Guy Siverson was a self-employed marketer in the past. He used to do everything by himself: SEO, Social Media, Videos and more. He couldn’t maintain the stress in a healthy way. One day he found himself with a BP of 200/100. It was obvious Guy needed to take a retreat.

A few years later, Guy opened Graceful Touch: Rapid City massage therapy.

Graceful Touch provides clients with muscle therapy, pain relief, increased mobility, and body relaxation using the art of massage. Graceful Touch is owned and operated by Guy and Irene Siverson.

We decided to ask Guy about the challenges he faced while working on this new business, in light of his previous burnout as a marketer.

Sophie Campbell: We are happy to know that your business is flourishing with the WebCEO marketing platform. How long have you been doing SEO?

Guy Siverson: In 2013, my previous business ViralTNTeam launched. It had amazing success. To gain clients we used Elance until this system was merged with ODesk and became UpWorks. Suddenly I had a severe client attainment issue that would be the end of ViralTNTeam.

Sophie: What was the problem?

Guy: Part of the problem was my inability to find clients while also navigating all the online marketing activities including SEO, Social Media, Videos and more. I just couldn’t maintain everything in a healthy way. All the stress of my failing business found me with a BP of 200/100. Not good.

Sophie: That is really not good. How did you return to the business?

Guy: After writing a lot about massage therapy on Quora, in November 2018 my wife and I opened Graceful Touch: Rapid City massage therapy. I had a website, but I wasn’t going to do SEO for it. Fortunately, a friend convinced me otherwise.

Sophie: But why didn’t you want to optimize your website and gain new customers?

Guy: I had no interest in doing SEO or web marketing because of the nightmare that had become my life back in the days of the previous business. As I turned up the marketing efforts for Graceful Touch, it wasn’t long before I was once again inundated with multiple tasks from every direction. The stress of my digital marketing days was beginning to rise again.

Sophie: Did you try some other SEO tools?

Guy: I’ve worked with tons of different tools and resources in my day. Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, MOZ; there are others. They all had the same two results:

1. Drained money from my bank account.
2. They had confusing platforms with poor support.

So, one day, while surfing the Web, I ran across a reference to a tool I hadn’t tried before. It was WebCEO. I was intriguingly unimpressed.

Sophie: Sometimes it’s good not to have any expectations about a new thing. There is way more joy in finding yourself wrong later.

Guy: Yes, I didn’t expect WebCEO to be any different. Actually, I was about to discover exactly how wrong I was.

Sophie: What was surprising for you about WebCEO?

Guy: One of my first discoveries was the ease of navigation within WebCEO. Of course, there is a definite learning curve. However, compared to the other tools it was nothing! Especially when WebCEO provides live walk-throughs via screenshare apps like Skype. During that walk through we talked about  everything.

Sophie: Was this walk-through comprehensive or you needed some more assistance?

Guy: It was thorough but it was overwhelming. I was soon to discover a major difference in the support from WebCEO compared to the support departments of other companies. Simply put, the WebCEO Support Angels like to have fun while getting the job done.

Sophie: You know that our support team is always there for you

Guy: Definitely! I came up with my first question and within moments I had an answer. I ask a lot of questions. The answers I receive from support are always informatively thorough. It’s like they always have more than enough time to give me red carpet treatment. I love that!

Sophie: It’s great to know that using WebCEO brings so much pleasure for you. Let’s talk about the results you gained!

Guy: Well, the results for my Google Maps and Google organic rankings are amazing. Take a look:

• nearby massage – #1
• near me massage – #2
• massage therapy – #2
• massage therapist – #2
• massage therapist near me – #3
• massage therapist nearest – #2
• massage therapy nearest – #2
• massage therapy nearby – #3

These are all local geo Google Maps results for my local area.

Sophie: These results are great! But what’s more important is the number of clients you actually get from the web. I am sure you get a lot of conversions; describe them please.

Guy: Oh, just last Friday I received a call from someone wanting to buy a gift certificate from us. Turns out they found us on Google. Thanks, WebCEO. $450 later the deed was done – not bad for my day off!

That was followed by another $150 purchase from someone else that found me at the top of the results. We get these calls all the time now.

Sophie: Seems like there’s been a growth of traffic to your website. Did you notice something unusual in any of the reports?

Guy: Perhaps you mean this WebCEO report:

The red line is mine. Even though we are the newest kid on the block, we are killing the competitors.

Sophie: Wow! Seems like you are really on top! These results wouldn’t have happened if there was no hard work done. What SEO tools were a must for you in the beginning?

Guy: In the world of digital marketing, every day there is a new keyword to target. However, with WebCEO, I was easily able to target a specific landing page.

For example, I very much want to take all the traffic from my area when it comes to “nearby couples massage near me” type keywords.

Thanks to being able to keyword traffic to specific landing pages, I am getting into positions on Google everywhere. This is leading to increased phone calls like the one we received yesterday from a couple that wanted a massage. That’s an additional $175 for Graceful Touch.

Sophie: What are your Top 3 WebCEO resources?

Guy: I could speak about all the amazing tools which have brought me to a site optimization of 83%. This is not perfect but yet I am getting wonderful rankings on Google thanks to its ability to guide me in fixing things internal to my website.

However, if I were to pick the thing I love most, it would be the integration of the task list for me to understand what needs to get done and what doesn’t.

Another tool I really like from WebCEO is the Web Buzz Monitoring system. I have yet to utilize it to its fullest capability. But the way that WebCEO allows you to interface with Facebook and other social media platforms is excellent. I plan to get more involved in this area as time marches by.

Sophie: A professional tip: how often do you recommend SEO & technical audits? How often do you usually schedule reports?

Guy: I schedule automatic scanning and reporting twice a month, so I have enough time to check issues and fix them. I use the same scanning and reporting schedule for Rank Tracker, Backlink Checker, Web Buzz Monitoring tool and many other tools.

Sophie: What SEO task is the most challenging for you?

Guy: One of the hardest things for me to do is build backlinks. However, that has now become a non-issue with the competitor spy tools that produce these types of results:

At first, I wasn’t sure what all those different columns meant. But the WebCEO Support Angels walked with me step by step until I understood everything they are bringing to this table for my success. 

Sophie: Other SEO tools were helpful too, weren’t they?

Guy: Other tools give stats. Other tools give numbers. Other tools give results. WebCEO does all the above and they continue forward by actually caring about you and your success on the Web.

Sophie: And what do you find so unique about WebCEO?

Guy: While I do think that each tool is amazing, if this was the complete package that made up WebCEO, I probably wouldn’t be as excited. However, when you put all their power together in one package, make it easy to navigate, and provide first class fun support, there is absolutely no other option that beats WebCEO. At least, as a local business owner in my own right. That is my opinion.

Sophie: Guy, thank you very much for your inspiring story and so many good words about WebCEO! I am glad it became less stressful to maintain all your marketing routines.

Guy: Exactly. I am a slightly unique client in that I am presently a small business owner in my own right. Having just completed our first year in business while holding an A- rating with the BBB, which I believe, in part, WebCEO can take credit for.

How?

Thanks to the power you brought to my services I now have a very important commodity, called clients.

What’s so unique about a small business owner using the web to build a healthy client base? Nothing. Nothing, ezcept my previous business was focused on web marketing with SEO at the helm. I’ve worked in the SEO industry for well over 10 years, so I have much more than a surface knowledge when it comes to what is required for success on the web.

And I am here to say that all that knowledge can easily be found in WebCEO. But that’s not all. Each month they release a technological update, thus accruing more and more power.

I am clearly convinced that while other tools may attempt to compete, there is nothing quite like WebCEO.

The post How an Ex-Marketer Recovered from Burnout and Succeeded in Local Business appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Can you remember the precise year when SEO started? It was somewhere between 1995 and 2000, near when search engines appeared. 

