Category Archives: SEO

Blogging, Brand, Market Research, SEO, Voice of Customer, Website Optimization

5 Ways of Using Word Clouds to Enhance Digital Marketing

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Word Clouds For Digital Marketing:

Word clouds are a great creative tool that many of us love to play around with. They generate an image composed of words from content that has been submitted in the tool. The size of individual words in the word cloud indicates its frequency or importance.

However, word clouds are also very useful tools for content creation, brand evaluation, competitor analysis, SEO keyword targeting and customer insight.

1. Marketing Content:

Finding images that are suitable for your blog or social media posts can be time consuming and problematic as many images are protected by copyright and have permissions which restrict usage. However, we know from research that blog posts with images have much higher engagement levels and are more likely to be shared. So, to save time and money copy and paste your new blog post into a word cloud to create a free and unique image for your new content.

2. Evaluate Your Value Proposition:

Word clouds are also useful to evaluate how well your value proposition messages are embedded in your content.  Check how well your brand messages are being communicated by plugging in your website address or social media URL.

Image of word cloud for Conversion-Uplift.co.uk homepage
Word cloud of Conversion-uplift.co.uk using jasondavies.com

 

World cloud tools like Tagxedo allow you to input your Twitter and social media feeds. This can highlight the value of the content you are sharing and allow you to identify the themes that are occurring most often. Do these correspond with how you want to be perceived by your social media followers?

Analyse your LinkedIn profile in a word cloud generator to ensure your profile communicates a professional tone and is using the best words to promote your expertise.

If you have a Yelp page, use a word cloud to assess how your customers describe your service.

3. SEO Keyword Audit:

Word clouds are a great SEO tool as they instantly indicate which words are most prominent in your marketing content and how Google or other search engines are likely to assess your content.

4. Competitor Research:

Just as you can evaluate your own marketing content and keywords using a word cloud, you can also use the same approach to undertake some competitor research.  Plug in your competitor’s URL into a word cloud to identify the keywords they are targeting and how consistent their value proposition is communicated.

Image of word cloud of sitetuners.com
Wordcloud of www.sitetuners.com using Tagcrowd.com

5. Analysing Customer Feedback:

Customer feedback is not just collected through online polls and surveys. Customer conversations are also a great source of feedback, whether via telephone calls, live chat, product reviews or emails. You will probably be surprised at the number of sources potentially available to you and the volume of feedback.

Don’t let the volume of feedback put you off as word clouds are an excellent means for processing verbatim customer conversations to obtain quick and clear insights. Such conversations can be a great source of insights for developing hypothesis for A/B and multivariate tests.

However, before proceeding with using a word cloud to analyse customer conversations it is wise to do some preparatory work to clean up your transcripts or survey responses. Otherwise you may find that duplicate feedback or similar meaning terms reduce the effectiveness of your word cloud at communicating key insights.

Duplicate Responses:

It’s not uncommon for some visitors to answer a survey or leave feedback multiple times. Unless this is dealt with a single customer can skew your analysis, especially if they have repeated the same comments on multiple occasions.

This is often easy to spot if the respondent has to leave an email address or another unique identifier. Once you have identified the culprits go through and review their feedback and delete all but the first response. It’s better to be consistent with your method as otherwise you will be bringing in subjective bias into the analysis.

Combining Terms:

I once launched a poll on a homepage on a mobile responsive website by asking the open-ended question; “What is missing on this page?” We received lots of comments from mobile visitors about being unable to login, sign in or see the login box. All of these responses obviously related to the same issue and so it was sensible to combine the terms. This can easily be done by using the “Replace” function in a spreadsheet.

It’s also worth looking out for plurals and replacing such terms with the singular version of the word.  Acronyms can also be problematic if some respondents use the full phrase and so search for such inconsistencies to replace acronyms where necessary.

Weighting Results:

When presenting word clouds you sometimes want to give more weight to certain terms because of what you know about their impact on your business. For instance you may want to give more prominence to feedback on your most popular webpages or blogs in your word cloud.

Word cloud tool Wordle allows you to change the weighting of certain words by making adjustments in the advanced mode. For example you could weight words according page views to reflect the popularity of a page or blog they relate to. However, make sure you make this clear when you present your word cloud as otherwise this can create a misleading impression of the feedback received.

Conclusion:

Word clouds are flexible and free tools that can save you time and money. Before you splash out money on buying competitor analysis, SEO keyword audits or text analytics tools try out word clouds first.

Below are nine of the best free word cloud solutions available.

The 9 Best Free Word Cloud Tools:

My recommended word cloud is Wordclouds.com as this is an easy to use but flexible tool with some great advanced settings. Visually it also looks superior to most other tools.

Image of word cloud generated by Wordclouds.com
Word cloud from blog post using Wordclouds.com

 

  1. ABCya!:A word cloud for kids that may be relevant if your website is of interest to children. Type or paste text into the box below and press the arrow button to view the word cloud generated.
  2. Jason Davies: A great tool if you want to generate a word cloud from a blog or website.
  3. Tagcrowd: Allows you to set specific criteria for your cloud such as language, maximum number of words and minimum frequency.  Allows you to create a word cloud from a webpage URL, Twitter ID and other social media feeds.
  4. Tagxedo: Create word clouds from a URL, Twitter ID, Del.icio.us ID, news, search, RSS feed, uploading text or enter it yourself.
  5. WordArt (Formerly Tagul):  A word cloud generator with advanced features including words inside words, rich font choices, roll-over effects, custom shapes, colours and fonts and export in vector formats.
  6. Tricklar: This site claims to use high quality media sources from around the world to generate word clouds. I found it difficult to find words or phrases that it would generate a word cloud for and so maybe only useful for popular subjects.
  7. Wordclouds.com: This is a free word cloud generator which can be used with most browsers. On the homepage got o “File” and upload a document or PDF, paste text (by File dropdown), input a URL or amend the word list (dropdown). In the word list you can even add links to individual words by entering the URL after the word.
  8. WorditOut: Advanced filters allows you to filter the text to display or remove words and change their importance. Select your own layout by choosing your own colours, fonts, and sizes or let WorditOut find a random look for you.
  9. Wordle: A simple word cloud generator which allows you to set the weights of words.

