel and videos to those of your competition, comparing the frequency of posting, videos’ stats, and more.

Conclusion

In 2020 SEO, businesses and agencies that pursue a holistic YouTube strategy will always be three steps ahead of everyone else. We need to determine every opportunity to create videos that will engage our potential clients.

Creating YouTube videos as part of your marketing campaign is tapping into a huge well of billions upon billions of searches for video content that was previously unavailable to us.

And that’s a well we shouldn’t dismiss out of hand.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at @ab80.

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