[Case Study] How We Ranked #1 for a High-Volume Keyword in Under 3 Months

Posted by DmitryDragilev

This blog post was co-written with Brad Zomick, the former Director of Content Marketing at Pipedrive, where this case study took place.

It’s tough out there for SEOs and content marketers. With the sheer amount of quality content being produced, it has become nearly impossible to stand out in most industries.

Recently we were running content marketing for Pipedrive, a sales CRM. We created a content strategy that used educational sales content to educate and build trust with our target audience.

This was a great idea, in theory — we’d educate readers, establish trust, and turn some of our readers into customers.

The problem is that there are already countless others producing similar sales-focused content. We weren’t just competing against other startups for readers; we also had to contend with established companies, sales trainers, strategists, bloggers and large business sites.

The good news is that ranking a strategic keyword is still very much possible. It’s certainly not easy, but with the right process, anyone can rank for their target keyword.

Below, we’re going to show you the process we used to rank on page one for a high-volume keyword.

If you’re not sure about reading ahead, here is a quick summary:

We were able to rank #1 for a high-volume keyword: "sales management" (9,900 search volume). We outranked established sites including SalesManagement.org, Apptus, InsightSquared, Docurated, and even US News, Wikipedia, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We managed this through good old-fashioned content creation + outreach + guest posting, aka the "Skyscraper Technique."

Here are the eight steps we took to reach our goal (click on a step to jump straight to that section):

1. Select the right topic
2. Create bad-ass content for our own blog
3. Optimize on-page SEO & engagement metrics
4. Build internal links
5. Find people who would link to this content
6. Ask people to link to our content
7. Write guest posts on leading blogs
8. Fine-tuning content with TF * IDF

Before we start, understand that this is a labor-intensive process. Winning a top SERP spot required the focus of a 3-person team for the better part of 3 months.

If you’re willing to invest a similar amount of time and effort, read on!

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Step 1: Finding a good topic

We wanted three things from our target keyword:

1. Significant keyword volume

If you’re going to spend months ranking for a single keyword, you need to pick something big enough to justify the effort.

In our case, we settled on a keyword with 9,900 searches each month as per the Keyword Planner (1k–10k range after the last update).

That same keyword registered a search volume of 1.7–2.9k in Moz Keyword Explorer, so take AdWords’ estimates with a grain of salt.

One way to settle on a target volume is to see it in terms of your conversion rate and buyer’s journey:

• Buyer’s journey: Search volume decreases as customers move further along the buyer’s journey. Fewer searches are okay if you’re targeting Decision-stage keywords.
• Conversion rate: The stronger your conversion rate for each stage of the buyer’s journey, the more you can get away with by targeting a low search volume keyword.

Also consider the actual traffic from the keyword, not just search volume.

For instance, we knew from Moz’s research that the first result gets about 30% of all clicks.

For a keyword with 9,900 search volume, this would translate into over 3,000 visitors/month for a top position.

If we could convert even 5% of these into leads, we’d net over 1,800 leads each year, which makes it worth our time.

2. Pick a winnable topic

Some SERPs are incredibly competitive. For instance, if you’re trying to rank for "content marketing," you’ll find that the first page is dominated by CMI (DA 84):

You might be able to fight out a first-page rank, but it’s really not worth the effort in 99% of cases.

So our second requirement was to see if we could actually rank for our shortlisted keywords.

This can be done in one of two ways:

Informal method

The old-fashioned way to gauge keyword difficulty is to simply eyeball SERPs for your selected keywords.

If you see a lot of older articles, web 1.0 pages, unrecognizable brands, and generic content sites, the keyword should be solid.

On the other hand, if the first page is dominated by big niche brands with in-depth articles, you’ll have a hard time ranking well.

I also recommend using the MozBar to check metrics on the fly. If you see a ton of high DA/PA pages, move on to another keyword.

In our case, the top results mostly comprised of generic content sites or newish domains.

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz’s Keyword Explorer gives you a more quantifiable way to gauge keyword difficulty. You’ll get actual difficulty vs. potential scores.

Aim for a competitiveness score under 50 and opportunity/potential scores above 50. If you get scores beyond this threshold, keep looking.

Of course, if you have an established domain, you can target more difficult keywords.

Following this step, we had a shortlist of four keywords:

1. sales techniques (8100)
2. sales process (8100)
3. sales management (9900)
4. sales forecast (4400)

We could have honestly picked anything from this list, but for added impact, we decided to add another filter.

3. Strategic relevance

If you’re going to turn visitors into leads, it’s important to focus on keywords that are strategically relevant to your conversion goals.

In our case, we chose “sales management” as the target keyword.

We did this because Pipedrive is a sales management tool, so the keyword describes us perfectly.

Additionally, a small business owner searching for “sales management” has likely moved from Awareness to Consideration and thus, is one step closer to buying.

In contrast, “sales techniques” and “sales forecast” are keywords a sales person would search for, not a sales leader or small business owner (decision-makers).

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Step 2: Writing a bad-ass piece of content

Content might not be king anymore, but it is still the foundation of good SEO. We wanted to get this part absolutely right.

Here’s the process we followed to create our content:

1. Extremely thorough research

We had a simple goal from the start: create something substantially better than anything in the top SERPs.

To get there, we started by reviewing every article ranking for “sales management,” noting what we liked and what we didn’t.

For instance, we liked how InsightSquared started the article with a substantive quote. We didn’t like how Apptus went overboard with headers.

We also looked for anomalies. One thing that caught our attention was that two of the top 10 results were dedicated to the keyword “sales manager.”

We took note of this and made sure to talk about “sales managers” in our article.

We also looked at related searches at the bottom of the page:

We also scoured more than 50 sales-related books for chapters about sales management.

Finally, we also talked to some real salespeople. This step helped us add expert insight that outsourced article writers just don’t have.

At the end, we had a superior outline of what we were going to write.

2. Content creation

You don’t need to be a subject matter expert to create an excellent piece of content.

What you do need is good writing skills... and the discipline to actually finish an article.

Adopt a journalistic style where you report insight from experts. This gives you a better end-product since you’re curating insight and writing it far better than subject matter experts.

Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet to speed up the writing part — you’ll just have to grind it out. Set aside a few days at least to write anything substantive.

There are a few things we learned through the content creation experience:

1. Don’t multi-task. Go all-in on writing and don’t stop until it’s done.
2. Work alone. Writing is a solitary endeavor. Work in a place where you won’t be bothered by coworkers.
3. Listen to ambient music. Search “homework edit” on YouTube for some ambient tracks, or use a site like Noisli.com

Take tip #1 as non-negotiable. We tried to juggle a couple of projects and finishing the article ended up taking two weeks. Learn from our mistake — focus on writing alone!

Before you hit publish, make sure to get some editorial feedback from someone on your team, or if possible, a professional editor.

We also added a note at the end of the article where we solicit feedback for future revisions.

If you can’t get access to editors, at the very least put your article through Grammarly.

3. Add lots of visuals and make content more readable

Getting visuals in B2B content can be surprisingly challenging. This is mostly due to the fact that there are a lot of abstract, hard-to-visualize concepts in B2B writing.

This is why we found a lot of blog posts like this with meaningless stock images:

To avoid this, we decided to use four custom images spread throughout the article.

We wanted to use visuals to:

• Illustrate abstract concepts and ideas
• Break up the content into more readable chunks.
• Emphasize key takeaways in a readily digestible format

We could have done even more — prolific content creators like Neil Patel often use images every 200–300 words.

Aside from imagery, there are a few other ways to break up and highlight text to make your content more readable.

