Getting back on the SEO Path – Tools
Its been more than a year now since I have personally run a SEO campaign for a website. During the early days of Creately.com, I had spent endless hours devising strategies to grow traffic and gathered invaluable hands-on skills in organically growing traffic with a combination of a sensible content strategy, SEO optimisation, PR for news coverage and content distribution to develop a diverse set of real back-links to the site.
Since then I have developed various content-led traffic generation strategies for clients, but have left the gory implementation details to external service providers. This allowed us to focus on our core strengths in digital strategy while leveraging our global partner network to deliver a more cost effective campaign to our clients.
Well enuff of that. This week we started thinking about applying some of the key concepts we espouse to our clients to help us reach out to our customers – creative agencies out there looking for a trusted digital agency to partner with.
While Alf and the team work on the new website, I decided to put in place a Search Engine Optimisation and traffic generation strategy. So I find myself now dusting off my Market Samurai license, logging back into Adwords, scouring for good content writers and beginning to have a really great time.
In the series of posts to follow, I will try to share some of my experiences and learnings. And to kick off this series on SEO, heres a list of the tools I will be using during my SEO adventure.
Getting the basics right
- Define your Objectives
Draw up a simple list of what you’d like to achieve in your SEO campaign. Use these as guides:- Increase Search Traffic by 45%
- Appear on first page for 3 keywords
- Google Analytics
You should have this ready to go on your site. If you dont know what Google Analytics is – the best place to start is the Google site. - Google Adwords
Getting an account on Google Adwords gives you access to some pretty handy data even if you don’t plan to run Google Ads on your website.
Keyword Research and Generation
- Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
This is the holy grail in free keyword research. Google Keyword Tool provides local and global search volumes, adword CPC costs along with suggested keywords to help you build your targeted keyword list.
- SEOMoz
SEOMoz is a great service if you don’t want to get inundated with too much info from the start. With its host of research tools, they provide an easy to use and powerful all-in-one SEO platform at a monthly subscription price. I have used SEOMoz and although there are many far more powerful tools out there, SEOMoz is built to be as easy to use for a beginner and a Pro! You’ll get on-page SEO analysis, back-link tracking, historical ranking information and keyword tracking all in one place along with email reports that look great. And they do a great Free Trial ;-) - Open Site Explorer
This is a great free tool from the guys at SEOMoz. Open Site Explorer is a large web index with 36 billion URLs and 9.2 trillion links. This is a great tools for digging into your competitors backlinks and learning where their getting their backlinks from. More on this in a later post. - SEOMoz Term Extractor
Another free tool from SEOMoz – the Term Extractor is great for digging into the keywords your competitors are targeting.
Traffic and Competitor Analysis
Now you’ll also want to be able to assess how well you’re doing against your competitors. The best way to do that would be to have access to their Google Analytics account, although thats very unlikely to happen! But without that, we can still muster up a good enough guess through some of these competitive intel web sites.
- Alexa Traffic Rank
Alexa’s Site Info gives you rankings on any half-decent site on the Internet. Although the data tends to be more US centric – it can provide a good indicator of SEO success viz-a-viz your competitors. - DoubleClick AdPlanner by Google
This service is meant for advertisers looking to advertise on web sites and provides rich traffic and segmentation data. Very useful when trying to understand your competitors SEO strategy. - Market Samurai
I used to love this product but something seems to be wrong with it this week. I am not getting Keyword and Adword cost information within Market Samurai – which is a shame cos this is a powerful all-in-one SEO tool.
Nice article Charan. How much of your strategy is geared towards google? And what’s your take on Bing & Yahoo?
Thanks Nik.
I think the fundamentals of search optimisation are essentially the same on most of the search engines. So although most of the data I use to build my keywords is derived from Google – I expect the same search patterns to exist on Bing and Yahoo. Of course, one could definitely extend the research and probably find some very valuable niche terms on the other search engines, but personally having looked at the volume of traffic Bing and Yahoo send to most of our sites, I don’t know if its worth the effort. For example, we have a well ranked site on all major search engines, but Yahoo and Bing collectively only send me 4% of my organic search traffic.
Have you had a different experience? Would love to hear your ideas on this.