Thank you for reading my post and I hope you found it useful. Please share using the social media icons below if you like this post.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

  • About the author:  Neal provides digital marketing optimisation consultancy services and has worked for  brands such as Deezer.com, Foxybingo.com, Very.co.uk, partypoker.com and Bgo.com. He uses a variety of techniques, including web analytics, personas, customer journey analysis and customer feedback to improve a website’s conversion rate.
  • Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com  and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website.  If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@conversion-uplift.co.uk. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch, see his LinkedIn profile or connect on Facebook.
SEO, Sunk cost fallacy

Why Is SEO The Biggest Scam On The Internet?

False Promises Made By SEO Agencies:

On an almost daily basis I receive emails from companies offering to “optimise” my site. This often includes a guarantee to get my site on the first page of Google (even though I have already achieved that), to send more visitors to my site, to fix broken links, provide site analytics and get more authoritative links to my site.

Image of email from SEO scam agency offering guaranteed top of Google

What the hell is an “optimised site”?

I’m sorry to tell you that anyone who claims to have “fully optimised” your site for SEO or any other purpose is a fraud and is probably charging you a lot of money for little, if any benefit. There is no such thing as a “fully optimised” site as it’s like repairing the roads, the job is never done.

For example if you want to improve your conversion rate listening to the advice of a so called “expert” will have limited impact and needs to be validated through A/B and multivariate testing. Every site is unique and so a best practice may work on one site but there is no guarantee that it will work on your site.

80% of SEO is pure hype:

 

Since 24th April 2012 when Google released their “Penguin” update most of what SEO agencies do has become irrelevant. Even more worrying though is that a lot of what some of these agencies do may actually harm your ranking and they certainly can’t guarantee to put you on the first page of Google.

 

The old tricks don’t work anymore:

Stuffing your site with keywords, content cloaking and blasting blog sites with links to your site don’t work and are more likely to get you penalised. Even keywords are much less important than before as there is evidence that Google now evaluates the content on the pages that link to your site to identify what searches you rank for rather than relying on the keywords that are on your page.

Search engine algorithms are much better than before at spotting attempts to play the system and conversely are more adept at identifying good quality and relevant content. There are still SEO best practices, but these are more about avoiding mistakes than using any tricks of the trade.

 

What drives SEO rankings?

Part of the problem with SEO and why so many SEO scams are circulating is that Google and the other search engines don’t publish exactly what gets you a high page ranking. However, from what the search engines do publish and research carried out by genuine SEO agencies it is clear that it is a combination of quality external links to your site, social indicators (likes, shares, tweets etc.) and good content. As Google can differentiate between legitimate links and the spam that many SEO agencies create it really comes down to good content. So maybe SEO should be re-named content marketing?

Most basic tools are free:

For many of the genuine aspects of SEO there are free tools available that you can easily access. I’ve previously written a post on how to use Google’s Search Console. This is a great free tool that will answer most of the questions you may have about the performance of your site including; crawl errors (e.g. page not found – 404s), external links to your content, average page rank, clicks,  impressions and structured data errors.

Google Analytics is also free and allows you to identify your most popular content and track page speed and conversion goals. If you have the time and resource there is no need to pay SEO agencies lots of money to identify where your problems exist.

 

Why don’t SEO agencies tell you this?

People have a made a lot of money out of SEO and continue to do so and so why would they admit they add little, if any, value? There may also be an illusion of skill for some SEO agencies that psychologist Daniel Kahneman sums it up nicely:

“Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed.” Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, fast and slow

This is not only a waste of money it is quite dangerous for companies. By measuring metrics that don’t influence your bottom line (e.g. Likes and Shares), people can’t stop themselves optimising campaigns using such meaningless targets (see Cobra Effect).

A lot of investment has also been made into SEO and optimisation. Due to our tendency not to want to admit when we have made bad decisions (see Sunk Cost Fallacy), people often carry on with behaviour even when there is no evidence to support it.

12 SEO scams and how to spot them:

  1. Guaranteed Rankings:

It is not possible to guarantee a #1 ranking on Google as their algorithms are far too complex for any SEO agency to play the system and definitely deliver a sustainable first place on Google.

  1. They don’t detail how the will improve your organic traffic:

Many SEO “experts” claim they have “secret” SEO strategies and don’t detail what exactly they are going to do to improve your ranking or traffic levels.  Any legitimate agency should outline in detail tasks they will undertake and agree some targets to measure their level of success.

Image of how I more than doubled organic traffic using content marketing strategy

For example in October 2016 I implemented a new content marketing strategy and by the beginning of 2017 my organic traffic had more than doubled. I knew exactly what my plan was and also had the analytics in place to measure the impact of my new strategy. Anyone who can’t tell you what they plan to do is probably thinking of using black hat SEO techniques that will get you penalised or banned by the major search engines.

Here are a few of the SEO scams that try to leave back links on my site on a daily basis. They don’t even have the intelligence to hide their intent.

Image of comments on blog from SEO scam companies

 

  1. Offer free trial SEO services:

Genuine SEO work is time consuming and takes days, if not weeks, to deliver results. No genuine SEO company is going to offer this for free and if they also ask for access to your admin area or hosting account I would be very concerned about their motives.

Image of SEO audit
Image Source:

 

  1. They have a special relationship with Google or an employee at Google.

This is definitely a scam as Google can’t be seen to have a “special relationship” with any SEO agency and so this will be a simple lie.

  1. Offer to submit your site to hundreds of search engines.

In the UK Google, Bing, Yahoo and AOL account for over 95% of searches and so why waste time worrying about other niche search engines?