• Section headers
• Bullets and numbered lists
• Small paragraphs
• Highlighted text
• Blockquotes
• Use simple words

We used most of these tactics, especially blockquotes to create sub-sections.

Given our audience — sales leaders and managers — we didn’t have to bother with dumbing down our writing. But if you’re worried that your writing is too complex, try using an app like Hemingway to edit your draft.

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Step 3: Optimize on-page SEO and engagement metrics

Here’s what we did to optimize on-page SEO:

1. Fix title

We wanted traffic from people searching for keywords related to “sales management,” such as:

• “Sales management definition” (currently #2)
• “Sales management process” (currently #1)
• “Sales management strategies” (currently #4)
• “Sales management resources” (currently #3)

To make sure we tapped all these keywords, we changed our main H1 header tag to include the words definition, process, strategies, and resources.

These are called “modifiers” in SEO terms.

Google is now smart enough to know that a single article can cover multiple related keywords. Adding such modifiers helped us increase our potential traffic.

2. Fix section headers

Next, we used the right headers for each section:

Instead of writing “sales management definition,” we used an actual question a reader might ask.

Here’s why:

• It makes the article easier to read
• It's a natural question, which makes it more likely to rank for voice searches and Google’s “answers”

We also peppered related keywords in headers throughout the article. Note how we used the keyword at the beginning of the header, not at the end:

We didn’t want to go overboard with the keywords. Our goal was to give readers something they’d actually want to read.

This is why our <h2> tag headers did not have any obvious keywords:

This helps the article read naturally while still using our target keywords.

3. Improve content engagement

Notice the colon and the line break at the very start of the article:

This is a “bucket brigade”: an old copywriting trick to grab a reader’s attention.

We used it at the beginning of the article to stop readers from hitting the back button and going back to Google (i.e. increase our dwell time).

We also added outgoing and internal links to the article.

4. Fix URL

According to research, shorter URLs tend to rank better than longer ones.

We didn’t pay a lot of attention to the URL length when we first started blogging.

Here’s one of our blog post URLs from 2013:

Not very nice, right?

For this post, we used a simple, keyword-rich URL:

Ideally, we wouldn’t have the /2016/05/ bit, but by now, it’s too late to change.

5. Improve keyword density

One common piece of on-page SEO advice is to add your keywords to the first 100 words of your content.

If you search for “sales management” on our site, this is what you’ll see:

If you’re Googlebot, you’d have no confusion what this article was about: sales management.

We also wanted to use related keywords in the article without it sounding over-optimized. Gaetano DiNardi, our SEO manager at the time, came up with a great solution to fix this:

We created a “resources” or “glossary” section to hit a number of related keywords while still being useful. Here's an example:

It’s important to make these keyword mentions as organic as possible.

As a result of this on-page keyword optimization, traffic increased sharply.

We over-optimized keyword density in the beginning, which likely hurt rankings. Once we spotted this, we changed things around and saw an immediate improvement (more on this below).

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Step 4: Build internal links to article

Building internal links to your new content can be surprisingly effective when promoting content.

As Moz has already written before:

“Internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link juice.”

Essentially, these links:

• Help Googlebot discover your content
• Tell Google that a particular page is “important” on your site since a lot of pages point to it

Our approach to internal linking was highly strategic. We picked two kinds of pages:

1. Pages that had high traffic and PA. You can find these in Google Analytics under Behavior --> Site Content.

2. Pages where the keyword already existed unlinked. You can use this query to find such pages:

Site:[yoursite.com] “your keyword”

In our case, searching for “sales management” showed us a number of mentions:

After making a list of these pages, we dove into our CMS and added internal links by hand.

These new links from established posts showed Google that we thought of this page as “important.”

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Step 5: Finding link targets

This is where things become more fun. In this step, we used our detective SEO skills to find targets for our outreach campaign.

There are multiple ways to approach this process, but the easiest — and the one we followed — is to simply find sites that had linked to our top competitors.

We used Open Site Explorer to crawl the top ten results for backlinks.

By digging beyond the first page, we managed to build up a list of hundreds of prospects, which we exported to Excel.

This was still a very “raw” list. To maximize our outreach efficiency, we filtered out the following from our list:

• Sites with DA under 30.
• Sites on free blog hosts like Blogspot.com, WordPress.com, etc.

This gave us a highly targeted list of hundreds of prospects.

Here’s how we organized our Excel file:

Finding email addresses

Next step: find email addresses.

This has become much easier than it used to be thanks to a bunch of new tools. We used EmailHunter (Hunter.io) but you can also use VoilaNorbert, Email Finder, etc.

EmailHunter works by finding the pattern people use for emails on a domain name, like this:

To use this tool, you will need either the author’s name or the editor/webmaster’s name.

In some cases, the author of the article is clearly displayed.

In case you can’t find the author’s name (happens in case of guest posts), you’ll want to find the site’s editor or content manager.

LinkedIn is very helpful here.

Try a query like this:

site:linkedin.com “Editor/Blog Editor” at “[SiteName]”.

Once you have a name, plug the domain name into Hunter.io to get an email address guess of important contacts.

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Step 6: Outreach like crazy

After all the data retrieval, prioritization, deduping, and clean up, we were left with hundreds of contacts to reach out to.

To make things easier, we segmented our list into two categories:

• Category 1: Low-quality, generic sites with poor domain authority. You can send email templates to them without any problems.
• Category 2: Up-and-coming bloggers/authoritative sites we wanted to build relationships with. To these sites, we sent personalized emails by hand.

With the first category of sites, our goal was volume instead of accuracy.

For the second category, our objective was to get a response. It didn’t matter whether we got a backlink or not — we wanted to start a conversation which could yield a link or, better, a relationship.

You can use a number of tools to make outreach easier. Here are a few of these tools:

1. JustReachOut
2. MixMax
3. LeadIQ
4. Toutapp
5. Prospectify

We loved using a sales tool called MixMax. Its ability to mail merge outreach templates and track open rates works wonderfully well for SEO outreach.

If you’re looking for templates, here’s one email we sent out:

Let’s break it down:

1. Curiosity-evoking headline: Small caps in the subject line makes the email look authentic. The “something missing” part evokes curiosity.
2. Name drop familiar brands: Name dropping your relationship to familiar brands is another good way to show your legitimacy. It’s also a good idea to include a link to their article to jog their memory.
3. What’s missing: The meat of the email. Make sure that you’re specific here.
4. The “why”: Your prospects need a “because” to link to you. Give actual details as to what makes it great — in-depth research, new data, or maybe a quote or two from Rand Fishkin.
5. Never demand a link: Asking for feedback first is a good way to show that you want a genuine conversation, not just a link.

This is just one example. We tested 3 different emails initially and used the best one for the rest of the campaign. Our response rate for the whole campaign was 42%.

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Step 7: Be prepared to guest post

Does guest blogging still work?

If you’re doing it for traffic and authority, I say: go ahead. You are likely putting your best work out there on industry-leading blogs. Neither your readers nor Google will mind that.

In our case, guest blogging was already a part of our long-term content marketing strategy. The only thing we changed was adding links to our sales management post within guest posts.

Your guest post links should have contextual reference, i.e. the post topic and link content should match. Otherwise, Google might discount the link, even if it is dofollow.

Keep this in mind when you start a guest blogging campaign. Getting links isn’t enough; you need contextually relevant links.

Here are some of the guest posts we published:

• 7 Keys to Scaling a Startup Globally [INC]
• An Introduction to Activity-Based Selling [LinkedIn]
• 7 Tips for MBAs Entering Sales Management Careers [TopMBA]

We weren’t exclusively promoting our sales management post in any of these guest posts. The sales management post just fit naturally into the context, so we linked to it.