The TechWyse Internet Marketing agency established their company in 2001. They were standing at the gates of high-quality white-hat SEO because keyword stuffing, link exchange, spamdexing and other black-hat SEO techniques were quite common then. So, TechWyse had a lot of issues to deal with!

We decided to ask DJ Kennedy, CEO of TechWyse, about his experience growing from a small team to one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia Campbell: First of all, I am happy to know that WebCEO helps your business. How long have you been working as an SEO agency?

DJ Kennedy: We established the company in 2001. Since then, we have evolved to be one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia: Wow! Almost 18 years in the market. What is your global mission?

DJ: Our mission is to maintain our legacy as an industry leader and deliver exceptional digital marketing solutions that exceed client expectations. We do this by hiring and developing the most inspired, passionate marketing individuals as part of a creative and collaborative environment.

Sophia: Do you remember your first steps. Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform? 

DJ: We tried a lot of different approaches; now it’s hard to say if it was really worth that. We spent a lot of time on switching between numerous Google Analytics accounts (can you imagine how much time it takes when you have 50 clients’ accounts and more?) and reporting to our clients. Now these tasks are automated so we are focused on creative work, communication with clients, and enlarging our community. 

Sophia: What SEO tools are a must for you? 

DJ: We have a few that we use regularly.  Right now we really like Ahrefs and SpyFu for getting in depth knowledge of a domains back link attribution and also keyword research.

We also love WebCEO and have been using it for many years to gain greater intelligence on our client base.

Sophia: Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time? 

DJ: SEO reporting can be a very tedious task. For every client, you are supposed to run a specific set of reports. For example, a keyword research report, a technical audit and an SEO analysis for a new client.  Also, a report on rankings, a backlink analysis, technical and SEO audits, web analytics and social engagement. 

So you begin with scanning and generating numerous reports. Then you check every report for blank spaces with no data. When all the reports for every client are scanned and checked, you can prepare a consolidated report for each client. And the final touch: select the language of the report. This is important for us because some of our clients speak English and some speak French.

Sophia: So you must enjoy WebCEO’s interface which is translated into 24 languages.

DJ: Yes, this feature is truly important! But the report generation still has many steps. When all reports are put together and designed for each client, you have to send them according to individual schedules. 

Some of our clients receive reports once a month. Other clients may need reporting every week. Some may require specific SEO services in their location like St. John’s, NL. Some might say that once a quarter is enough. So having flexibility is important. 

Sophia: Having such a lot of work, did you ever miss deadlines?

DJ: If you miss deadlines in this business then you are telling your client that you are not prepared.  This is not acceptable. This is why choosing dependable software to help with the repetitive tasks is so important. 

Sophia: What advice can you give to SEO Agencies to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

DJ: Preparation and organization! This is not as hard as it seems. Split every process into tiny tasks. Assign tasks to every team member. Set deadlines. Track their performance regularly and fine-tune the process on the fly, instead of checking it all on the last day. A task manager is a must for an SEO team! If a task manager can be integrated into an SEO platform, it’s even better. We enjoy WebCEO’s Task Manager feature – so we never have to search for third-party solutions.

Sophia: What was the most remarkable challenge that your SEO Agency faced?

DJ: This question would need another full interview!  This happened a year ago. One of our clients suddenly lost his rankings for a number of keywords and his website’s traffic dropped. This happened because of a link bomb. We detected a lot of inbound poor-quality links pointing to the domain. WebCEO’s Backlink Checker tool made this easy to detect and, what is more important, neutralize this kind of black-hat SEO attack. 

I can tell you for sure that this was the first time when using the Google Disavow saved our skin! It took some waiting afterwards but, eventually, the client’s website got its rankings & traffic back. Now his backlink profile is clean and powerful. 

Sophia: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

DJ: We do our best in optimizing client sites structure for better rankings, prioritizing the most important pages and bringing more link flow to them with the help of thoughtful on-site interlinking. WebCEO’s Internal Link Optimization is a must for this task.  Using Schema is good form as well!

Sophia: What WebCEO tool really helped your agency grow?

DJ: That’s definitely the Lead Generation button! The button looks simple and prospective customers visiting our website enjoy receiving their free SEO reports. After that, they understand that, with our help, their SEO routine will become much easier. Just in this way, the number of our customers increased 300% in 2015, the year of the Lead Generation button’s introduction, thanks to WebCEO. The lead generation button helped our agency grow financially too. 

Sophia: What tool is a must-have for any SEO specialist?

DJ: Say no more – it’s definitely rank tracker. This is the best way to see the progress of a website. The Rank Tracker report is one of the most important for the client as he can see in what way visitors reach his or her website. When it comes to WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool, both we and our clients are happy to know how many times their website was featured in snippets, shown in vertical results (Google Places, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) as well as in organic and paid search results. 

Sophia: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

DJ: As I said before, our SEO team members have assigned tasks and these form their workflow. However, sometimes there are urgent tasks – we receive alerts from the Technical Audit tool, alerts on ranking fluctuations, and we act immediately. Critical SEO errors can result in decreased rankings. We receive consolidated reports regularly, but these alerts are really good when something urgent happens. You only have to check your mailbox regularly.

Sophia: Thank you very much for such a comprehensive interview! We will do our best to make our customers happier still.

DJ: Thank you for such a great service. WebCEO is a nice fit for us. Without the reports rendered by WebCEO, getting to the root of problems would have taken much longer.  We have been delighted to watch the growth of this tool moving at the same pace as the growth of our own agency!

The post SEO Team Grew to One of the Top Digital Marketing Agencies in Canada appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In just a few years, the best SEO tools have moved online, now performing in the cloud to collaborating users. These users can access their projects from any device, anywhere in the world. This is why online SEO software is so popular. The only serious choice people are making these days is between having free online accounts or mining the advantages of paid subscriptions.

A contemporary SEO tools list would include more than 80 online SEO programs to choose from, but a comprehensive, really good, web agency oriented set of tools can make a big difference – you can work smarter and faster with them. Some users prefer a mix of top SEO tools, while others go for all-in-one platforms. Let’s take a look at the current field:

BEST SEO TOOLS 2019

Keyword Research tools

• Answer The Public
• LSI Graph
• Google Search Console
• Google Keyword Planner
• WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool

Site audit and SEO analysis tools

• Google Search Console
• BrightLocal
• WebCEO’s Technical Audit and On-Page SEO Issues tools

Link building tools

• Majestic
• Ahrefs
• Linkody
• Link Research tools
• WebCEO’s Backlink research tool

Rank Tracking tools

• Pro Rank Tracker
• WooRank
• SEO Monitor
• Advanced Web Ranking
• WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool

All-in-one SEO platforms

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Moz
• WebCEO

First, we can’t ignore Google SEO tools. The best free SEO tools you can get in the niche are run by Google. There’s Google Keyword Planner, Search Console, Trends, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights. All marketing people need to be logged into these on their browsers.

Keyword research tools

those that show you keywords you haven’t thought about but your potential customers have been thinking about:

This free SEO tool provides a lot of keyword suggestions from Google and Bing. They call themselves ‘a goldmine of insight for today’s marketers’. You can see an aggregated view of search queries with hints about the motivations and emotions of the people typing them. This will really help for inspiration and consumer insight in the age of Google. However, to use the full functionality of Answer The Public you will have to pay $99/mo.

Summary: This online SEO tool is really great to find keywords you never thought about; however, the tool may show keywords which are not relevant. Also, it may not work as well with very specific keywords.

Official website: https://answerthepublic.com/

Summary: These keywords won’t drive you to position #1 instantly, but this will help your content ranking over time, when SEO effort has already been put in.