  1. Low priced SEO:

As I have already mentioned genuine SEO is time consuming and labour intensive and so anyone who offers to do it at a very low cost is either having you on or they won’t do a very good job for you. Concentrate on learning how to use Google Search Console and Google Analytics for free and you will save yourself a lot of money.

  1. We understand Google Algorithms and are algorithm experts:

Search engine algorithms are very complex, dynamic and are frequently updated and so it is virtually impossible to understand for certain how they will rank your site for a specific search query.

  1. We can submit your site to well-known directories:

Some SEO agencies offer to manually submit your site to various directories. This is another scam as this is the internet; the vast majority of people use Google not directories to find a service or a product they are looking for.

  1. We can submit new content to search engines:

Continuously submitting your site to Google is a complete waste of time as it won’t influence your ranking. If you have new content you can submit it to Google for instance using their free Search Console.

Image of Fetch as Google from Search Console

  1. We are partners with Google or work with someone at Google:

Google can’t be seen to partner with any SEO company and nor would any employee want to risk their jobs by illegally working with any such firms.

  1. SEO companies that want ownership of your content:

You should never give up ownership of your content to an SEO agency as you should retain ownership of anything you pay for.

  1. You pay for a monthly SEO package:

Monthly SEO packages can be a great money spinner for unscrupulous agencies. Before signing up ensure you have agreed a suitable number of hours per month that the agency will work on your site and get them to specify in detail the tasks they will undertake for you. Further, agree some targets for quality links and an increase in traffic to ensure you get value for money. Any agency that is not willing to comply with these requests is not worth dealing with.

Conclusion:

OK, so genuine SEO work can be valuable for a site. However, the key here is to agree objectives that have clear benefits  and set performance targets to ensure you get value for money. Avoid signing up with any agencies that use any of the above tactics as they are likely to be poor value for money and could actually damage your search engine rankings.

If you can, educate yourself about SEO practices to allow you to take greater control over organic traffic generation. Further, remember that what your visitors and Google want is great content and that should be your priority. Everything else, including SEO, should be secondary to the content. If you focus on quality content in the first place then SEO may largely take care of itself as good content will attract external links and social media mentions and shares.

Thank you for reading this post. If you found it useful please share using the social media icons below.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

  • About the author:  Neal provides digital marketing optimisation consultancy services and has worked for  brands such as Deezer.com, Foxybingo.com, Very.co.uk, partypoker.com and Bgo.com. He uses a variety of techniques, including web analytics, personas, customer journey analysis and customer feedback to improve a website’s conversion rate.
  • Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com  and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website.  If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@conversion-uplift.co.uk. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch, see his LinkedIn profile or connect on Facebook.
Keyword research, SEO, SEO Link Building, User Experience, Website Optimization

How To use Google’s Search Console To Boost Conversions

Google’s Search Console is Free!

Budgets are often very tight with start-ups and yet it is important to have visibility of how your business is performing in the digital space.  When I advise start-ups on how to optimise their website or app the first thing I do is set them up with Google’s free Search Console tool. Unlike many free solutions the Search Console provides webmasters with a  comprehensive set of tools to inform and improve a site’s performance from an SEO, user experience and conversion perspective.

What is the Search Console?

Previously called Webmaster Tools, the Search Console is a fantastic free site performance tool that seeks to give webmasters the information they need to effectively manage and improve their digital experience. Without this tool set up you will be largely in the dark about many aspects of your site’s performance. Indeed, many companies end up needlessly  paying out a lot of money to SEO agencies for simple tasks that they could manage themselves if they had known about Google’s Search Console.

Once you have Search Console set up you will be in a much stronger position to set SEO targets and understand many of the issues that may be holding your site back in Google search. It can also help you improve the user experience by resolving errors and usability issues.

How do I set up Search Console?

All you need to do is login into an appropriate Google account and go to webmasterstools/home   and “Add a property” within the Search Console. Then follow the simple instructions to confirm your ownership of the site.

The easiest way of doing this is often inserting some code into the header of your site before the closing </head> tag. Alternatively, if you have Google Analytics on your site you can also use that to validate your ownership of the site. If you get into difficulties just contact your website builder or designer for assistance.

Initially you won’t have any search data to look at but you can check the console for any signs of errors or usability issues identified by Googlebots. These are the programs or spiders as they often called that Google uses to crawl your site to understand the type of content you have and index pages for Google search.

The Dashboard:

 

The dashboard of the Search Console provides a useful overview of the health of your site. This includes site errors, DNS errors, server connectivity issues, URL errors, page not found (404s), and a graph of the total clicks over the latest 28 days. This is great, but you can get much more detail about your site by digging into the left-hand navigation menu.

Image of Google Search Console Dashboard

Search Appearance:

This includes structured data which helps Google understand the mark-up of your pages so that it can add rich snippets (or Schema.org) and other information to your search result. Rich snippets describes the structured data mark-up that webmasters add to HTML to enable search engines to better understand what type of information is present on a web page. So, rich snippets are the visible result of structured data that appears in SERPs.

Image of Data Highlights page from Search Console

You can add structured data to your site using a plugin for WordPress.org such as JSON-LD. You can also add structured data to your page using the Data Highlighter tool  (see above) which you can access in the Search appearance section of the navigation.

Rich cards provide data to Google about events, products, or opportunities on your site. Google has five types of rich cards; recipes, events, products, reviews and courses. The Search Console provides sample mark-up for each type of card and a Structured Data Testing Tool to validate your mark-up.

The HTML Improvements tab informs you about any issues related to your page tags. Whether it is missing title tags, duplicate title tags and whether title tags are too long or too short.

Accelerated Mobile Pages provides you with data on errors relating to your AMPs and informs you how many AMPs have been indexed by Google. It also allows you to test AMPs and then submit them to Google for indexing.

