How to Use The Best SEO Tools For Free To Gain Traffic To Your Blogs
By: Leslie Cohen
Improve your digital content with SEO + PPC campaigns and beat your competitors. Keyword tools kick start your digital strategy to produce the highest possible traffic to your content.
Strategic planning before writing content utilizing the best tools from the experts is a win-win.
Writing good content can help improve SEO rankings. There are amazing tools that will help you flood visitors to your site, giving you an edge over your competitors.
Your content writer should be knowledgeable about how these tools can benefit the visibility of your project, taking into concern your goals and target market. The research tools described below can be used for press releases advertisements, white papers, blogs, landing pages, website content, and any form of online media.
Utilizing the tools below prior to planning your content strategy can help you gain more insight on how to step forward and plan a strategy for online content promoting your products and services.
Good content is critical, as Google evaluates good content with quality reviewers.
You should analyze the search traffic of your competition on a regular basis.
It is not always about just using the tools below before an article is written. You should be re-purposing your content on a regular basis and update it if you see the traffic is going down. Utilizing the tools below will help you find new keywords and tweak things around a bit, keeping your content fresh and relevant to attract an audience by what they are searching for .
The Moz Toolbar
Check out the "MOZ toolbar" where you can see a quick overview of metrics. The SEO toolbar for Google's Chrome browser is available in the Chrome Webstore at the link below for free. Using this tool, you will see the most relevant link data. The Moz Toolbar will gauge keyword difficulty and lets you view the sites that are getting the most pertinent link data. Use this link to add it to Google Chrome.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mozbar/eakacpaijcpapndcfffdgphdiccmpknp
Once you are logged in to your Moz account, type in a search term to show the page and domain authority graph highlighted in green under the search links. We used the search term “Content Marketing”. The partial screen shot below is what the MOZ search shows on the first page of Google.
Domain authority shows how well a site ranks in Google-measuring the strength of entire domains or sub-domains. Page authority shows how well a page ranks in Google. These metrics are best used as guides, as they are not definitive scores.
The Moz Open Site Directory
Use the Moz OpenSite Directory to view authority and links. Page Authority is a score based on a 100-point scale developed by Moz. It predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines. The data from the Mozscape web index will include link counts, MozRank, MozTrust, and other factors to analyze the metric.
The “Authority” section lets you view domain and page authority.
The “Page Link Metrics” section lets you view just discovered and established links. Domain authority measures the power of a domain name. It is just one of countless search engine ranking elements. Domain authority is based on three factors: Age, Popularity, and size. SEO top experts Moz are highly credited for this metric, known as “DA” or Domain Authority.
Here is what it looks like:
Click compare metrics for a side by side view. We chose Amazon and Ebay. Here is what it looks like:
To target the highest ranking pages to maximize link building with Moz, you can view top pages on any domain according to Page Authority.
SERPs Offers Three Free Tools
Head over to www.SERPs.com and utilize their free search tools. The Keyword Research Database lets you see the CPC keywords that rank high for your search term and receive volume estimates.
SERPs is a great tool for agencies and digital marketers and SEO specialists. This handy tool can be used for any number of clients, or multiple sites.
SERPs provides data analysis for you to perform on your own.
With this data tool you, will be able to add multiple Google analytic sites to the dashboard.
Track keywords in different cities and countries.
The ability to upload keywords from your excel files.
Set up SEO correlation tests tracking what works and was does not by setting up multiple tactics with the ability to share them with your team.
Set up a “White Label Account” for custom domains.
Track your data rankings from Google and Yahoo on the go for admins only by downloading the app in iTunes or Google Play.
Get a free 14 day trial with any plan. Serp's offers-Solo, Pro, and Enterprise. Features and tools are well worth the subscription cost for the professional digital marketer, agency, small business or enterprise.
How Google Trends Can Work for You
Google Trends gives content marketers a big advantage by helping you see where your market is trending. It allows you to research trends and analyze consumers search query behavior online. Following the volume trend in Google Trends is a “HUGE ADVANTAGE”. Bloggers, in particular can see what is trending in their market segment.
How to Use Google Trends
Type in a keyword of choice. We chose stock market. The graph shows the search term is “trending upward”. You can search for time, region and specific categories in the drop down menu. The graph gives you sub-regions where the term is being searched in the USA. The second part of the graph gives you the opportunity to see related topics and related queries.