If you’re guest blogging in 2017, this is the approach you need to adopt.

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Step 8: Fine-tuning content with TF * IDF

After the article went live, we realized that we had heavily over-optimized it for the term “sales management.” It occurred 48 times throughout the article, too much for a 2,500 word piece.

Moreover, we hadn’t always used the term naturally in the article.

To solve this problem, we turned to TF-IDF.

Recognizing TF-IDF as a ranking factor

TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) is a way to figure out how important a word is in a document based on how frequently it appears in it.

This is a pretty standard statistical process in information retrieval. It is also one of the oldest ranking factors in Google’s algorithms.

Hypothesis: We hypothesized that dropping the number of "sales management" occurrences from 48 to 20 and replacing it with terms that have high lexical relevance would improve rankings.

Were we right?

See for yourself:

Our organic pageviews increased from nearly 0 to over 5,000 in just over 8 months.

Note that no new links or link acquisition initiatives were actively in-progress during the time of this mini-experiment.

Experiment timeline:

• July 18th – Over-optimized keyword recognized.
• July 25th - Content team finished updating body copy, H2s with relevant topics/synonyms.
• July 26th - Updated internal anchor text to include relevant terms.
• July 27th - Flushed cache & re-submitted to Search Console.
• August 4th - Improved from #4 to #2 for "Sales Management"
• August 17 - Improved from #2 to #1 for "Sales Management"

The results were fast. We were able to normalize our content and see results within weeks.

We’ll show you our exact process below.

Normalization process — How did we do it?

The normalization process focused on identifying over-optimized terms, replacing them with related words and submitting the new page to search engines.

Here’s how we did it:

1. Identifying over-optimized term(s)

We started off using Moz’s on-page optimization tool to scan our page.

According to Moz, we shouldn’t have used the target term — “sales management” — more than 15 times. This means we had to drop 33 occurrences.

2. Finding synonymous terms with high lexical relevance

Next, we had to replace our 28+ mentions with synonyms that wouldn’t feel out of place.

We used Moz's Keyword Explorer to get some ideas.

3. Removed “sales management” from H2 headings

Initially, we had the keyword in both H1 and H2 headings, which was just overkill.

We removed it from H2 headings and used lexically similar variants instead for better flow.

4. Diluted “sales management” from body copy

We used our list of lexically relevant words to bring down the number of “sales management” occurrences to under 20. This was perfect for 2,500+ word article.

5. Diversify internal anchors

While we were changing our body copy, we realized that we also needed more anchor text diversity for our internal links.

Our anchors cloud was mostly “sales management” links:

We diversified this list by adding links to related terms like “sales manager,” “sales process,” etc.

6. Social amplification

We ramped up our activity on LinkedIn and Facebook to get the ball rolling on social shares.

The end result of this experimentation was an over 100% increase in traffic between August ‘16 to January ‘17.

The lesson?

Don’t just build backlinks — optimize your on-page content as well!

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Conclusion

There’s a lot to learn from this case study. Some findings were surprising for us as well, particularly the impact of keyword density normalization.

While there are a lot of tricks and tactics detailed here, you’ll find that the fundamentals are essentially the same as what Rand and team have been preaching here for years. Create good content, reach out to link prospects, and use strategic guest posts to get your page to rank.

This might sound like a lot of work, but the results are worth it. Big industry players like Salesforce and Oracle actually advertise on AdWords for this term. While they have to pay for every single click, Pipedrive gets its clicks for free.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Source: Moz Blog

The Best Types of Content for Local Businesses: Building Geo-Topical Authority

Posted by MiriamEllis

Q: What kind of content should a local business develop?

A: The kind that converts!

Okay, you could have hit on that answer yourself, but as this post aims to demonstrate:

1. There are almost as many user paths to conversion as there are customers in your city, and
2. Your long-term goal is to become the authority in your industry and geography that consumers and search engines turn to.

Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web. When a local business manages to become a visible solution to any of these needs, the rewards can include:

• Online traffic
• In-store traffic
• Transactions
• Reviews/testimonials
• Clicks-for-directions
• Clicks-to-call
• Clicks-to-website
• Social sharing
• Offline word-of-mouth
• Good user metrics like time-on-page, low bounce rate, etc.

Takeaway: Consumers have a variety of needs and can bestow a variety of rewards that directly or indirectly impact local business reputation, rankings and revenue when these needs are well-met.

No surprise: it will take a variety of types of content publication to enjoy the full rewards it can bring.

Proviso: There will be nuances to the best types of content for each local business based on geo-industry and average consumer. Understandably, a cupcake bakery has a more inviting topic for photographic content than does a septic services company, but the latter shouldn’t rule out the power of an image of tree roots breaking into a septic line as a scary and effective way to convert property owners into customers. Point being, you’ll be applying your own flavor to becoming a geo-topical authority as you undertake the following content development work:

Foundational local business content development

These are the basics almost every local business will need to publish.

Customer service policy

Every single staff member who interacts with your public must be given a copy of your complete customer service policy. Why? A 2016 survey by the review software company GetFiveStars demonstrated that 57% of consumer complaints revolve around customer service and employee behavior. To protect your local business’ reputation and revenue, the first content you create should be internal and should instruct all forward-facing employees in approved basic store policies, dress, cleanliness, language, company culture, and allowable behaviors. Be thorough! Yes, you may wear a t-shirt. No, you may not text your friends while waiting on tables.

Customer rights guarantee

On your website, publish a customer-focused version of your policy. The Vermont Country Store calls this a Customer Bill of Rights which clearly outlines the quality of service consumers should expect to experience, the guarantees that protect them, and the way the business expects to be treated, as well.

NAP

Don’t overlook the three most important pieces of content you need to publish on your website: your company name, address, and phone number. Make sure they are in crawlable HTML (not couched in an image or a problematic format like Flash). Put your NAP at the top of your Contact Us page and in the site-wide masthead or footer so that humans and bots can immediately and clearly identify these key features of your business. Be sure your NAP is consistent across all pages for your site (not Green Tree Consulting on one page and Green Tree Marketing on another, or wrong digits in a phone number or street address on some pages). And, ideally, mark up your NAP with Schema to further assist search engine comprehension of your data.

Reviews/testimonials page

On your website, your reviews/testimonials page can profoundly impact consumer trust, comprising a combination of unique customer sentiment you’ve gathered via a form/software (or even from handwritten customer notes) and featured reviews from third-party review platforms (Google, Yelp). Why make this effort? As many as 92% of consumers now read online reviews and Google specifically cites testimonials as a vehicle for boosting your website’s trustworthiness and reputation.

Reviews/testimonials policy

Either on your Reviews/Testimonials page or on a second page of your website, clearly outline your terms of service for reviewers. Just like Yelp, you need to protect the quality of the sentiment-oriented content you publish and should let consumers know what you permit/forbid. Here’s a real-world example of a local business review TOS page I really like, at Barbara Oliver Jewelry.

Homepage

Apart from serving up some of the most fundamental content about your business to search engines, your homepage should serve two local consumer groups: those in a rush and those in research mode.

• Be sure the former is being given must-have information to understand your business at a glance and contact it immediately.
• For the latter, the homepage should offer clear navigation, consumer-centric content, and inducements to further explore additional pages of the website (take advantage of a special, look at products, see project photos, read a blog post, etc.) as they seek to get to know your business better before choosing it for a transaction.

Pro tip: Don’t think of your homepage as static. Change up your content regularly there and track how this impacts traffic/conversions.