Official website: https://lsigraph.com/

This is a free Google SEO tool and it’s a shame not to use it. Google Search Console will help you find underestimated keywords which people are already using in their Google searches to find your website. You can also analyze your site’s impressions, clicks and each keyword’s average position on Google Search as well. With the help of Google Search Console, you can make your website shine on Google Search results.

Summary: Every list of the best SEO tools includes Google Search Console. Keywords from Search Console will help you understand what people have already been searching for when they visit your website.

Official website: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

These are also free and they will help you get plenty of keyword suggestions, so you can research them and narrow your keyword list. You can also get bid estimates, so you can plan your advertising budget. Once you have found the best keywords for your website, you can add them to your advertising plan. You can also add them into a major SEO tool platform like WebCEO. You may finalize a list and launch a marketing campaign any time you are ready.

Summary: Google Keyword Planner is a must; it’s really informative. But you will have to wait until your account is matured to see accurate data.

Official website: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

Well, everything looks good, but when it comes to doing even more effective work, you will face the downside of free keyword tools. They usually have low limitations and really lack statistics data. You will have a hard time evaluating monthly searches, bid competition, search trends etc. – so it might not be so easy to pick the most effective keywords on a free tool. Even the AdWords keyword tool won’t give you precise data when you have just created a vendor account: you will only see huge ranges (for example, 1-10k). Once your account has matured, you will see more precise data, but that takes time and money. Which brings us to

This gives you a definite, not an estimated, number of a keyword’s monthly searches from the get-go and offers additional metrics that most other SEO tools don’t even have: for example, search trends (how a keyword’s monthly searches have been fluctuating throughout the year), a keyword effectiveness coefficient, clicks and impressions. WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool can also show the number of local searches per month for an area of your choice. You can also estimate your advertising budget with the bid competition number.

Summary: Relevant keyword suggestions, precise keyword effectiveness metrics, accurate and high quality data and good usability are united in the WebCEO Keyword Suggestion tool. I absolutely love it.

Official website: https://www.webceo.com/

Site audit and SEO analysis tools

Google and the visitors of websites love fast loading sites with zero technical issues. So you have to audit your site for errors on a regular basis. Mobile friendliness, page speed and errors – every factor is critical.

This tool allows you to check the mobile friendliness of your website and see if there are SEO issues (like duplicate titles and descriptions). You may even receive email alerts when Google identifies issues on your site. Unfortunately, it won’t show you a full list of technical and SEO issues on your website. An additional site audit tool is a must-have too, so you can see a full picture.

Summary: Good enough for an instant check of a website’s technical issues and mobile friendliness, but it won’t compete against the top SEO tools.

Official website: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

This is a great choice for those who are working for locally oriented businesses and doing local SEO. It will be easy for you to uncover technical issues with the site’s local SEO profile. The most useful thing about BrightLocal is the ability to audit, clean and build citations from the most popular sites. Also, with BrightLocal you will never forget about Google My Business – we all know how important it is to register one’s location and keyword descriptions with search engines.

Summary: Their automated reports look really good! You’ll have to schedule a report and then wait a long time until it is scanned.

Official website: https://www.brightlocal.com/

You should ask yourself if you really need a standalone tool for technical/SEO audits. The big all-in-one SEO programs offer great auditors, so it will be much easier to use a platform instead of a variety of different SEO tools with separate logins.

For instance, WebCEO has Technical Audit and On-Page SEO tools which scan your site for technical and SEO errors, respectively. Both are completely free if you use the free trial and they won’t add to the variable cost of an agency level paid plan.

Summary: A technical audit for webmasters and an SEO analysis report for SEO specialists are exactly what you need to keep your website user- and search-engine-friendly. Scanning is quick so even if you forget to schedule – it will only take a minute or two!

Official website: https://www.webceo.com/

Next in line are the tools all SEO professionals love:

Link building tools

It shows special metrics like trust flow, citation flow, historical index, fresh index, etc. With all these metrics you can see your improvements and progress. You will see must-have data on your backlinks, so you can estimate if they are naturally earned or you’d better get rid of them. Also Majestic is a data provider – and the best SEO tools use their data.

Summary: Majestic is really cool and affordable – the biggest database on the web, with an easy interface and good usability. However, there are SEO programs that show backlinks divided into two columns: natural and unnatural.

Official website: https://majestic.com/

This platform is also well known for their backlink opportunities. Ahrefs offers its proprietary metrics such as DR (Domain Rating), UR (URL Rating), AR (Ahrefs Rank) which are used to estimate backlink popularity. Also, Ahrefs is not a data provider so you will have to buy a subscription to their platform to have access to their backlink tool.

Summary: This SEO software has a lot of valuable information and you just have to get used to its interface. However, it is not cheap and won’t do for small businesses or solo SEO specialists.

Official website: https://ahrefs.com/

Linkody is an amazing backlink monitoring tool that every webmaster should possess. Its main focus is set on monitoring your backlinks as well as tracking the success of your link-building efforts.

What’s more, Linkody automates the whole process for you! You will get notified when you gain or lose any backlinks and you will have a full overview of the necessary SEO metrics to assess your backlinks. To help you improve your link-building strategy, Linkody will give you insights into your competitors’ link building strategies.

The post 20+ Best SEO Tools in 2019 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As a company providing agency-level SEO tools, we can’t help but look at our customers’ feedback with starry eyes – especially when they write it into a story. Today, we have the privilege of interviewing the Agnew Group, fresh from their all-time record month in both visits and lead generation in January 2019. A leading motor group based in Northern Ireland and one of the top 25 franchise car dealerships in the UK, the Agnew Group continues to go from strength to strength.

Colm Sharkey, Digital Marketing Manager at Agnew Group spoke to WebCEO about his role, all things SEO and how WebCEO is helping them achieve their online goals.

When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

WebCEO and I were first introduced many years ago. I was looking for a cost-effective, all-round piece of software as I developed my knowledge of SEO. The free version was easy to use and provided great insight, making the decision to upgrade a no-brainer. I first used the software whilst I was Website Manager at a leading Utilities company and immediately was able to identify glaring technical errors and make immediate improvements to the visibility of the website. Identifying and fixing the likes of broken links and 404 errors, I imagine, are how a lot of people start off their SEO journey.

Moving on in my career, I setup my own digital marketing agency, Blue Shark Digital, and WebCEO was an essential piece of kit that I relied on. Mainly dealing with SME’s, being able to scan and audit client’s websites and implement immediate and impactful changes and improvements was and is an essential component of what Blue Shark Digital offered.

You now work for Agnew Group and manage 6 websites! That’s a challenging responsibility. How does WebCEO help you with that?

To call it a challenging responsibility would be an understatement, indeed! (laughs) Well, the opportunity was too tempting to turn down. The role at Agnew Group came up and I knew it was one that I had to pursue. Having previously worked in a digital role in the automotive industry, the appeal of Agnew Cars was strong, with the chance to work with brands like Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche amongst others.

Within the Agnew Group we have 6 websites: Agnewcars, Autoexchange, Autostore, Repair Centre, Agnew Leasing and Agnew Motability. WebCEO allows the digital team to monitor each site, create automated reports and alerts and to develop, track and compare different solutions and SEO improvements on the sites. The software makes the somewhat daunting task of monitoring 6 sites manageable and allows more time to be spent on digital strategy.

The digital strategy is continually evolving based on data-driven decisions, of what WebCEO contributes significantly. Each site has their own objectives and users. We track cross-domain traffic within our sites and study the online behaviour of each. WebCEO assists with this process, alongside other software such as Universal Analytics and UX software.

Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

Yes, I have used SEMrush and SE Ranking previously. However, each time I find the variety and reliability of WebCEO, combined with the competitive pricing, the best solution. My current role is the 3rd role in a row that I have subscribed to WebCEO.