Simple Keyword Search
Google Trends Graph
In the third graph above, an additional keyword to compare. Amazon was chosen due to its popularity. Related queries are now compared. The graph surprisingly shows the term “Amazon Prime” is at the top as no.1 with a value of 100, the most commonly searched query. Amazon Stock is at #4, with a value of 10, clearly on this day, not a popular search term.
The above graph lets choose to track interest over time in the USA region using drop down menus that give different options for time, country choices, categories, photo, web, image search, YouTube search and shopping search.
Example for Search Term “Blogs”
The graph below shows the interest over time for 12 months for the general term blogs in the USA region.. The top portion of the graph shows search interest over time in the given time period.
The bottom portion of the graph shows the interest by region showing the highest point, the descending downward. The related search queries are what is the most interesting, showing the most commonly searched query, and what other users are searching for.
Since this search is broad, you would be searching using terms in your niche. We chose to compare "Blogs" and "Content Marketing". The first graph shows the inquiry for the past 12 months in the USA.
The second graph shows the search terms used in comparison for "Blogs" and "Content Marketing". The comparison shows that popular terms people are searching for, "How To" and "What Is". When blogging consider preparing an educational blog that answers the popular terms being searched in your niche to gain credibility and customer loyalty.
How Can Growth Hacking Help with Marketing
“Growth Hacking” is a way marketers experiment with less costly alternatives than using traditional media. This type of marketing works to help you gain customers over the long term, and organically. With Growth Hacking, you seek the lowest cost of customer acquisition.
It's rewarding to see the fruitful results.
The options to start experimenting are plenty.
Email marketing, A/B testing, “content marketing”, writing persuasive ad copy, viral strategies such as video, and social media outreach. The focus is on user testing for a product or preparing wireframes for a website to experiment user functionality.
The data that you see from various projects can help you improve customer engagement, and discover new technologies that work.
Social Media: The rich insight into your customer preferences all for free. Learn How to Use it Wisely.
Facebook has free tools to track your social media campaigns and target markets.
Social media can help with your rankings over time.
Audience Insights: This free tool lets you see where your existing clients are coming from and gives you the ability to attract new ones from other locations.
A great tool if you service clients nationwide or internationally. You can see audience percentages and see if it is relevant to your targeting strategy.
Facebook URL Debugger tool: Use this to let Facebook recrawl your pages Metadata allowing you to update a link when it is shared.
What Keywords should you show up for?
Buy T-Shirts online is better than T-Shirts in the “Google Keyword Tool.”
“Exact Match”- A more accurate match as Google defaults to the broad search for all searched with the word T- Shirt. It’s too broad for you to pin down effective keywords.
If you ship in the USA only, make sure to set the country you ship to only when using the tool.
Google rounds numbers, the numbers you get are average.
Focus your pages with keywords that are related strongly to one another. Choose three to five keywords for your site or you will lose quality in “crafting a high title tag” if you use too many.
Focus on a good “meta tag.” Meta tags do not help with rankings anymore as much, if at all. The “meta description” tag will encourage customers to visit your site. Place the keywords in your “title tag” smartly and it will encourage visitors to visit your site.
Don’t use too many meta tags, or it will clog the code on your website. Have a unique meta tag so it accurately describes the page. Good ad copy is what will get clicks.
How To Make Your Website Get More Clicks
A comprehensive content digital marketing plan is one of the most important “plans of action” for your business.
When someone is viewing your blog, the reader should be led to a plan of action, such as a filling in a form to sign up for your mailing list, or buy your services or product.
Make a stunning well- designed website and landing page.
Have a blog on your site. Blogs help with subscriptions on your website.
Make sure the layout is clean and easy to read. Use a lot of white space with lots of room to breathe in between paragraphs.
Provide great photos that cause emotion. If you are selling a product photos look best on white backgrounds.
Get creative with product descriptions. Think about a short story as to why the product should be bought, instead of just technical features, sizes and measurements.
Product demonstration videos and informative how to videos work wonders and build more trust to sell information and products.
Cross- sell with other products.
Optimizing your heading tags will gain more traffic.
Listen to your customer’s feedback, social media crowd’s voice and curate content around that.
Your digital content marketer should be equipped with the tools and the knowledge of SEO that helps make your business a success.
One last word- Don’t be afraid to experiment. You can have a great article but the title may not be working. Change the title and insert different and updated trending keywords using the tools above and give it a whirl.
Not getting the traffic to your website that converts to sales?
Let’s get started today on the road to success for your business. AZ Publishers is here to get you started.