Image of Accelerated Mobile Page test in Search Console

 

Search Traffic:

Under this section you can view Search Analytics which provides data on search results, including key words, clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. This information is essential for understanding how successful you are with SEO and identifying key words where you have good authority. Use the data on your average ranking for keyword phrases to inform new content development to build on areas where you have good authority and to understand which words have the most potential from a volume perspective.

Image of Search Analytics in Search Console

This section also shows how many external links there are to your site and who is linking to what content. This information is crucial in understanding how effective your link building strategy is and also what content other sites are most interested in. External links are important to your SEO strategy because they are one of the few ways that Google can tell how well regarded your content is to other web users. It also helps direct more traffic to your site and explains why so much effort is put into link building.

However, be careful about placing links to your site on random blogs as Google is looking for links from sites with a good authority and may potentially penalise you if it becomes aware of such activity. However, where you are getting lots of external links to your content from good authority sites this suggests you should explore creating more content on this topic to capitalise on the interest shown.

Search Analytics also provides additional information on internal links, security issues, international targeting (useful for segmenting content by language) and mobile usability issues identified by Google. Mobile usability is especially important to monitor as Google continues to give more and more priority to mobile users.

Google Index:

Index status confirms the number of pages on your site that Google has indexed and so can be found via the search engine. Blocked resources tells you about pages where the Googlebot can’t access important elements on your page and so Google may not be able to accurately index the page. Remove URL allows you to hide URLs from search engines as the page may contain out-of-date information or may just be obsolete for whatever reason.

Crawl:

The Crawl section provides you with data on errors detected by Googlebots when crawling your site. Although page not founds (404 errors) may not harm your SEO ranking it can damage the customer experience and so it is important to monitor crawl errors on a regular basis.

Generally I would advise initially deleting all the page not founds for both desktop and mobile. You can then check back in a few days to see which ones have been replicated since you removed them from the console. Many 404 errors don’t recur as they are not even correct URLs and so this way you can concentrate on those that matter.

This section also shows how many pages on average are crawled by the Googlebot. But don’t wait for the Googlebot to crawl your site if you have new or revised content to index. Use the Fetch as Google function below to test how Google crawls and renders a page on your site. This identifies whether Googlebot can access a page on your site and you can then submit the URL for indexing. This is especially useful for a rapidly changing site as you don’t want Google displaying old or out-of-date content.

Image of Fetch as Google from Search Console

The Robot.txt tester allows you to edit your robot.txt file and check for errors. Robot.txt files are used to tell Google which parts of your site you don’t want to be crawled and indexed by a search engine. The Sitemap tab allows you to submit a new sitemap to Google which helps it to understand how your site is structured and assists in the indexing of individual pages by Google. It also tracks how many pages you have submitted for indexing and how many pages Google actually indexes.

The Security Issue tab shows if Google has detected any potential security problems with your site. If your site is hacked then Google provides a number of resources to help resolve the problem.

Finally, the Additional Resources tab includes 9 links to free resources such as Email Markup Tester, PageSpeed Insights, Google My Business and Custom Search. Check these out as a number of them can help improve your search engine marketing and grow your organic search traffic.

Conclusion:

When seeking to improve your SEO performance the Search Console should be your first port of call. There is little point in spending money on an SEO agency until you have fully digested what the Search Console is telling you. Even if you decide you don’t have the time or expertise to resolve all the issues identified by this tool, use the Search Console to inform and prioritise objectives for your agency to follow. Further, use the Search Console to monitor your SEO performance over time as a successful strategy should be capable of improving key metrics over time.

Thank you for reading this post. If you found it useful please share using the social media icons below.

 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

  • About the author:  Neal provides digital marketing optimisation consultancy services and has worked for  brands such as Deezer.com, Foxybingo.com, Very.co.uk, partypoker.com and Bgo.com. He uses a variety of techniques, including web analytics, personas, customer journey analysis and customer feedback to improve a website’s conversion rate.
  • Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com  and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website.  If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@conversion-uplift.co.uk. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch, see his LinkedIn profile or connect on Facebook.

 

Blogging, SEO, Social Media, Website Optimization

5 Reasons To Build A Business Blog Today

Big business abandons blogging.

Blogging is dead.

Is it true? Yes, big companies are abandoning their blogs, probably because the ROI is difficult to calculate and shareholders complain too much.

No, blogging is no more extinct than the last time it was declared a dead donkey. Hasn’t social media marketing taken over? Forget it. Social media is for fun, not solving urgent needs.

Blogging wins the conversion battle every time. A business blog is still the most efficient way for a small company to generate prospects and then to convert them into buyers.

1.    Blogging Improves Google Search Results

Blogging is good for search results in many ways.

Each new blog post means that you have another indexed page on Google’s computers. The more text you have on your site, the more likely it is that Google will judge it as a good match for a given search query.

Google also takes more notice of recent website posts than ones from the golden age of steam. Frequently updated blog posts are the best way better search engine results pages (SERPS).

Ranking higher in Google is more than just a vanity metric. If you rank higher, you get more clicks, more traffic, and more leads.

2.    Blogging Brings You More Traffic

 

Image Source:
Image Source – Free PDF download:

The chart above is from a Hubspot report that you can download for free. It shows that sites with more pages get more traffic. A blog is the best way to grow your site gradually and naturally.

A blog post is a magnet that keeps on pulling, forever.

Image of chart showing proportion of contacts generated by recent and previous posts
Image Source:

This Hubspot chart shows this magnetic effect. Every post you write adds to the overall lead-attracting power that your blog has. Your old posts will still rank in search engines and bring in new leads 12 months down the line.

 

3.    Blogging Builds Your Reputation

This Forbes post gives various ways to increase your reputation. The one that stands out is “Go out of your way to help others reach their goals.” This is how your blog helps your rep.