What I like about WebCEO is the layout and user experience of the software. Some competitor software packages may have, or claim to have, similar features. However, WebCEO stands apart in terms of the clarity of the reporting, the clarity of the layout and supporting information it provides for each tool.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, WebCEO plugs-in industry-recognised metrics from the likes of Alexa, Moz and others for certain aspects. Having the ability to measure Moz Domain Authority and Alexa URL rank within the software is a massive plus, for example.

What is your favourite tool on WebCEO?

That’s a difficult one, depends which day you ask me. We are doing quite a lot of link-building as a team, and Competitor Backlink Spy is an absolute godsend. In short, I challenge my team to pick a competitor and identify every good link they have and target 85%+ of them to create links to our sites (where relevant).

Yesterday we had a good team discussion about where we are on Bing and Yahoo and what specific things we could do to improve our visibility. With non-Google search engine traffic still at around 10% of total visits, rank tracking on these search engines has proved invaluable. Being able to view Bing/Yahoo rankings and also the traffic from these sites in the same place was handy.

Tomorrow, well… Who knows?

What features do you honestly miss in WebCEO?

Some of the Competitor Analysis tools. I don’t think any one in particular is the authority in this arena, so having several different tools to monitor trends is of appeal. By their very nature, these tools all use different algorithms to analyze and estimate traffic on competitor sites. By having several tools to monitor at once, it can give you a clearer picture. The more tools the better in this regard to keep an eye on those pesky competitors of Agnews!

Congratulations on a record-breaking January! Could you tell us about it?

In January 2019 agnewcars.com had our all-time record month in visits, users, calls and emails. This was led by a 21% and 11% year-on-year growth in organic and referral traffic. With “SEO traffic sources” (search engines and referral) accounting for 65% of hard leads (calls and emails), the priority since I started this role was to devise and implement an SEO and content strategy starting from the neck of the sales funnel upwards. There is plenty of work still to do and scope to significantly improve the performance.

Launching new landing pages, we are able to track over time in WebCEO how we rank for the keywords we target, and the impact of traffic to these pages in terms of lead generation. These landing pages have had bespoke designed based on the latest CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) principles and they have accounted for almost 10% of total leads since launch.

We aim to continue to use WebCEO to assist in the implementation and continuous improvement of the Agnew Group websites.

The post How a Company Got a 65% Lead Boost with Agency SEO Tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Most people who try to optimize their website for SEO by themselves struggle with it. That’s what allows SEO agencies to exist and prosper in the first place. However, this business is no walk in the park, either. Sites need to be thoroughly analyzed, issues need to be found and fixed, and reports need to be ready on time. Handling all this work is the only way to make a profit.

So how do SEO agencies stay afloat? I can best speak about the one where I work. Our way of solving problems and keeping our customers satisfied lies in using the right SEO tools for agencies – in our case, WebCEO tools. This is a story about how they helped us go from being limited both in the number of clients and in the level of analysis, to an SEO agency with a greater capacity to serve more clients and a raised level of analysis and deliverables.

Specifically, there are three factors that made the difference of which I will speak on this occasion: reports, analysis, workflow.

Reports for clients

As an agency, we work with online SEO tools and send monthly reports to clients. These reports include data on traffic and ranking and we always prepare a detailed report of the activities we carried out in the past month in favor of the client. Before working with WebCEO, we used to fulfill our tasks on a Word file, cutting and pasting screenshots of different tools and platforms such as Google Analytics, Search Console, IBP, Facebook and more. It really had a very bad appearance, but the most important thing is that it took us a long time to make these reports, which limited the entire operation and affected the number of cases we could take as clients.

When working with WebCEO, the generation of reports is done in a single click, and the outcome looks much more aesthetic and professional. The fact that you can link WebCEO with other tools means that the report you generate already includes data from these tools and everything looks homogenous.

To summarize, before WebCEO it took us at least 3 hours to generate a report and today it takes us approximately 30 minutes to generate a report (including its review). I did not mention that the whole interface and therefore the reports are available in the language I need (Spanish).

Some characteristics of the reports that especially help us are:

1. Content control: There are endless topics and sections that you can include in the report, but you do not always want to include everything (either because you do not want the client to be exposed to certain information or because you want to offer different content at different levels for clients). The WebCEO platform allows you to easily include or remove sections of the report, at the client level. You do not need to define a format for every client but rather customize the content of each one. The level of content control does not end with whether you include a section or not. It goes further and allows you to define what type of view you are going to show for a tool (for example: with or without technical explanations, data order, etc.).

2. Report branding: I can add a well customized cover, a header with our logo and our slogan, a footer with our contact information + an adaptation of report colors to our logo. Personally, I like to change the cover often by featuring special topics on holidays or special occasions. I also use this flexibility of appearance to do SEO work for other digital marketing agencies that are not specialized in SEO – I give them reports with their own logo and slogan.

3. Shipping and automation options: Reports can be scheduled to be generated automatically on a certain date and sent automatically to the client.

Analyzing fast

The SEO analysis includes, among others, a review of code errors, competition analysis, backlinks analysis, and other factors which usually require several tools to review, some free and others paid. You can link your Analytics, Search Console and Facebook accounts to WebCEO and have everything joined together. In addition, they have alliances with third parties such as Moz and Majestic, so I don’t have to pay a lot to have all these tools separately.

As an agency director, I’m able to quickly see and analyze the situation of all my clients in a few minutes through a control panel; I can filter according to several criteria to detect clients that have not advanced as we expected, a client that suddenly has an unexpected jump in the amount of backlinks, etc. This control panel is also accessible to my account executives so that they can oversee their specific clients.

The platform has 16 tools to execute SEO (from technical audit, analysis of backlinks, SEO optimization, loading speed, etc.) but I am going to talk here about 4 that I find really worthy in my daily work:

Rank Tracking: I very much appreciate here the possibility of reviewing mobile vs. desktop computer browser ranking and the possibility of reviewing rank positions in very specific geographical areas such as cities. I love the different options that I can see in the results: by word, by URL, by label, comparison with different dates, seeing the track records of the ranking of each word and seeing the actual SERP results.

Dangerous Competitors: I love this tool because it helps me quickly see who my competitors are on Google and with what keywords they are competing with me. I am also using this very broad report to provoke my prospects by showing them who their competition really is; they are always amazed.

Competitor Backlink Spy: Lists the best backlinks of my most dangerous competitors and lets me know when one of these competitors just received a new high quality backlink.

Internal Links Optimization: This tool helps me analyze in minutes the architecture of internal links on the page, as well as understand the hierarchy of internal pages regarding authority. I’m even embarrassed to say that before WebCEO we did not analyze this type of thing and today I cannot analyze a client without examining this aspect on their website.

Workflow and other extras

I have dozens of clients in my agency. Several account executives take care of more than 10 clients per month each. You can calculate that an executive dedicates approximately 7 hours a month to analyze each client and to perform tasks that have to do with this client (in addition to the account executive I have a support team that performs tasks such as link building, copy writing, etc. which are not included in these 7 hours). Before WebCEO, I could have never analyzed a client in 7 hours, this means I could have never reached this number of customers. WebCEO made my work process easier, so I could suddenly attend to more clients without leaving aside the level of service that I give to each one and without affecting the results.

WebCEO has several features that help me manage my agency. I’ve already talked about the reports that save me a lot of time and the control panel that helps me see the situation of all my clients at a glance. But there are many other functions:

User profiles: I have created user profiles with different permits and views. My executives have a certain profile, I have another, other members of the team have another profile and I even facilitated access to my clients with a special profile where they can see online only some of the tools and see their ranking results, their report, etc.