Contact Us page

On this incredibly vital website page, your content should include:

• Complete NAP
• All supported contact methods (forms, email, fax, live chat, after-hours hotline, etc.),
• Thorough driving directions from all entry points, including pointers for what to look for on the street (big blue sign, next to red church, across the street from swim center, etc.)
• A map
• Exterior images of your business
• Attributes like parking availability and wheelchair accessibility
• Hours of operation
• Social media links
• Payment forms accepted (cash only, BitCoin, etc.)
• Mention of proximity to major nearby points of interest (national parks, monuments, etc.)
• Brief summary of services with a nod to attributes ("Stop by the Starlight tonight for late-night food that satisfies!")
• A fresh call-to-action (like visiting the business for a Memorial Day sale)

Store locator pages

For a multi-location businesses (like a restaurant chain), you’ll be creating content for a set of landing pages to represent each of your physical locations, accessed via a top-level menu if you have a few locations, or via a store locator widget if you have many. These should feature the same types of content a Contact Us page would for a single-location business, and can also include:

• Reviews/testimonials for that location
• Location-specific special offers
• Social media links specific to that location
• Proofs of that location’s local community involvement
• Highlights of staff at that location
• Education about availability of in-store beacons or apps for that location
• Interior photos specific to that location
• A key call-to-action

For help formatting all of this great content sensibly, please read Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages.

City landing pages

Similar to the multi-location business, the service area business (like a plumber) can also develop a set of customer-centric landing pages. These pages will represent each of the major towns or cities the business serves, and while they won’t contain a street address if the company lacks a physical location in a given area, they can contain almost everything else a Contact Us page or Store Locator page would, plus:

• Documentation of projects completed in that city (text, photos, video)
• Expert advice specific to consumers in that city, based on characteristics like local laws, weather, terrain, events, or customs
• Showcasing of services provided to recognized brands in that city ("we wash windows at the Marriott Hotel," etc.)
• Reviews/testimonials from customers in that city
• Proofs of community involvement in that city (events, sponsorships, etc.)
• A key call-to-action

Product/service descriptions

Regardless of business model, all local businesses should devote a unique page of content to each major product or service they offer. These pages can include:

• A thorough text description
• Images
• Answers to documented FAQs
• Price/time quotes
• Technical specs
• Reviews of the service or product
• Videos
• Guarantees
• Differentiation from competitors (awards won, lowest price, environmental standards, lifetime support, etc.)

For inspiration, I recommend looking at SolarCity’s page on solar roofing. Beautiful and informative.

Images

For many industries, image content truly sells. Are you "wowed" looking at the first image you see of this B&B in Albuquerque, the view from this restaurant in San Diego, or the scope of this international architectural firm’s projects? But even if your industry doesn’t automatically lend itself to wow-factor visuals, cleaning dirty carpets can be presented with high class and even so-called “boring” industries can take a visual approach to data that yields interesting and share-worthy/link-worthy graphics.

While you’re snapping photos, don’t neglect uploading them to your Google My Business listings and other major citations. Google data suggests that listing images influence click-through rates!

FAQ

The content of your FAQ page serves multiple purposes. Obviously, it should answer the questions your local business has documented as being asked by your real customers, but it can also be a keyword-rich page if you have taken the time to reflect the documented natural language of your consumers. If you’re just starting out and aren’t sure what types of questions your customers will ask, try AnswerThePublic and Q&A crowdsourcing sites to brainstorm common queries.

Be sure your FAQ page contains a vehicle for consumers to ask a question so that you can continuously document their inquiries, determine new topics to cover on the FAQ page, and even find inspiration for additional content development on your website or blog for highly popular questions.

About page

For the local customer in research mode, your About page can seal the deal if you have a story to tell that proves you are in the best possible alignment with their specific needs and desires. Yes, the About Us page can tell the story of your business or your team, but it can also tell the story of why your consumers choose you.

Take a look at this About page for a natural foods store in California and break it down into elements:

• Reason for founding company
• Difference-makers (95% organic groceries, building powered by 100% renewable energy)
• Targeted consumer alignment (support local alternative to major brand, business inspired by major figure in environmental movement)
• Awards and recognition from government officials and organizations
• Special offer (5-cent rebate if you bring your own bag)
• Timeline of business history
• Video of the business story
• Proofs of community involvement (organic school lunch program)
• Links to more information

If the ideal consumer for this company is an eco-conscious shopper who wants to support a local business that will, in turn, support the city in which they live, this About page is extremely persuasive. Your local business can take cues from this real-world example, determining what motivates and moves your consumer base and then demonstrating how your values and practices align.

Calls to action

CTAs are critical local business content, and any website page which lacks one represents a wasted opportunity. Entrepreneur states that the 3 effective principles of calls to action are visibility, clear/compelling messaging, and careful choice of supporting elements. For a local business, calls to action on various pages of your website might direct consumers to:

• Come into your location
• Call
• Fill out a form
• Ask a question/make a comment or complaint
• Livechat with a rep
• Sign up for emails/texts or access to offers
• Follow you on social media
• Attend an in-store event/local event
• Leave a review
• Fill out a survey/participate in a poll

Ideally, CTAs should assist users in doing what they want to do in alignment with the actions the business hopes the consumer will take. Audit your website and implement a targeted CTA on any page currently lacking one. Need inspiration? This Hubspot article showcases mainly virtual companies, but the magic of some of the examples should get your brain humming.

Local business listings

Some of the most vital content being published about your business won't exist on your website — it will reside on your local business listings on the major local business data platforms. Think Google My Business, Facebook, Acxiom, Infogroup, Factual, YP, Apple Maps, and Yelp. While each platform differs in the types of data they accept from you for publication, the majority of local business listings support the following content:

• NAP
• Website address
• Business categories
• Business description
• Hours of operation
• Images
• Marker on a map
• Additional phone numbers/fax numbers
• Links to social, video, and other forms of media
• Attributes (payments accepted, parking, wheelchair accessibility, kid-friendly, etc.)
• Reviews/owner responses

The most important components of your business are all contained within a thorough local business listing. These listings will commonly appear in the search engine results when users look up your brand, and they may also appear for your most important keyword searches, profoundly impacting how consumers discover and choose your business.

Your objective is to ensure that your data is accurate and complete on the major platforms and you can quickly assess this via a free tool like Moz Check Listing. By ensuring that the content of your listings is error-free, thorough, and consistent across the web, you are protecting the rankings, reputation, and revenue of your local business. This is a very big deal!

Third-party review profiles

While major local business listing platforms (Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp) are simultaneously review platforms, you may need to seek inclusion on review sites that are specific to your industry or geography. For example, doctors may want to manage a review profile on HealthGrades and ZocDoc, while lawyers may want to be sure they are included on Avvo.

Whether your consumers are reviewing you on general or specialized platforms, know that the content they are creating may be more persuasive than anything your local business can publish on its own. According to one respected survey, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations and 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews to form a distinct impression of your business.

How can local businesses manage this content which so deeply impacts their reputation, rankings, and revenue? The answer is twofold:

1. First, refer back to the beginning of this article to the item I cited as the first document you must create for your business: your customer service policy. You can most powerfully influence the reviews you receive via the excellence of your staff education and training.
2. Master catching verbal and social complaints before they turn into permanent negative reviews by making your business complaint-friendly. And then move onto the next section of this article.

Owner responses

Even with the most consumer-centric customer service policies and the most detailed staff training, you will not be able to fully manage all aspects of a customer’s experience with your business. A product may break, a project be delayed, or a customer may have a challenging personality. Because these realities are bound to surface in reviews, you must take advantage of the best opportunity you have to manage sentiment after it has become a written review: the owner response.