People read your blog for what they get out of it. If you are writing to help people, then they will have more regard for you and will be more likely to buy your services than those of a less helpful competitor.

Some companies spend millions building a brand that is instantly recognizable in an attempt to link brand and reputation. Blogging is not free because of the time and resources you need to do it well, but it is a lower cost option than social media and television advertising campaigns.

You don’t need to establish your brand/reputation with everyone on the entire planet who breathes. You only need to reach your niche consumers, and that can be done for less than you think by blogging.

4.    Blogging Builds Your Email List

If you have an email list, then you can use an email marketing platform to send them marketing emails. There are as many statistics relating to the positive ROI of emails as there are fish in the sea. Here are just a few, including “For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. – EmailExpert “[Infographic] 10 Must Know Email Marketing Stats 2014” (2014)”

If someone subscribes to receive your emails, then that person is interested in your services. The act of subscribing filters out the time-wasters from those who are serious.

Having a helpful blog is the best way to encourage prospects to subscribe to your emails.

 

5.    Blogging Builds Customer Relationships

Nobody buys from someone they don’t trust. To build trust, you need to build a relationship with each client.

Building trust takes time and many marketing ‘touches’. Buyers need to feel they know you and like you before they eventually trust you.

Blog subscribers will see your focus on fixing problems that they and other readers have. Their respect for you will grow, especially when they see you responding to comments on your blog posts.

Starting Your Blog

You may well be short of time, but your business needs a blog. This Conversion-Uplift post describes how a blog and social media campaigns can work together. You need to use both channels, just like you need nuts as well as bolts to build anything from a construction kit.

You don’t have the time? According to this guru you can build a blog in 47 minutes. This post gives you screenshots and the exact process you need to replicate Neil’s building process.

The time to make new posts to your blog is significant, but so are the leads that it will bring. Another screenshot from Hubspot’s free and downloadable Marketing Benchmarks Report makes the point very well.

Image of chart that shows how much more traffic a site with 51 to 100 pages gets compared to one with a site with 50 or fewer pages
Image Source – Free PDF download:

 

The more pages on your blog, the more business leads you will get.

Thank you for reading this post and if you found it useful please share using the social media icons on the page.

 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

  • Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com  and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website.  If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@outlook.com. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch and view his LinkedIn profile.
Keyword research, SEO

How To Do Keyword Research!

6 Steps To Follow For Your Keyword Research – Updated 22nd March 2017

Keywords remain an essential part of SEO strategy for both organic and paid traffic optimisation. With the Hummingbird update long-tail keywords became more important to SEO. As a result keyword research needs to consider optimising a website on a semantic level to inform a site’s architecture and segment site topics into thematic areas.

This has made keyword research more complex but it is still an important element of SEO strategy. Below are 19 of the more popular keyword tools that are often recommended by SEO experts. But first here is a 6 step guide to how to do keyword research:

 

1. Identify important topics to your business.

 

Draw up a list of all the important and relevant topics that relate to your business. Start with general topics (e.g. landing page optimization & web analytics).

2. Produce a list of keywords for general topic.

 

These should be keyword phrases that you consider it will be important to rank on in SERPs (search engine results pages). These key hear is to capture all your ideas as this won’t be the final list of keywords. Remember to use your web analytics to identify what keywords your site is already getting found for.

 

3. Examine related search terms.

 

Go to Google and start typing one of your phrases and see what related search terms are suggested by Google. These suggestions may generate more ideas for new keywords that you hadn’t previously considered. You can also take them a step further by typing some of the related search terms into Google to see what their related search terms are.

 

4. A mix of
head terms & long-tail keywords.

 

Head terms are short keyword phrases, usually one to three words. Long-tail keywords tend to contain three or more words.  People generally search using head terms more frequently and so they tend to be more competitive and harder to rank compared to long-tail terms. On the other hand long-tail terms are more specific and give you a better understanding of what people are really looking
for. For this reason you need a good mix of both types of terms.

 

5. How do your competitors rank on keywords?

 

Understanding what keywords your competitors are targeting is useful from two perspectives. It can provide ideas for reviewing your own list of keywords. Additionally, where you are both targeting the same keyword it means that you may have to work harder to improve your own ranking.

However, don’t just copy the keywords that your competitors target, they may not always be relevant and it will also make it more difficult to improve your rankings. By targeting keywords that
your competitors are ignoring may give you a quick win by allowing you establish high ranking for these terms due to a lack of competition.  Use tools like SEMrush and others outlined below to find out which keywords your competitors are ranking on.

 

6. Keyword list reduction.

 

Use tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner to reduce the number of terms in your list. This will help to ensure you are focussed on terms that have reasonable number of searches (i.e. neither too little or too much). Use Google Trends to find out their
trend history and forecasts so that you don’t remove terms that have potential in the future.

20 Awesome Keyword Research Tools:

 

1. AuthorityLabs: Track historical rankings and view graphical representation of how a keyword is ranking over time. Allows you to automate your SEO monitoring, track local rankings and recover (not provided) keywords.

30 day Free trail available. The Basic plan is priced at $24 a month and offers 100 keywords and up to10 domains. The Plus plan costs $49 a month for up to 250 keywords and 50 domains. The Pro, their most popular plan costs  $99 a month for 1,000 keywords and 100 domains. The Enterprise plan starts at $450 a month for 5,000 + keywords and unlimited domains.

2. Bing Keyword Research Tool: All data is based on organic searchers over the last 6 months and provides ideas and suggestions for your content. Just sign up for  Bing Webmaster Tools to access the keyword research resource.

3. Blog Post Headline Analyzer: This Free tool is from CoSchedule and will analyse headlines for length, how powerful or emotionally engaging the words are, how uncommon the words are and provide recommendations to improve your headline.

4. ContentForest Pro: This is an SEO-led content marketing tool that analyses your content and provides on-page optimization recommendations to update and prioritise your keyword list for an efficient content creation strategy. It will give you an overview of which keywords you are already ranking so you don’t end up duplicating effort.