Tasks: Task Manager is a section where I can generate different task lists and assign them to different members of my team. For example, I have created a list of steps and tasks to perform in case of migration to https (you will be surprised how many tasks are involved in this migration if you do it with SEO in mind). I can assign this list of tasks to a certain account executive to work on for a certain client.

Alerts: I have programmed alerts that notify me and the account executive if a client has a suddenly lowered position, if his competitor has risen in position or if the website suffers from a technical failure.

Free evaluations for prospects: I added a button to my web page where I am offering my visitors a free evaluation of their web page. It is fully automated, and I am not aware that it is happening until I get a notification to my email with the report and contact information that was also sent to the prospect. It’s a good way of turning visitors into prospects without much effort.

I have been working with WebCEO for 2 years now; what impresses me the most is its support capacity. The possibility of contacting them directly with such ease and the willingness of the team to help you is something that I do not see much in other companies, whether they provide SEO software for agencies or not.

The post SEO Tools for Agencies: Pro Functionality & Unlimited Users appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Running an SEO business is definitely a big challenge. First off, SEO agencies have to swim in an ever-changing ocean of Google algorithms, adapt their SEO activities to these changes and shape an individual marketing strategy for each client site. Second, managing hundreds of clients’ websites is a great responsibility and a big pain. This is where marketing automation tools become a great help. These tools, when designed properly, help to automate routine marketing tasks, provide big data for deeper research and analysis, and help SEO teams to collaborate more effectively.

If you run a digital agency or plan to provide SEO services, you will definitely love this insider information. We recently sat down with Mike Tortorice from Infront Webworks, a US-based digital agency, to discuss their experience in the niche of SEO services, challenges and drawbacks, hacks and workarounds. Here’s what he had to say…

How long have you been in the SEO niche and what challenges did your Digital Agency face?

Infront Webworks has been in Website Design and digital marketing for over 20 years but a little over 6 years ago we started aggressively recruiting SEO experts and building a team to compete with the best in the SEO agency space. In that time, we have won a number of National SEO awards, were the 11^th company in the U.S. to become LSA certified, have built a team that has 130 years collective SEO experience and created a reputable brand in the SEO arena.

Our biggest challenge is keeping up with demand as we grow. Most recently we were runner up for the 2017 US Search Awards “Small SEO Agency of the Year” which proved to be a great way to attract more high profile clients. With this, having WebCEO as a partner really showed that scalability was manageable.

Having the right white-label SEO software at the right time in a company’s growth curve is very important. WebCEO keeps up quite nicely.

What is your favorite feature in WebCEO?

As the SEO and Digital Marketing Manager at Infront Webworks, I have grown to appreciate the easy to understand and intuitive layout of WebCEO that has helped grow departmental gross revenue by 934% in the past 5 years, while consistently maintaining a 95 plus percent client retention rate. Many similar white-label SEO tools miss the mark when it comes to management overview. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a tool that offers a specialist breakdown of proper website metrics and KPI’s at a glance.

How is WebCEO different from similar SEO tools on the market?

With the multi-user functionality, being able to quickly glance at the SEO team’s metrics that are broken down by specialist makes it one of our go-to tools as we go about our work days. Spotting good and bad website metrics at a glance is vital to a specialist and a manager in this role. I don’t believe there is another platform that can dissect between team members at a glance and is equally valuable to the team manager and the specialists who strategize the client accounts.

How exactly did WebCEO help your SEO team save time and costs?

Time is money as they say. With WebCEO, the ability to quickly assess stats fast is tantamount along with finding KPI’s quickly. The platform does all this easily. From a digital marketing and SEO agency perspective, and as a manager on the team, I need a way to keep up on how specialists are performing which can be a huge challenge in this industry. With so many competing priorities having a quick glance of every client’s overview is huge.

The WebCEO Task Manager gives us the ability to segment specialists based on any category of our choosing. For instance, from the initial starting dashboard you can set up custom names for each specialist on your team, as well as assign projects based on department, or maybe a section for competitor rankings. The sky is the limit as you can alter each row to represent any category of your choice. For example, the below image represents the average of metrics of each specialist’s clients.

This gives management a quick glimpse of performance at a high level. If something is off the next step would be to examine deeper by simply clicking on the specialist’s name and opening up their dashboard deeper and taking a granular look.  This will open up a panel listing the particular SEO specialist’s clients in a well formatted list. This breaks down the statistics even further.

From here if we can drill down even further per website under a specialist’s projects for an overview of the site of your choosing. Once again at the project overview level, everything is well laid out and composed. You can also add special widgets to this dashboard. For example, if you wanted to track at a glance traffic over 12 months, there is a widget set you can add to the project level dashboard with a simple click of the mouse.

All the widgets display nicely as they are lumped together into the project overview. The look and feel is sleek and streamlined which is good because WebCEO offers branded access to the dashboard from your own sub-domain if you wish to let your clients see stats at will. This helps agencies remain transparent, which is a present day gripe among new clients who previously had bad experiences with non-transparent agencies.You can also set the permissions so your client will only see their dashboard.

Upon logging in as a customer or as an SEO team member, the project overview is the first thing you will see at the project level. A not-so granular overview of the metrics of your choosing. From site speed to average ranking position the widgets can be set to your liking or set as static for your clients, meaning they cannot be altered via a third party.

It would appear something like this…

By clicking on any of the widgets the tool sets get more and more intricate as far as stats and helpful information goes.

WebCEO from end to end has so much information packed within its programming I can’t think of anything that is not covered important to SEO. Stacked with the ability to provide everything from competitor reporting, backlink toxicity, social analytics to technical website audits, WebCEO is the Swiss Army Knife of SEO in that it pretty much does everything you need for technical level SEO.

Oftentimes in SEO, there is always an extreme amount of jumping around between different SEO tools, but with WebCEO the need becomes less frequent. Pulling information from tools like Google Analytics, Search Console and SEMrush, you can almost always stick with this one tool, finding the information you need at the press of a mouse.

In conclusion, one thing that really separates WebCEO from all the other SEO tool suites is its team management features. No other SEO tool suite offers “at a glance” KPI’s on SEO team member performance and per client stats from a single screen.

WebCEO has all the strength of all the most popular tool suites for the SEO professionals doing the day to day SEO but also offers dimensions for managers and directors that no other tool set does.

I bet you send SEO reports to your customers. Could you please tell us more about it?

We actually do send out monthly reporting. With WebCEO the practice is easy and offers customers a detailed view of how their performance stacks up.  The reports look exactly like they do when a customer logs in to view their account. The PDFs are full of color and insights. A professional looking bonus for clients.

Taking it a bit further you can not only set up reporting to utilize your agency’s branding but you can also incorporate branded reports to include your client’s logo as well.

Reporting is an essential part of what we do. Being able to expand on information and stay transparent lends to our company’s outstanding reputation.

What are the top 3 WebCEO tools which your team uses most often?

The top 3 tool sets our team uses quite regularly are:

1. The Keyword Detail tool – This tool allows us to view the progression of keywords along with the ranking pages. Combining this tool with the Internal Links Optimization tool allows us to capitalize on moving link juice around websites in order to push keywords higher by easily viewing what page ranks for what search terms.

2. The Link Toxicity tool – Gives us insights on bad link mojo. You can set custom parameters to find the types of links that should not be associated with your client’s website, easily create a disavow file and submit it to Google with a few clicks.

3. Competitor Backlink Spy – A phenomenal tool that allows you to view the backlinks of a competitor’s website. If you have ever done a bit of link building, you know the importance of trying to share backlinks that your competitors have through simple outreach and backlink techniques.

Finally, do you have any recommendations from your SEO team on how we could improve WebCEO to help manage your SEO workflow?

One of the nice things about the customer help desk at WebCEO is their responsiveness to our needs.