You are not a silent bystander, sitting wordless on the sidelines while the public discusses your business. The owner response function provided by many review sites gives you a voice. This form of local business content, when properly utilized, can:

• Save you money by winning back a dissatisfied existing customer instead of having to invest a great deal more in winning an entirely new one;
• Inspire an unhappy customer to update a negative review with improved sentiment, including a higher star rating; and
• Prove to all other potential customers who encounter your response that you will take excellent care of them.

You’ll want to respond to both positive and negative reviews. They are free Internet real estate on highly visible websites and an ideal platform for showcasing the professionalism, transparency, accountability, empathy, and excellence of your company. For more on this topic, please read Mastering the Owner Response to the Quintet of Google My Business Reviews.

Once you have developed and are managing all of the above content, your local business has created a strong foundation on the web. Depending on the competitiveness of your geo-industry, the above work will have won you a certain amount of local and organic visibility. Need better or broader rankings and more customers? It’s time to grow with:

Structural local business content development

These are options for creating a bigger structure for your local business on the web, expanding the terms you rank for and creating multiple paths for consumer discovery. We’ll use Google’s 4 micro-moment terms as a general guide + real-world examples for inspiration.

I want to do

1. A homeowner wants to get her house in Colorado Springs ready to sell. In her search for tips, she encounters this Ultimate Home Seller’s To-Do Checklist & Infographic. Having been helped by the graphic, she may turn to the realty firm that created it for professional assistance.
2. A dad wants to save money by making homemade veggie chips for his children. He’s impressed with the variety of applicable root vegetables featured in this 52-second video tutorial from Whole Foods. And now he’s also been shown where he can buy that selection of produce.
3. A youth in California wants to become a mountain climber. He discovers this website page describing guided hikes up nearby Mount Whitney, but it isn’t the text that really gets him — it’s the image gallery. He can share those exciting photos with his grandmother on Facebook to persuade her to chaperone him on an adventure together.

I want to know

1. A tech worker anywhere in America wants to know how to deal with digital eye strain and she encounters this video from Kaiser Permanente, which gives tips and also recommends getting an eye exam every 1–2 years. The worker now knows where she could go locally for such an exam and other health care needs.
2. A homeowner in the SF Bay Area wants to know how to make his place more energy efficient to save on his bills. He finds this solar company’s video on YouTube with a ton of easy tips. They’ve just made a very good brand impression on the homeowner, and this company serves locally. Should he decide at some point to go the whole nine yards and install solar panels, this brand’s name is now connected in his mind with that service.
3. A gardener wants to know how to install a drip irrigation system in her yard and she encounters this major hardware store brand’s video tutorial. There’s a branch of this store in town, and now she knows where she can find all of the components that will go into this project.

I want to go

1. While it’s true that most I-want-to-go searches will likely lead to local pack results, additional website content like this special gluten-free menu an independently owned pizza place in Houston has taken the time to publish should seal the deal for anyone in the area who wants to go out for pizza while adhering to their dietary requirements.
2. A busy Silicon Valley professional is searching Google because they want to go to a "quiet resort in California." The lodgings, which have been lucky enough to be included on this best-of list from TripAdvisor, didn’t have to create this content — their guests have done it for them by mentioning phrases like "quiet place" and "quiet location" repeatedly in their reviews. The business just has to provide the experience, and, perhaps promote this preferred language in their own marketing. Winning inclusion on major platforms’ best-of lists for key attributes of your business can be very persuasive for consumers who want to go somewhere specific.
3. An ornithologist is going to speak at a conference in Medford, OR. As he always does when he goes on a trip, he looks for a bird list for the area and encounters this list of local bird walks published by a Medford nature store. He’s delighted to discover that one of the walks corresponds with his travel dates, and he’s also just found a place to do a little shopping during his stay.

I want to buy

1. Two cousins in Atlanta want to buy their uncle dinner for his birthday, but they’re on a budget. One sees this 600+ location restaurant chain’s tweet about how dumb it is to pay for chips and salsa. Check this out @cousin, he tweets, and they agree their wallets can stretch for the birthday dinner.
2. An off-road vehicle enthusiast in Lake Geneva, WI wants to buy insurance for his ride, but who offers this kind of coverage? A local insurance agent posts his video on this topic on his Facebook page. Connection!
3. A family in Hoboken, NJ wants to buy a very special cake for an anniversary party. A daughter finds these mouth-watering photos on Pinterest while a son finds others on Instagram, and all roads lead to the enterprising Carlo’s Bakery.

In sum, great local business content can encompass:

• Website/blog content
• Image content including infographics and photos
• Social content
• Video content
• Inclusion in best-of type lists on prominent publications

Some of these content forms (like professional video or photography creation) represent a significant financial investment that may be most appropriate for businesses in highly competitive markets. The creation of tools and apps can also be smart (but potentially costly) undertakings. Others (like the creation of a tweet or a Facebook post) can be almost free, requiring only an investment of time that can be made by local businesses at all levels of commerce.

Becoming a geo-topical authority

Your keyword and consumer research are going to inform the particular content that would best serve the needs of your specific customers. Rand Fishkin recently highlighted here on the Moz Blog that in order to stop doing SEO like it’s 2012, you must aim to become an entity that Google associates with a particular topic.

For local business owners, the path would look something like when anyone in my area searches for any topic that relates to our company, we want to appear in:

• local pack rankings with our Google My Business listing
• major local data platforms with our other listings
• major review sites with our profiles and owner responses
• organic results with our website’s pages and posts
• social platforms our customers use with our contributions
• video results with our videos
• image search results with our images
• content of important third-party websites that are relevant either to our industry or to our geography

Basically, every time Google or a consumer reaches for an answer to a need that relates to your topic and city, you should be there offering up the very best content you can produce. Over time, over years of publication of content that consistently applies to a given theme, you will be taking the right steps to become an authority in Google’s eyes, and a household brand in the lives of your consumers.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Source: Moz Blog

189: How to Create Amazing Videos for Your Blog Using Your Smartphone

YouTube Video Optimization for SEO

YouTube presents video content in a social setting, giving you valuable marketing opportunities. Learning how to create and publish videos on YouTube requires a minimum level of expertise, but harnessing the power of videos requires SEO skills that differ from the skills necessary for traditional SEO.

Why Use Video?

Video adds interactive and visual elements to your Web presence. Some people would rather watch a video than read an article while other appreciate the variety. Either way, your video content gives you another channel for reaching your target market.

Using YouTube as a video platform makes sense because it offers the necessary infrastructure to host a seemingly unlimited number of videos while providing performance metrics. The YouTube user base also makes the site attractive. The presence of millions of site users ensures that you can reach your intended audience there.

Adding Text

Without text, YouTube cannot categorize your videos, and potential viewers cannot find them. Every video can include a title, a text description, and tags, so use these elements wisely. Make sure you carefully choose relevant keywords and incorporate them everywhere you can add text. When you have content that pertains to a particular brand, include that name in the mix.

YouTube uses a metric called watch time to prioritize videos. When people find a video that interests them and meets their needs, they will likely watch more of it than they would if they discovered the video had no relevance to them.

Do not dilute your keywords or your brand, because connecting your content with people who need it will increase the watch time of your videos, giving them and your channel increased authority on the site.

Closed Captioning

Many video publishers fail to recognize the SEO value of closed captioning, and altogether ignore it. Closed captioning gives you an additional method of associating text with your video. As a transcript of your content, your closed captioning helps you communicate with people in settings where they cannot watch or listen to your content. The improved accessibility of closed-captioned videos earns a higher value on YouTube, giving them improved visibility in search results.

Embed Video

Although some people directly search YouTube for desired content, the size of the site can make popular videos get lost. Let your video SEO effort piggyback on your website SEO strategy by embedding video content directly into your pages and posts. When you do, make sure you create an updated sitemap, so the search engine bots learn that your website contains video content. The sitemap will help people discover your videos and boost your page rank.