ContentForest also has an excellent suite of Free SEO tools, including KeywordKiwi which allows you to find long tail keywords based upon what people are searching for on Google. For blogs, ContentIdeator generates anywhere from 10 to 100 blog post title suggestions when you input a keyword. There are also a pagerank, social share, and broken link checker to name just a few.

 

5. Google Adwords Keyword Planner: A Free Adwords Tool that allows you to search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical data, see how a list of keywords might perform and set up a new keyword list by multiplying several keywords together.

6. Google Keyword Suggest Tool: An easy to use tool from SEOChat.com  for identifying longer and more specific phrases to narrow targeting. Enter a term and it will generate a list of the most popular keyword phrases that all begin with the base word – using Google, Amazon, YouTube and Bing “suggest” data bases. The tool generates phrases for every letter of the alphabet. Choose a phrase and then move to the next step to generate more phrases.

7. Google Trends: Is a Free tool that allows you to view what people have been searching for with Google. It graphs how often a term is used over time and how this varies geographically. It allows you to generate predictions of how search volumes are changing. You can also compare more than one term to view their relative popularity.

8. iSpionage: Provides insights into competitors’ effective keywords, ad copy and budget. A highly recommended tool for finding out what your competitors are up to.

Free trial available for all plans. For keyword research the Silver plan costs $69 a month with unlimited searches and 10,000 data exports a day. The Gold plan comes in at $99 a month for unlimited searches, 50,000 data exports a day and 10 competitor alerts. For additional services such as daily landing page and web page monitoring, the Campaign plans costs $129 (Pro)  and $299  (Premier) a month.

 

9. Keyword Discovery Tool: One of the most popular keyword tools that provides keyword search statistics from all the major search engines. It will provide the search phrases that people use to find a product or service. It should help you identify the search terms driving traffic to your competitors.

The Standard plan is currently at a special discount price of $29.95 per month for up to 3 domain research results and 20 projects. The Professional plan costs $199.95 per month for up to 100 domains and unlimited number of projects. Both plans allow up to 1,500 searches a day, with 1,000 results displayed and 10,000 terms per project.

10. Keyword Multiplier Tool (Clever Clicks): This is a free tool that allows you to generate a list of all possible keyword phrases. Just type in your list of keywords and the tool will produce a list of every phrase variation possible.

A simple tool that requires you to enter the following information :
Box 1: Primary keywords
Box 2: Secondary keywords
Box 3: Location

11. KeywordTool.io: The Free version is excellent for finding out what people are looking for as it produces around 750 suggestions for each keyword. The suggestions generated depend on the specific Google domain and language that you select.

The Pro plans start from $48 a month and offer:

  • Up to 1,440+ keywords from Google and YouTube, 1,875+ from Bing, 3,750+ from App Store returned for a single search.
    On average 2x more keywords than in free version
  • Google search volume
  • Level of competition on Google AdWords
  • Suggested bid on Google AdWords
  • Ability to export all the data to a CSV file
  • Ability to sort keywords by any parameter

The Pro Lite plan ($48 a month) offers 2 times more keywords than the free plan and the ability to export data in CSV.  The Pro Basic ($68 a month) also gives you search volumes to understand how popular a keyword is. In addition Pro Plus ($88 a month) provides CPC and competition on AdWords.

12. searchmetrics: Essentials is their standard keyword research tool. The suggest function will show you where the specified domain ranks for a particular keyword, plus you can add and tag keywords using the tool.

The Essentials plan costs $69 a month for limited access to their database,   $2,000, up to 1 year of visibility history, up to 3 countries, up to 10,000 rankings per report and current historic keyword rankings.

The Suite Business ($2,000 a month) is an integrated SEO solution built for smaller brands and beginners. This provides complete visibility history,  all countries, up to 20,000 rankings per report and historic keyword rankings for the last 6 months. Additionally this provides content and site structure optimization, extensive backlink analysis and other services.

Prices for their Suite Enterprise and Suite Ultimate plans can be obtained by request.

 

13. SEMRUSH: The industry standard keyword research tool identifies your main competitors based upon the keywords you plan to target. Click on your competitors and it will show you what other keywords they target ad to and the ad copy they use. Highly recommended for seeing who your top paid and organic competitors are for the keywords you plan to use.

It allows you to easily combine and visualise SEMrush data to compare competitive domains and estimate keyword difficulty. For projects it enables you to launch global campaigns and view all the key metrics regarding competitors, keyword rankings, and on-page health in once place.

Plans start from $69.95 per month for Pro which offers 10,000 results per report, 3,000 reports per day, 5 projects and the ability to track 500 keywords. The Guru plan which costs $149.95 per month provides up to 30,000 results per report, 5,000 reports a day, up to 50 projects and the ability to track 1,500 keywords.

Finally, the Business plan comes in at $549.95 per month and delivers up to 50,000 results per report, 10,000 reports per day (for each of 4 users), unlimited projects and resources for tracking up to 6,000 keywords.

 

14. SerpStat: A Free keyword tool which filters results to show only the questions that people enter into the search box. It provides you with popular keywords and their various forms used by people who are searching for interesting products, services or information. It collects and aggregates search suggestions, providing them with the ability to download in a TXT file. It is very good for giving you the how-to content and frequently asked questions.

 

15.Soovle: A very easy to use and Free keyword tool which generates a list of the best keywords by analysing search engines Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers.com, YouTube, Bing and Yahoo!

 

16. Spyfu: A great tool for identifying all the places where your competitors show up on Google. It will show you all their keywords and the ad variations they have employed. Excellent for understanding your competitors’ most profitable keywords.

The Basic plan costs $79 a month with unlimited keyword and domain results, track up to 400 keywords, over 9 years of AdWords and organic history,  and 250 sales leads and domain contacts. Professional costs $139 per month, and offers everything in the Basic plan in addition to rank tracking of up to 800 keywords and access to their API.