Recently, we asked the help desk if there was a possibility to add the last scan date to the specialist’s dashboard so we could be sure on the management side of things that client accounts are being scanned by our specialists in a timely manner and to ensure we have a fresh view of the client stats at all times. This way no one is neglected and it keeps the workflow alive.

The response was quick and at the moment they are looking into it with the programmers in order to implement. Again, this would be a great feature-set for our team.

I love that WebCEO does what it takes to make agencies successful.

The post How a Digital Agency Raised Its Client Retention Rate to 95% appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As the developers of SEO software designed for digital and SEO agencies, we know how frustrating it can be running multiple SEO projects, analyzing dozens of clients’ website, delegating multiple SEO tasks to team members, keeping an eye on customer satisfaction and constantly looking for new SEO leads via email or cold calls.  It’s hard work that requires second guessing your every move.

Regardless of the size and direction of your SEO service, be it a local SEO firm with tens of patrons or a large-scale SEO agency with thousands of projects, you can’t cope without rock solid digital marketing tools. We tried to analyze dozens of digital marketing tools and we have singled out those which would best serve an SEO agency specialist in his or her daily challenges.

Lead Generation

Any SEO business chokes if one doesn’t feed it with fresh SEO leads on a regular basis. SEO lead generation has evolved into pointing to potential clients’ pain points and issues, offering solutions to the same. There are several ways of generating leads for your SEO business: cold calls, email marketing, PPC, webinars, form generated free SEO reports and gated content campaigns. Here are several SEO lead generation tools that will help you keep your sales team busy.

1. MySiteAuditor is a clean and simple lead generation tool that provides an unlimited number of free SEO reports for your potential clients. The website audit tool can be embedded on your site. It allows site visitors to run an audit for a specific page for a target keyword. It has a free 10-day trial and then you will be charged as much as $1.3 per lead a day.

Cost: $39/mo

2.  SEO Lead Generation tool from WebCEO is another white label SEO audit tool that helps you generate your SEO leads right from your site. It comes as an additional feature to your tools package, so you don’t have to pay for it as a separate tool, the package allows to generate 5 SEO audits a day in the Startup plan to unlimited number of audits in the Agency Unlimited plan. API integration can help you collect and manage SEO leads right from your CMS platform.

Cost: With WebCEO, this lead generation functionality comes as a part of any package.

3. Found.ly is a great automated B2B lead prospecting tool that will help you save a lot of time and the effort needed for you to find the public info and contact details of your SEO leads. For now, Found.ly provides a BETA version of its service and you should send a request to get access to its features.

Analytics & SEO Reporting

Choosing ideal SEO software can be really frustrating and time-consuming. The problem with some SEO tools is that they often provide only the what and not the why of SEO data. Another problem is that most SEO tools have poor reporting options or don’t have them at all.  There are only a few advanced SEO software providers out there that can fit SEO agency needs based on the following criteria:

• Accurate and informative SEO data (keyword rankings, backlink data) backed by advice and how-to tips.
• Simple and user-friendly interface.
• Integration with 3rd party tools
• API access
• Regular SEO data backup
• Two-sided levels of accessibility for both clients and SEO team members.
• Easy-to-customize SEO reports with the ability to set an individual scan schedule and automatic email delivery.

Taking into account the above criteria, we picked several options you may want to consider, in case you haven’t yet.

4. Moz Pro

Pros: Where Moz really shines is in having the biggest SEO community. It is well-recognized among SEO newbies and small business owners who optimize their websites without professional help and need some SEO advice.

Cons: Features provided in the Moz Pro fall short of expectations once you dig deeper into the tools. The SEO data is often limited. There is no possibility to track rankings for specific locations, much less multi-location business mobile rankings.  It has no white label access options for an agency’s clients.

Cost: starts at $99/mo

5. Raven Tools

Pros: Raven Tools is an aggregation of 3rd party SEO and Marketing tools which can set you free from logging into several types of marketing automation platforms (like email mailing) and let you see and analyze data under one roof. Instead of paying to multiple providers you invest your money into one proven platform.

Cons: The Raven Tools report customization is basic. It only shows the average rank tracking data which is taken from Google Search Console and it doesn’t provide a detailed picture of your page-by-page rankings on Google and other SEs, while also not providing competitor, local and mobile rankings.

Cost: starts at $99/mo

6. WebCEO

Pros: WebCEO is well-equipped for both SEO jobs and client reporting.

• It provides the most accurate and detailed keyword rankings for the Google local, mobile and YouTube search engines as well as hundreds of country specific search engine. You can clearly see client rankings alongside their competitors. It does a great job in terms of keyword research, technical and code audits, internal and external backlinks, competitor backlinks sorted from high to low value, web buzz and social media monitoring, content submission, sitemap submission, landing page optimization analysis and much more. The SEO reports are supported by helpful advice for troubleshooting.
• WebCEO’s intuitive, easy-to-customize SEO reports with an automatic report mailing tool is a great find for SEO agencies which want to pitch their SEO services.
• Multi-user and multi-level access provides unlimited possibilities for team collaboration.
• Multilanguage versions of the SEO platform interface and reports allow agencies to go native in almost any country.

Cons: The platform is designed for professional use and the plethora of options sometimes overwhelms those who barely know HTML tags or rarely use social media.

Cost:  starts at $99/mo

Compare Moz, RavenTools and WebCEO here.

Backlink Analysis & Outreach

Link building campaigns now take much more of your effort and time than back in the old days when you might ask someone for a reciprocal link or you would simply place links on local directories, forums and comment sections. Today, link building is now a good mix of building brand awareness, credibility and influencer outreach.

7. Ahrefs

Originally built for backlink checking, Ahrefs has evolved into a full-fledged SEO platform. But it still remains one of the best backlink analysis tools with an index of 12 trillion known links.

Cost: starts at $99/mo

8. BuzzStream

Buzzstream is designed for link generation by means of researching leads, sending them customized messages in order to earn links and to track the progress of such outreach activities. The service allows you to send messages directly from the tool interface, enables setting reminders to send messages, and tracks and helps continue correspondence on outreach campaigns.

Cost: $24/mo for 1 user and 30 prospecting searches.

9. Mention

Mention is a great influencer outreach and link building tool. It provides an opportunity to get juicy links from non-linked brand mentions. You find your brand name somewhere and then ask a webmaster to please turn it into an actual link.

Cost: $29/mo for 2 basic alerts and 3000 mentions

10. WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy

The tool lets you see the best backlinks your competitors have, sorted by factors such as Domain Trust Level or social media mention popularity.

Cost: $99/mo

Project Management and Collaboration

To operate, manage and track the progress of digital marketing efforts and keep up-to-date on the activities for all your SEO projects, you should have trouble-free project management tools. Unless you are Shiva.

Here are several tools for project management and collaboration.

11. Basecamp

Basecamp is great for an SEO project management perfectionist. It consolidates team discussion in a collaboration center, a company projects board, along with your personal assignments and schedule. It doesn’t say anything about having an API or integration with 3rd party toolsL The guys at Basecamp believe in karma. They provide their software for free to teachers and students and they give 50% off the price to non-profits and charities.

Cost:  be ready to pay $99/mo if you are not a teacher/student and a non-profit organization.

12. ActiveCollab

Active Collab shows even higher potential than Basecamp. It provides solutions for project management, task management, team collaboration and management, client management, time tracking and invoicing. Unlike Basecamp, Active Collab enables integration with additional 3rd party add-ons for absolutely free, no matter what plan you have.

See how some of the well-known project management tools compare.

Cost: $25/mo for 5 members and 5 GB of space.

13. Slack

Slack is a great app for team communication. It helps an SEO agency outsource work to SEO specialists in other countries.

Cost: starts at $8/mo

14. WebCEO

WebCEO’s Agency Unlimited plan offers Task Management specifically designed for digital marketing work delegation.