Call to Act

Avoid strong sales pitches and spammy behavior in your video content. Your videos should add value to the community, so make sure they can help the people in your target audience. Still you expend much time and effort producing your video content, so make it work for you.

Gently help viewers understand their problems and needs. Assist them by showing them how your products and services meet their needs. Also, always add a clear call to action (CTA). Whether you want people to register on your site or make an immediate purchase, tell them what you want them to do. If you don’t, your YouTube channel will become a reference library that never converts sales for your business.

Source: SoloSEO

The Surprising Ways You Can Use SEO to Win New Marketing Job Opportunities

If you’ve been even remotely connected to digital marketing at any point over the last twenty years, then you’re no doubt well aware of the meaning and value of Search Engine Optimization. But you might not realize that SEO isn’t just a way to get higher rankings on the SERPs–it can also be used to generate personal job opportunities and career growth.

These days, SEO has a very specific connotation. That’s because most people consider the phrase “search engine” to be synonymous with “Google.”

That’s not unreasonable if your objective is to increase web traffic and conversions on your site. But what you might not realize is that there are a number of other search engines out there that have a surprising influence on your career prospects. And you don’t have to be an SEO consultant or guru to take advantage of them.

Search Engines in the Recruitment World

You’ve probably used Google or a similar search engine to find nearby restaurants, compare products, or research a topic you’re unfamiliar with.

In much the same way, employers and marketing professional recruiters use search engines to find high-quality marketing talent and sift through job applicants.

A few examples:

LinkedIn

For at least a while longer, LinkedIn is THE place to be online for developing a professional network and improving career growth prospects.

Marketing professional recruiters often search for potential candidates on LinkedIn via the social network’s own search engine. LinkedIn allows you to search by keyword and include a variety of filters like location and company.

Recommended for You

Webcast, April 18th: Google Analytics Setup and Basics: Measuring What Matters for Business Impact

Much like you’d include certain keywords and content on your web site to attract more visitors, you can optimize your LinkedIn profile to maximize its visibility to recruiters seeking your skills and experience.

Start by making sure your profile is complete and up-to-date. Add images, articles, media, and Featured Skills when available.

Consider what marketing skills and experience you have are most marketable, and feature them prominently in job titles and personal descriptions.

For instance, if you’re an SEO consultant you’ll certainly want to focus on that as much as possible. But you’ll also want to add related skills and keywords like Link Building, SEO Copywriting, or Site Speed Optimization depending on your experience and specialty.

LinkedIn favors displaying complete, active profiles. Optimizing yours will maximize the chances of a recruiter seeing it and offering you an opportunity–even when you’re not actively looking for work!

Happy with Your Marketing Job?

Keep in mind that, at the end of the day, LinkedIn is still a social network first and foremost. Furthermore, LinkedIn’s search engine prioritizes profiles that have a connection to the searcher. So you’ll find the most success if you’re active in cultivating valuable connections and participating in groups to extend your network.

For more tips on LinkedIn SEO, check these resource:

Applicant Tracking Systems

Most employers and recruiters manage candidates for their jobs through an Applicant Tracking System; software that helps organize, evaluate and communicate with applicants.

When a job is posted online, it might get hundreds or thousands of applications. Most businesses can’t afford to manually consider each and every one. You want marketing professional recruiters and hiring managers to easily be able to find you in their Applicant Tracking System when they search for certain skills or accomplishments.

When possible, customize your resume and application to reflect keywords in the position’s job description (but don’t just stuff them in haphazardly). Avoid vague phrases and titles that don’t have widespread relevance. Marketing is so diverse, a term like “senior marketer” or “media manager” could mean a thousand different things.

Most ATSs require a text document that they can parse out for easy review, comparison and searching, and can not make use of a fixed-image PDF or image.

How Your PDF Marketing Resume Could Be Holding Back Your Career

A well-organized Word version of your resume can easily be translated by the ATS so you can be moved along the hiring process. And it will also improve the possibility of being contacted with future opportunities, since the ATS user will be able to search for people with your qualifications when a need arises.

Job/Career Sites

Ever submitted a general resume or created an account on a big job aggregation site like Monster or Indeed?

Employers use search engines on those sites to search for candidates as well. In general, the SEO guidelines listed above for resumes and ATSs apply here as well. Make sure you’ve included critical information like where you’re located in your profile!

Portfolio Hosting Sites

Many portfolio hosting platforms also have some form of search engine. This is especially important for creatives and developers. However, nearly any marketer from an SEO consultant to a web analyst to a PR executive could feasibly display much of their work on various projects and campaigns in a portfolio.

A digital portfolio isn’t just a place to hang up your pretty pictures; make it a job opportunity generator by strategically adding applicable keywords to your project descriptions and profile.

Author: Mark Miller

Mark Miller is Marketing Manager for MarketPro, a marketing recruitment firm. He writes about marketing career growth and development, marketing job hunting advice, and trends that affect the day-to-day work of marketers. He also creates content oriented towards business managers on how to hire marketers, how to build high-performing teams, and how… View full profile ›

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Source: Business 2 Community

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 14, 2017

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

• Search Buzz Video Recap: Burger King Spams Google Home, Similar Images, Featured Snippets & Ask.com Privacy Bug
  This week in search, I covered how Burger King spammed Google Home devices all across America. Google announced product schema support...
• Google Featured Snippets Showing More Images Now
  Yesterday we reported that featured snippets can source images from different content sources, so the content they scrape can be on site A, while the image they show in that scraped content can be from site B...
• Tweeting At Googlers Likely Won't Land You In The Google Bird House
  There are some really paranoid folks out there, those that think if they post anything publicly about their web sites, it might lead to a Google penalty. Of course...
• Google: There Is No CAPS Search Ranking Penalty
  We know capital letters in URLs don't necessarily hurt your rankings and we also know that using caps in your content doesn't convey emotions and thus impact your rankings. On the flip side...
• Google Enables Multiple Merchant Center Account & Access
  Google community manager, Cassie, announced in the Google Advertisers Help forums that you can now access and manage multiple merchant center accounts...
• Google Brazil Views
  Yu Wu shared a photo of him 'working' at the Google office in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is sitting in this long lobby, in a tall building, in a lounge chair, looking out at the views with his laptop. He

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

The 8 time- & money-saving SEO tools I pay for (& 17 more I use for free)

In a recent interview with SEO and Credo founder John Doherty on Dan Shure’s excellent Experts on the Wire podcast, he mentioned the positive response he’d gotten to a post he’d done this summer on the SEO Tools he uses. He mentioned that it seemed like a pretty simple post idea, but it made sense to me that it would get traction, because John is a smart writer and marketer. As I listened, I was curious what tools he was using, and I took a look at the post. I’ve also taken a page from his playbook in the following column.

I like comprehensive lists of things as much as the next guy, but in a space where tools and software are relatively fragmented, and the applications for those tools change rapidly, it’s especially helpful when experienced practitioners give you a peek at different tools they pay for, what they use them for and how they think about those tools. My consulting company pays for and uses a variety of SEO tools (possibly a few too many, and likely some of the wrong ones — let me know if you have a better approach!), so I thought putting together a similar post would be helpful.

Generally speaking, I tend to err on the side of having access to a tool if we’re likely to get any significant value from it. My business partner Ken and I own and operate both a consulting company and a web publishing company. A tool will probably pay for itself if it costs $50 to $100 a month, and it can:

• save ~10 hours of work we’d need to do manually over the course of a year
• or unearth a handful of valuable insights a year.