Lastly the Agency plan is priced at $999 per month and delivers unlimited custom reporting and keyword rank tracking. Further, you can search monthly data which allows you to track a domain’s weekly rank updates on keywords that you select. You can save up to 47% on the cost of a plan by choosing an annual subscription.

17. StoryBase:  [New] – StoryBase have spent 3 years creating this very easy to use keyword tool. It now has more than 5 billion long-tail keywords, 100 million question keywords and 2 billion related LSI keywords.

A free plan is available for a single user with to 10 searches a month, 15 results per search and one list. A starter plan for a single user costs just $9 a month with unlimited searches, up to 400 results per search and ten lists. The Premium plan for up to 5 users costs $79 per month for unlimited searches, up to 1,000 results per search, 1,000 lists and offers priority support.

18. Tinyranker: A simple, but flexible all-in-one SEO tool. As well as keyword analysis, Tinyranker provides for tracking keyword rankings,  on-page SEO and competitor keyword rankings.

30 day free trial available for all plans. Prices start from $19 a month for up to 100 keywords. An agency plan is available for $119 a month for up 2000 keywords.

 

19. Ubersuggest: A simple and Free keyword suggestion tool that begins to pull in keyword suggestions from Google and other sources the second you start to type. Often used for PPC and SEO keyword research.

 

20. WordStream’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool: A Free tool that allows you to run a limited number of searches in its massive keyword database.  A fast tool which holds over 1 trillion keywords in its database. Excellent for long-tail keyword suggestions.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found this post useful please feel free to share it using the social network icons below or at the top of this post.

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

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  • Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com  and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website.  If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@outlook.com. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch, check out the Conversion Uplift  Facebook page or connect on LinkedIn.
SEO, SEO Link Building

21 Powerful SEO Link Building Tools To Drive More Traffic To Your Site.

1 Comment

 What Is Link Building?

Updated 11th May 2017:

Establishing good quality back-links to your website is crucial to improving the credibility of your site. It’s the only way that Google bots can tell if other people value your content. You can use SEO tools to Identify what content gets linked to most so that you can prioritise your content marketing activities to ensure resources are targeted in the right areas.

Care needs to be taken though as Google can penalise anything that looks like link building for its own sake as the priority should be to create quality content that people want to share. Your Google site ranking is of course determined by a number of factors such as citations, brand mentions and the quality of links.

For a brilliant and comprehensive article on how to build links read ‘The Complete List Of Link Building Tactics’ by Jon Cooper. From my research the top 3 link building tools that I have come across are:

  1. SEMRush
  2. Google Webmaster Tools
  3. Majestic SEO

Below I have summarised 21 of the top SEO link building tools:

Image of chain links never bust
Source: Freeimages.com

 

SEO Outreach and Link Building Solutions:

1. ahrefs: Claims to have the largest index of backlinks. It is updated every 15 minutes and is highly recommended for identifying the number of referring domains that a site has, how many of these come from unique IPs, and how natural is your link growth over time.

Monthly plans range from $79 for Lite to £1,299 for Premium.7 day money back trial available.

Ahrefs homepage image

2. Audisto: This is a tool to analyse websites and is able to crawl through millions of pages. The crawler can identify problems with the site structure, HTML code and technical issues, together with finding your most valuable pages and the best pages to link to and form.

Audisto hompeage image

Monthly plans are based upon a sliding scale of the number of pages crawled. Plans start from €90 a month for up to 100,000 pages crawled, €120 for up to 1,000,000 pages, and go up to €1,590 for 50,000,000 pages.

3. BuzzStream: A dedicated link building site which allows you to import lists of websites for prospecting and provides useful data for deciding which websites you should target.  It will provide the domain authority of a site and how many followers they have on Twitter. It also allows you to easily contact websites through BuzzStream.

Monthly plans range from $29 for Starter to $249 for Premium. Free trial available.

Buzzstream homepage image

4. BuzzSumo: A comprehensive SEO and content marketing tool. It is invaluable for helping to identify the most shared content across all social networks and run detailed analysis reports. Find influencers in any new topic area, and review the content they shared.  ideas for new content. The “Backlink” tab shows the social shares of the the most popular inbound links.Track your competitor’s content performance and do detailed comparisons.

Monthly plans range from $79 for Pro to $239 for Agency. Contact BuzzSumo for Enterprise plans.

Buzzsumo homepage image

5. DeepCrawl:  DeepCrawl is a comprehensive website crawler, designed to identify and monitor technical aspects that could affect your SEO performance. It is good at identifying duplicate pages, pages with meta titles that are too long, duplicate pages and pages that take too long to load.

Monthly plans range from £50 for Starter to £1,050 for Enterprise.

Deepcrawl page image

6. Followerwonk: A  Twitter analytics app from Moz that you can use to find influential people by topic name, The app also allows you to compare users, analyse followers and sort users by name, days on Twitter, Tweet count and more.

The analyse followers function enables you to segment users into a number of psychographic groups including gender, location, and Twitter activity. 30 day Free trial available.

Followerwonk homepage image

7. Google Adwords Keyword Planner:  A Free tool from Google, Keyword Planner helps to build new search network campaigns or expanding existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical statistics, see how a list of keywords might perform and create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner image

8. Google Webmaster Tools: A Free tool from Google. If you use Google Analytics it is simple to add Google Webmaster to your account and start collecting data to identify how you can improve your SEO performance.

Image of Google Webmasters Tool login page

9. GroupHigh: A dedicated blogger outreach and influence management tool. This is highly recommended for larger organisations as it is able to import URLs by the thousands and provide basic blog information, SEO/traffic metrics and social networking data. GroupHigh maintains an extensive database of bloggers that includes social media data. This means you can see what topics a blog covers, but also how many Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook followers the blogger has.