Cost: $99/mo + $2 per active project + $4 per 1000 rank queries

There are much more digital marketing tools for SEO agencies and I am sure you have some that you use regularly. Please point some out in the comment section so I can add them to our list.

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The post 14 SEO Agency Tools for Lead Generation, SEO Jobs, Link Outreach and Project Management appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Have you ever had the pleasure of watching Mad Men? I am a huge fan of this TV drama series that describes the structure and code of the marketing world of the 1960s and uncovers the concepts of TV, radio and newspaper advertising campaigns and commercials in a fascinating, sticky way. This drama is full of inimitable genius characters. Here we have Don Draper with his hidden split personality, full of secrets, feminism-driven Peggy Olson with her keen desire to rule in a man’s world and many other characters we, marketers, can drive inspiration from. But what I like the most is their feel for marketing, I love the way they put teeth into effective advertising campaigns. Those guys and gals, in real life, wrote a major chapter in the history of modern marketing. I think, every marketer should watch the episode with Don’s Kodak slide projector ad pitch called “Carousel”. Isn’t it brilliant? He pulls on human sentiments but bases it all on his own experience. This helped to add a personal touch to the ad which is essential for today’s marketing approach.

What secret tools and special skills did the old marketing mad men have at hand in the Golden Age of the advertising world of the 1960s?

In a nutshell: guts, experience, creativeness and an office kit. These unalloyed salesmen brought a top flight creative mindset and genius to copywriting. Unlike today’s Internet marketers, they worked in most cases with the real products. They tested them in special test groups, where ordinary people tried, tasted, wore and slept with the products in order to spot the real pros and cons of the product in question. No special technologies were invented or used for an ad creative. The old marketing school required less analytical work and a lot of guesswork. All you needed to provide was one great idea approved by a positive nod of a client. It was the era of superiority of creativeness over accountability.

Fortunately (or unfortunately for particular reasons) we, millennials live in a totally different cyber world where the TV/Radio/Print mass media channels have been largely replaced by digital media. Blogs, Email, Paid Search, YouTube and Social Media are all new ways of driving audience attention and getting them to buy any type of product or service. With an infinite stream of information and big data, digital media has turned out to be a huge challenge for today’s marketers.  With access to more robust data, the Mad Marketing Men have evolved into Math Marketing Men. Data integration, automation, evaluation and optimization play decisive roles on the way to successful digital marketing. The only thing that has not really changed much in marketing is the vision of a customer persona profile. Сatering to what your audience needs has been crucial ever since products turned into brands and buyers turned into nearby consumers. But the methods, tools and skills used to understand, analyze, satisfy and convert people into loyal consumers has become more holistic and tangled. If Donald Draper were to work in a modern digital marketing world, he would have to sign up for multiple digital marketing tool accounts in order to find shortcuts for syncing SEO, Social Media and Paid Advertising campaigns in order to optimize digital marketing ROI.

The helping hand of Web CEO is here to direct you to the most useful and actionable digital marketing tools, most of which are recommended by experts and well tried by some of our in-house marketers.

Project Management Tools

Properly organized workflow and wisely assigned duties will benefit your final digital marketing ROI to a great extent. Try some of these cloud-based project management tools which are basically free.

Redmine is an open source (basic version) bug/task/feature tracking tool for effective digital task teamwork. Read more about the nuances of Redmine usage for project management here.

Asana is free for up to 15 team members. This project management tool is full of useful features for collaborative work under one roof. Multiple projects, task management and tracking, third-party tools integration, individual workplaces, calendars and project dashboards are all available within this one single platform.

Podio is available for free for up to 5 team members. It is an all-in-one collaboration tool that makes project progress transparent and flexible with all content and conversations integrated smoothly.

Pro tip: Don Draper would have greatly elevated his productivity level if he used a simple Kanban productivity system. The Kanban method (board) allows you to simplify project progress by splitting and visualizing it all into upcoming, current and complete tasks.

Market Research Tools

No one can tell you more about your target audience than your potential and current users. Nothing works better here than online questionnaires and surveys. Here are some industry-trusted DIY online tools that can provide you with interactive customizable consumer panel surveys, a huge database of easy-to-target respondents and interpretive reports.

SurveyGizmo is one of the most powerful and affordable survey tools available. With the help of the Survey Build tool you can create 40+ survey question types, which can be customized with your brand, and then sent to respondents via email, social media or embedded in your own site. The pricing is lower than other providers’. The basic membership charge is as low as $25/month.

SurveyMonkey is another leading survey platform that provides you with in-depth real-time market research results. A freemium version is available with 10 questions and 100 responses as the limit.

Samplify is a free market research tool that has a clean and user-friendly interface with easy-to-customize targeting and insightful reports about survey results.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

Every digital marketer should have fundamental SEO tools, which are important for keyword research and analysis, backlink checking, link acquisition, rank tracking, social engagement analysis and competitive benchmarks. All of these integral SEO tasks form the bottom line of a cohesive digital marketing strategy. If you miss any of these tasks, you won’t be able to see the forest for the trees.

Alexa is a great source of digital marketing data with comprehensive visitor traffic analysis, mobile insights, competitor metrics and basic social engagement insights. Membership pricing varies from $9.99 to $799 per month.

Compete is one of the digital industry’s old timers. They provide digital marketing experts with in depth information about your target market and your business rivals. Note that the data provided by Compete is tailored around the U.S market. The most popular solution from Compete is the Compete Pro that allows you to dive deep into your competition research, discover new proven keywords, analyze your website and check your competitors’ referral traffic. The account pricing starts at $249/month (higher than other SEO tool platforms).

Ahrefs is the most powerful and trusted link research platform with the largest index of live backlinks refreshed every 30 minutes (powered by its own search bot!). Ahrefs provides a detailed analysis of the link profile of your site compared to your competitors’ sites, plus data on new link acquisition and lost link tracking.

Google PageSpeed Insights is an open source web page testing tool powered by Google. The tool runs a number of tests regarding your site page performance in order to eliminate issues related to resource caching, assets upload/download size, JavaScript and CSS codes etc. The pagespeed insights of your pages are supplied with DIY SEO recommendations and advice, the successful implementation of which can significantly shorten your page load time and reduce your bounce rate (the page load time should not exceed 3 sec).

The Google Mobile-Friendly Testing tool is coupled with the PageSpeed Insights web page testing tool. It checks your site to see if it is eligible to be included in Google’s mobile search results in accordance with the new Google Mobile-Friendly algorithm factors. This tool is also open source and absolutely free.

KeywordTool.io is a free keyword research tool that provides up to 750+ relevant long-tail keyword suggestions based on the autocompletes of Google, YouTube, Bing and App Store search. Additional data parameters like search volume, CPC and bid competition are available in Keyword Tool Pro accounts (starting at $48/month).

Web CEO is the all-in-one SEO solution. For Don Draper it would be like a universal office toolkit that can be useful for anyone in the office. With this SEO oriented digital marketing platform you can cross out all of the above mentioned tools. If you really know the value of your time and want to run the bridge of your battleship, then Web CEO is what you need. You can conduct industry-level keyword research, technical and content SEO audits with in depth reporting and recommendations on mobile optimization. From there you can do a backlink analysis showing low quality links that you can then detox, after which you can track new link acquisition and spy on the best links your competitors have earned so you can maybe get the same ones from the same places. Add to that deep SERP tracking on 350+ global, local and social search engines (such as YouTube). Then there is the Content Submission Tool, the Site Audit tools, the Internal Links Optimization Tool and other SEO related features. 12 of 14 SEO tools are available for free (no time limits and no credit card required).  One of the unique free features that every digital marketing geek would love about Web CEO would be the ability to brand your SEO reports with your company or clients’ logo and color scheme. You can even host your own white label SEO tools or read-only SEO reports on your own website (via API or CNAME to a sub-domain)! With automatic report mailing, scheduled scanning of multiple projects and batch operation management, Web CEO can keep a modern web agency humming with progress reports that bring in hard cash. Customizable task lists can also be used as a project management tool and reporting system. There is even a great Social Media Metrics tool which will do most of the functions mentioned in the next section. Take this shortcut and start monetizing your SEO with Web CEO.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Google Social Analytics (Acquisition reports) is the first account you should sign up for in order to be socially plugged in! By tracking your social traffic you will be able to measure the progress of your organic social media campaigns. Here you’ll find some critical data on social network referrals, landing page engagement, social conversions etc. This data will help you keep the pulse on the social media performance of your site and identify your most viral content.