The test for more expensive options is similar, but, of course, the higher the price, the more it should be delivering in time savings and/or insights. Obviously, the tools you’ll use will depend a lot on the problems you’re trying to solve, the size of the sites you’re working on and so on, so your mileage may vary.

OK, on to the tools!

8 SEO tools we happily pay for

I previously worked for a search marketing software company, so I have a lot of empathy for how difficult it is to build a cool and useful piece of software, and I’m happy to pay for tools that make me more efficient.

These are all great tools and are in no particular order — certainly not by ranking.  For these seven tools we pay, for I tried to include:

• a screenshot for each.
• specific use cases.
• links to user guides and/or reviews.
• pricing information (most have free versions, but again, the idea here is that these are the tools I pay for).

Screaming Frog is an amazing tool. Hopefully, they don’t get wind of this, but even if they 10x’d the price, I’d absolutely have to pay it without hesitating. Unless you’re using an enterprise SEO tool, it would be very difficult to be efficient at conducting SEO audits without this tool.

When I encountered it, it replaced Xenu — the first crawl tool my old boss introduced me to almost 10 years ago now –and lots of other arduous tasks pretty much immediately. I use Screaming Frog for so many different things that I’ll probably forget some here, but some of my favorites are:

• checking for duplicate content.
• auditing 302 temporary redirects.
• getting a clear picture of the information architecture (level/click depth).
• identifying too-short or too-long title tags or meta descriptions.
• performing log file analysis (to see uncrawled/orphaned URLs, crawl frequencies and so on)

Screaming Frog user guides & reviews:

Screaming Frog pricing:

This is another tool for which I’d absolutely pay more than the sticker price given the value it delivers, and, as with the Screaming Frog section, URL Profiler allows you to do so many cool things that I definitely haven’t gotten to all of them. But here are a few we use the tool for currently:

• Developing a content analytics database. We have a huge spreadsheet that houses all of the content we’ve created for clients and our own sites, where we aggregate lots of different data (traffic, links, shares, word counts and more) and put that next to the different types of content we create (to target different types of keywords), dates published, cost to create each asset and so forth. This lets us see really interesting patterns across the content we create like:
  • What content types have the best cost-per-visit, cost-per-link or cost-per-share?
  • How long does it take for different assets to get traction (which do well in the first month, which gain steam over time)?
  • How does cost per visit/cost per link/cost per share vary for more and less authoritative domains?
• Assessing indexation. Running a big list of URLs through URL profiler to see what is and isn’t in Google’s index can be a tremendously valuable exercise to help diagnose issues and improve indexation and site structure.
• Conducting link prospecting/email gathering. You can also run a list of URLs through URL Profiler to grab emails for outreach or add useful data points like domain authority or links to the URL to help prioritize your outreach and get a head start on gathering contact info. For most outreach, this won’t be a one-stop shop for finding an email for your outreach prospects, but it can save some time.

URL Profiler user guides & reviews:

URL Profiler pricing:

Starting at £12.95 + vat

Rank checking is a bit of a tricky beast. I find it very valuable in measuring progress and diagnosing SEO issues, but simple rank reports (arguably) aren’t as useful as they once were. Additionally, as a consultant, rank reports generate extra work around educating clients on the importance and value of rankings for specific terms. All of that said, Authority Labs is a slick tool for tracking rankings across multiple sites.

Full disclosure on this category: I have used some different rank trackers over the years, but this isn’t a class of tools I’ve done a ton of research in recently (here is a really nice breakdown of all of the options here, though, spoiler alert: his recommendation seems to be the same).

Authority Labs user guides:

Authority Labs pricing:

Starting at $99/mo.

Moz Pro has a lot of different kinds of functionality (it seems like having too many different areas of focus has been something they’ve struggled a bit with), and honestly, there are a lot of aspects of the tool that I rarely use or have never used. Still, we’ve been subscribers for several years and find there’s more than enough useful functionality to justify the subscription. Specifically, I really like:

• Keyword Explorer & Keyword Difficulty Tool. I’ve used Keyword Explorer more and more as of late, and although they’re apparently sunsetting the Explorer, I still use the keyword difficulty tool frequently. As with all keyword data, the volume and difficulty estimates are rough, but the difficulty data especially is something that’s extremely useful, helping you gauge which terms to target for a given site as you come into a niche. Ahrefs and SEM Rush (coming up here on the list) have difficulty metrics as well, but I’ve been using the Moz metric for a while now and have a good feel for what it means in relation to the domain authority of the site I’m working on and the types of assets we’ll be likely to build for a client.
• MozBar. I still use this every time I’m coming up with ideas for linkable assets. Having the root domains linking to a page overlaid over search results as you’re coming up with topics is really invaluable.

Moz user guides:

Moz pricing:

Starting at $99/mo.

Nearly every SEO is going to have their favorite link analysis tool. I haven’t done a super-granular deep dive into comparing the different link analysis tools (there are folks who have done this work if you want to Google around). Anecdotally, and based on my usage, my impression is that Ahrefs finds more links than Moz’s tools. It also surfaces more relevant links in a more actionable interface than Majestic (though Majestic may have more actual link data). Again, just my two cents.

Ahrefs is another tool that I use frequently (nearly daily), but I don’t leverage all of the features. Specifically, my focus within the tool is:

• Link Analysis. I use Ahrefs data to get a sense of linking root domains, to analyze specific links, to get links to existing assets we want to Skyscraper (can you use that as a verb?) to use as link prospects and more.
• Content Explorer. Within Ahrefs is a Content Explorer tool which will show you the most linked-to or shared pages on a specific topic. I often find the results here a bit wonky and hard to act on, but frequently if I play around with different combinations of topics and metrics to sort by (linking domains, shares and so on), I get some good topic ideas.

Again, there’s a lot more in this tool. It has a lot of overlapping functionality with some of the other tools on this list, but this is what I use it for currently.

Ahrefs user guides & reviews:

Ahrefs pricing:

Starting at $99/mo.

I use SEMrush for every single site audit and keyword research project, and I often use it for one-off tasks as well. It’s essentially my “competitive keyword research” tool of choice. It would be really hard to do effective keyword research without SEMrush, as the insights you can get from looking at competitor and publisher sites is really invaluable. Here’s what I use it for:

• Competitive keyword research. Get a list of your/your client’s competitors and the niche publications (forums, popular blogs, major publishers, conference sites) and start to plug them into SEMrush to pull out relevant keyword opportunities.
• Internal linking optimizations. This concept is something I believe I first read about in Nick Eubanks’ keyword research course (you can see the step-by-step process broken down in this post on SEMrush’s blog). You can use SEMrush on your own (or a client’s) site to quickly surface terms that are ranking well but could use a little bit of a boost and have significant estimated search volume. You can then link internally to those pages from some of the better linked-to pages on your own site.

By now, you’re likely noticing that a lot of tools are expanding their functionality (and I’m not using some of these new features). SEMrush falls into this category as well. Really, if you’re just starting out and/or looking to conserve budget, you could probably pick one of these tools and get as much as possible out of it. I’m simply sharing how I use them in this column.

SEMrush user guides & reviews:

SEMrush pricing:

Starting at $99/mo.

Link prospecting is so hard! It’s incredibly time-consuming and difficult to scale, or even just do efficiently in small batches. Link Prospector is an awesome tool that helps with a specific slice of the link prospecting process: gathering link prospects. It essentially automates a lot of the manual work (running different link queries and grabbing prospects from search results). It just saves a ton of time if you’re doing this work. You still have to then layer on qualification and outreach, of course, but it’s an insanely useful tool.

Link Prospector user guides & reviews:

Link Prospector pricing:

From $5/credit or $47/mo.