Annual plan starts from around £9,000, but discounts may be negotiable.

Image of GroupHigh.com homepage

 

10. Inkybee.com: A comprehensive blogger outreach resource that enables you to find bloggers on any topic. Has a dashboard to track and manage your outreach. Includes a powerful search engine with advanced filtering, a blog discovery tool to identify more relevant blogs, a sophisticated list management tool to create all kinds of lists, a tool for analysing the influencers in your Twitter followers and a sector segmentation tool to find the details in your lists.

Monthly plans start from $79 for In-house-team to $249 for Large team. Free 14 day trial available.

Image of Inkybee.com homepage

 

11. Keyhole: This is a social media analytics tool for monitoring posts on both Twitter and Instagram.  As well as providing metrics such as posts, impressions and reach, Keyhole also gives you share of posts, geolocation, demographics and includes an advanced influencer filtering table.

Keyhole offers a week’s sample of Twitter data for Free. Paid plans start from $129 a month for 3 concurrent trackers and up to 50,000 posts on Twitter and Instagram. The Corporate plan costs $449 a month and offers up to 10 concurrent trackers and 100,000 posts. 

Image of keyhole.co homepage

12. LinkProspector from Citation Labs: Highly recommended tool for finding outreach targets.  Powerful tool for quickly building lists of potential link targets. Very affordable and gives a quick return on your investment.

Free plan offers 1 credit (reports normally cost 1 credit) and pay as you go plan from $10 for 5 credits. Monthly plans start at $27 for Consultant and up to $97 for Enterprise.

Link Prospector homepage image

13. Majestic: The Majestic Marketing Search Engine is best known for the trust flow and citation flow metrics. The topical trust flow aids analysis of a site’s topical data for evaluating the semantic context of a site. Identify top ranking sites in your sector and use the trust and citation flow data, together with topical trust flow numbers, to try to create a similar profile.

Plans range from £29.99 per month for Silver Quarterly to £250 per month for Platinum.

Image of Majestic.com homepage


14. Mozz: Open Site Explorer: Useful for gaining insights into links that point to certain pages and also has a highly regarded Keyword analysis tool.

Monthly plans start at $99 for Standard and go up to $599 for Premium.

Mozz Open Site Explorer page image

15. MyBlogU: A useful tool for blogs to establish new connections and backlinks. Facilitates knowledge sharing and you can choose between brainstorm, media and interview. The interview category can be used for creating interviews for you blog and for finding relevant projects to raise your profile.

 

Image of MyBlogU.com homepage

16. NinjaOutreach: This is a comprehensive research and link building solution which is designed to automate the outreach process. The tool offers a range of solutions from lead generation, finding guest posts, content promotion to link building.

Offers 14 day unlimited free trial. Plans start from $69 a month for a single user and stores up to 1,500 contacts. The small agency plan costs $129 per month for two users and stores up to 5,000 contacts. The enterprise plan is priced at $599 per month for up to 10 users and stores up to 100,000 contacts.

 

NinjaOutreach.com home page

17. SearchMetrics: Enterprise SEO platform that will gather data on your website, with information about SEO visibility, backlinks and more. The graphs facility enables you to identify any algorithm issues by looking for any sudden changes in visibility. Use the keywords ranking to help identify the most relevant websites to target. The social ranking feature provides evidence of how well the social marketing is performing.

Monthly plans start from $69 for Essentials and $2,000 for Suite Business. Contact SearchMetrics for pricing for Suite Enterprise and Suite Ultimate.

Seaerchmetrics.com homepage

18. Screaming Frog:  The Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to quickly crawl, analyse and audit a site from an onsite SEO perspective. It’s particulary good for analysing medium to large sites, where manually checking every page would be extremely labour intensive.

The Free standard Lite version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs at a time, but does not give you access to the configuration, saving of crawls or the custom source code feature. An individual licence is available for £99 per annum.

 

Screaming Frog SEO Spider page image

19. SEMrush: A comprehensive and  popular SEO tool for checking the health of a site. As part of keyword research the tool is also used to identify which top sites rank for primary keywords.

Monthly plans range from $69.95 for Pro to $549.95 for the Business plan.

SEMrush homepage image

20. Serpfox: A useful keyword position tracking tool. Set custom alerts and receive emails to inform you whenever a search term you are tracking enters the top ten positions, exits the top ten or changes by more than ten positions.

Monthly plans range from $10 for Starter and go up to $200 for Agency.

 

Image of Serpfox.com homepage

 

21. Skyrocket.Digital Similar Content Tool: A Free content promotion tool that helps you find authoritative and relevant websites that have linked to comparable content. This is a great prospecting tool as it allows you to target high-quality link prospects who have shared and linked to a comparable or related piece of content.

Simply enter relevant keywords for your content. The tool will then list prospects that already link to the top ranking content on those terms. You can export prospects to your outreach tool or add them to a spreadsheet.  Then you are ready to start your outreach campaign and earning links for your content.

image of Skyrocket.digital similar content tool homepage

For a more comprehensive post on the latest software check out 51 best link building tools and software in 2017.

Thank you for reading my post. If you found it useful please share using the social media icons below.

 

You can view my full Digital Marketing and Optimization Toolbox here.

To browse links to all my posts on one page please click here.

 

  • About the author:  Neal provides digital optimisation consultancy services and has worked for  brands such as Deezer.com, Foxybingo.com, Very.co.uk and partypoker.com.  He identifies areas for improvement using a combination of approaches including web analytics, heuristic analysis, customer journey mapping, usability testing, and Voice of Customer feedback.
  • Neal has had articles published on website optimisation on Usabilla.com  and as an ex-research and insight manager on the GreenBook Blog research website.  If you wish to contact Neal please send an email to neal.cole@outlook.com. You can follow Neal on Twitter @northresearch and view his LinkedIn profile.