Buffer is a content curation and distribution tool that will save you a lot of time. It is a must-have tool for those digital marketers who have multiple accounts and a huge base of followers whom they want to keep updated with the latest information about company updates and industry news.

Hootsuite is a powerful social media management and marketing tool that Don Draper would fall in love with. Use it for the efficient management of your multiple social assets and workflow, collaboration with your marketing fellows and to bring your social media marketing campaigns in line with the time you have to spend on them. At the time of this writing, Hootsuite’s retweets did not include a presentation of the Twitter image of original Twitter posts, but that is a minor issue they should clear up quickly. The tool can be a real social media time-saver.

ManageFlitter is one of a number of nifty tools to use when you are following more people on Twitter than are following you back. Twitter only lets you follow 2000 people before it sets a limit of not allowing you to follow more than 20% more people than follow you back. No matter how popular you become, you may have to use a tool like this to unfollow enough people to keep following those new people who are really interested in your business. For Google+, there is a similar service called Cycloscope that lets you know whom you’re circling but who are not circling you back.

Facebook Page Insights is for the social analytics of your Facebook page. Analyze the engagement, likes and shares and other metrics of your page posts alongside your competitors’ page performance in order to improve your organic facebook reach and outperform the competiton.

Facebook Ads Manager is the essential tool for multiple Facebook ad campaigns management. With the help of Ads Manager you can optimize your ads for better conversion and customize your targeted audience. You can also use pixel tracking to reach the people who are most likely to take action on your ads (retargeting).

Content Marketing Tools

Content is the way to drive peoples’ attention to the product you offer. Statistics show that 90% of all online companies market with content. Don’t become one of the 10% who pull up the rear.

Google Alerts is the best free alert email notifier about the latest news around the web. All you need to do is specify targeted keywords and the frequency of the individual alerts you want to receive in your email. With Google Alerts you can be the first to elaborate around an issue regarding a hot topic, thus increasing the odds of a blog or social media post going viral which can then help you win first page rankings for your keywords.

BuzzSumo is one of the best content generation tools that can help you get new ideas for your future posts, examine what kind of content works best and find new influencers in your niche. Be sure to follow these influencers from your active and now-popular social media accounts.

Quora is certainly the most authoritative Q&A platform showing crowed-sourced expert answers for any topic. You can use Quora as both a content alert forum, a content distribution channel (write answers to questions that relate to your business) as well as a lead generation tool (if someone is asking about where they can find a product that can do what yours does, you may want to pounce). Create a profile, follow all the topics and questions you are interested in + get alerts to your email box about the latest answers. You can use Quora as a content distribution tool by sharing links to your website and blog posts within your relevant and helpful answers.

MailChimp is an email marketing tool that automatically sends regular newsletters and reminders to your customers about industry news, company updates as well as your latest blog posts, special offers etc. With this leading email marketing provider you can easily personalize email templates and send them to the right people at the right time. MailChimp is also great for mobile email marketing.  Remember that keeping in touch with current and prospective users is the easiest and most savvy way to retain active users and stir up inactive ones.

PPC/Advertising Tools

Google AdWords is a paid advertising platform powered by Google. It is a traditional online advertising scheme that makes your ads visible to searchers when they enter relevant queries on Google search. The process of an ad campaign setup is simple. You launch an ad that is attached to your branded or other targeted keywords, set a budget for your campaign and pay Google for every click on your ad.

AdRoll is a cross-platform and cross-device retargeting provider that will help you run multiple retargeting campaigns on the Web, Social Media, Desktop and Mobile. It is a more effective type of advertising than Google AdWords since it reaches the people who have already visited your site and follows them with your retargeting ads onto other websites and platforms.

Taboola is the new word in the search engine marketing world. This tool is the perfect combination of Native Advertising and Content Marketing tools. Instead of spending your budget on less effective paid banners, you’re better off spending your time and money on the monetization of your branded content. Taboola will help you bring targeted highly engaged traffic to your dedicated landing pages, blog posts, infographics or other viral content via third party publisher sites where your content will be featured as sponsored, relevant material. Simillar approaches are offered by Zemanta and Outbrain.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

Conversion is at the top of the digital marketing funnel. If you master the subtleties of conversion rate optimization, you will benefit from well converted traffic and high rankings. Your landing pages are the first content assets on which to run A/B optimization tests in order to make changes that can boost your website conversion rate. Here are some tools that will help you.

Clicktale is designed specifically for the analysis of user behavior on your website. Features provided by the platform include Conversion Analytics, Experience Center and Session Replays. The pricing is based on the solution you buy.

Crazy Egg is a great and easy-to-use heat map tracking tool. You will love it because it gives you a view of what areas of your landing pages are more and less clickable. This can help to maximize your optimization of valuable spots with call-to-actions in order to generate more conversions.

Tip: Try to keep your list of essential digital marketing tools to a minimum in order to avoid a tool overload. If you spend more time trying to master a tool than on getting results from it, then dump it like Don Draper would have done.

The post 30 Digital Marketing Tools the Real Mad Men Would Have Wanted appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We know how hard it may be to choose the best product in the modern world of marketing hype. We compared the WebCEO Online Rank Checker to the Authority Labs tool to figure out what each tool will do.

We have chosen the two most popular plans, both cost $99/mo.

When we compare Web CEO and Authority Labs domains and keywords directly, it seems Authority Labs gives you more. However, if you add a keyword such as “real estate” for Google.com (USA) and the same keyword for Google.ca (Canada), Authority Labs will count them as two keyword slots, while with the WebCEO Rank Checker this would be only one keyword.

With the WebCEO Rank Checker you can choose from 300+ local search engines as well as the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing). Also with Web CEO you can monitor every keyword in 5 search engines while Authority Labs only in 3 (and will count it as 3 different keywords).

As you know, ranking reports are one of the most important aspects of an SEO business. You can save your ranking report in CSV format with Authority Labs, but only manually.

The Web CEO Online Rank Checker scans your rankings automatically and sends reports to your email inbox.

Authority Labs allows you to share your ranking reports on a white-label domain in read-only format.

With Web CEO Online’s Pro Plan, you can do this but you can also share the actual tools themselves with customers and coworkers by using the White Label Domain service available in the Pro Plan ($99+/mo).

The Web CEO Gold Plan for the fixed $99 price lets you show reports at reportsharing.com. You would have to pay $20 more per month for the white label service plus the Pro Plan project and scan fees.

The White Label Domain feature of the WebCEO Online SEO tools allows users to configure a domain that will host the SEO tools and you can then label the tools with a private logo, header, footer and custom design. Here your clients and coworkers can log on from your own website to collaborate on projects, operate the SEO tools in a Do-It-Yourself mode, or view reports in a read-only format.

Consider reviewing the WebCEO White-label SEO Tools. Start with a free trial here.

A live screenshare demo on white-label SEO Platform management is available on request. Please fill in the form on our website and expect Allen Maccannell, VP Sales at WebCEO, to contact you shortly.

The post Web CEO Online VS. Authority Labs appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.