This is the last time I’ll mention that tools are increasingly expanding and overlapping, and that I only use specific slices of them (big relief for you the reader, right?) but here again we have an example of a tool that does a lot of different things around link analysis, content analysis and more.

Personally, my favorite use for BuzzSumo is for seeing the most shared content around specific topics and from specific sites. This can give you a lot of great content ideas, and, while I mainly turn to Ahrefs for in-depth link analysis, having link data next to the share data is helpful as well.

Buzzsumo user guides & reviews:

Buzzsumo pricing:

From $79/mo.

What’s in YOUR SEO toolbar?

This is actually a fun question for SEOs (free topic idea for those of you in the expert roundup community). These are the varied Chrome extensions that are consistently present in my toolbar and are used at varying frequencies.

Most of these are free to use (a couple have a premium version) and, in most cases, the use cases should be pretty specific and straightforward, so  I won’t go into a great deal of detail.

If you’re doing link prospecting and outreach, Link Miner is an incredibly valuable tool. It allows you to:

• quickly check a page to see which links are broken (helpful in alerting writers/webmasters that their links are broken as you’re recommending they add your resource).
• see actual link metrics for the broken link. This is the game-changer here. Previously I’d used another plugin called Check My Links for this purpose, which works well for simply seeing broken links on a page. Link Miner does this and goes a step further and shows you the number of linking root domains for a broken link. This means that, with a little additional data, you can add all of the folks linking to that broken link to your list of link prospects (they’re likely very relevant).

The extension is free, but it’s more useful when you can combine it with the link data for broken links, so it will be more valuable if you have a subscription to one of the tools with their own link data (Moz, Ahrefs or Majestic SEO).

This is a handy plugin that quickly lets you know the redirect path for a specific page, which is useful as you’re clicking through a site trying to understand specific issues.

The extension is free.

This is Google’s plugin that tells you which Google tags are present on each of your pages and if there are issues with those tags. I probably use this more to troubleshoot conversion tracking issues in AdWords accounts than anything else, but it’s also very handy to quickly see if Google Analytics code is both present and properly installed on a given page.

The extension is free.

This is a handy little Chrome extension that lets you quickly open a bunch of links on a list at once in new tabs. If you’re working on link prospecting this is frequently pretty useful.

Finding emails can be difficult, particularly for link/resource lists where there may not be a clear author. Hunter is a really slick tool that lets you quickly see contact information for the folks on a page or site, and you can even click through to the pages that specific addresses are on to get more context and figure out if this is really the best person to be contacting. Good data capture at this stage of the outreach process can really impact your success rate and efficiency.

It’s free to use the extension, but if you exceed certain usage thresholds, you’ll need to subscribe to one of the different paid plans.

Additional tools I use for SEO work

Beyond the subscriptions and Chrome extensions, I use a few additional tools to execute on SEO work. Not all of these are SEO tools, strictly speaking, but I find they help with a lot of recurring SEO tasks.

If you’re just looking to quickly see what’s going on with a batch of URLs (maybe some blog content on a site moved, and you’re not sure what kind of redirects it’s been run through), this is a nice free tool that gives a clean visual of the http status for a batch of URLs.

Frequently I’ll want to mash up some keywords with modifiers (e.g., if you’re working with a pizza chain, you may want to quickly combine “pizza places in” and {city name}) for various reasons and purposes, and this tool is a quick and easy way to do that.

I was working at WordStream when the Keyword Grouper was developed, and the basic premise here is that within a big list of keywords (like an AdWords search query report) you frequently want to understand not just what individual terms are driving the most traffic or conversions, but what clusters of terms drive the most traffic or conversions in aggregate.

You can dump a big list of keywords with an associated metric (traffic, estimated traffic, conversions, or whatever) into the grouper, and it’ll tell you which keyword groups are driving the most traffic, conversions and so on, which is really helpful as you try to map out keyword priorities.

BuzzStream’s paid influencer and relationship management tools are great, but they also have some really cool free link-building tools that I use frequently and rarely see on these kinds of lists. Specifically, you can do things like:

Yoast is the SEO plugin I most frequently find on WordPress sites, and we install it on all of our own sites as well. It’s a great tool for quickly customizing title tags, and it can help with lots of SEO blocking and tackling issues like generating an XML sitemap, canonical tags and more. There’s also a premium version that offers more functionality.

Of course, there’s a lot of data you can mine from Google’s free tools (or kind of free, in the case of Keyword Planner). I’m as quick to complain about Google as the next guy, but the ease of access to a lot of this data is really worth being grateful for.

I kind of hate it when people put general stuff they use all the time, like “Google Docs” or “my laptop” or “Excel” or “WordPress” on their {X} tools list, so forgive me here if you do, too, because these don’t belong on an SEO tools list, strictly speaking. I do think it’s worth calling out how I find and organize SEO information. Beyond some of the general best practices information that Google puts out, there’s not a ton of universally accepted “SEO canon,” and Google is updating their algorithms, their search results and their guidelines and policies constantly. For that reason, it really is important to have at least a rough process for staying up to date with news and information. I like to do the following:

• Subscribe to blogs in Feedly. It’s a bit Google-Reader-Era-ish of me, but I still have a number of blog feeds I follow, and I typically add interesting blogs when I find a post by them. I try to check in every week or two and work through everything that’s unread.
• Follow smart people on Twitter. I have a Twitter list for this purpose. I don’t understand why there’s not broader adoption of this feature. I feel that a number of the complaints I hear about Twitter could be solved if people knew about and used lists. If you just created one that aggregated tweets by Glenn Gabe and Barry Schwartz’s, it would almost be like hiring someone to keep you up to date in real time with everything that ever changes about Google’s search results and what it means/why it’s important (but for free).
• Save interesting stuff to read to Instapaper. It seems most people use Pocket for this purpose, but Instapaper works well for my purposes, so I’ve saved myself the switching costs and use it to save long-form posts that I want to read but don’t have the time (or focus level) for at the moment (most often from Twitter links).
• Save “bookmarkable” posts to Evernote. Finally, I drop tools I want to try, links I want to share and great articles I want to reference later into different Evernote notebooks.

All of these tools are free. I also played around with different IFTTT recipes but found this disconnected process works better for me personally. I’m sure there’s a more efficient process to be had here, but again, this is just a list of stuff that I do and use.

OK one more along those same lines: Boomerang is one of my absolute favorite overall apps. I do pay for this one, and I also use it for way more than SEO (essentially I use it for personal email management), but the main features allow you to:

• send emails later. Rather than saving a draft and sending in the morning, you can just schedule it to go out on the spot. If you’re prospecting and working on outreach on off-hours, this is really helpful.
• have an email “boomerang” back into your inbox. If you send an outreach email, you can just check a box and have that email jump back to the top of your inbox in a day or a week or more to remind you to follow up if you don’t (or if you do) get a response.

Pricing for Boomerang starts at $5 a month, which is incredibly low in relation to the value it provides for regular email communication, never mind outreach.

My current “SEO tools to try” list:

That’s really the full list of tools that I currently have in rotation, but, obviously, I’ve only covered a fraction of the tools that are available out there. I also keep a running list of any tools or services I see in my travels that I’d like to try, so I’ll share that here as well (maybe you’ll have more success carving out the time to actually play around with them than I have):

Did I miss something you can’t live without? Some functionality I’m crazy to be leaving on the table? Competitive tools that are better than what I’m using? Let me know!

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Tom Demers is the co-founder and managing partner of Measured SEM and Digital Examiner. His companies offer paid search management, search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing services to businesses of varying sizes in various industries.

Source: Search Engine Land