Author: yarra

Neil Patel (the big cheese of SEO) recently put together a review of 13 essential SEO tools.

We’ve summarised the 13 tools mentioned in the review and listed them by value (to us) and their fees.

FREE AND VALUABLE

SEOquake (a browser SEO extension)

Helps identify good sites for posting. Two parts:

• SeoBar is an additional toolbar, which shows the values of selected parameters for the page currently opened in the browser window. Set of parameters shown by SeoBar is fully customizable by user.
• The second part is the computation of the parameters for search results and its inclusion into search engine result pages – SERPs – for the most popular search engines. General sets of parameters consists of such things as Google Page Rank, Google Index (number of indexed pages in Google), Google Link (number of links pointed to the current page (except links from concerned domain)). Similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters. There is also a tool for creation of custom parameters at the user’s disposal. These parameters can be saved and used for future research.

Moz Open Site Explorer

• Research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging backlinks.
• Free data: inbound links, just discovered, top pages, linking domains, anchor text, compare links metrics.
• Full access to Open Site Explorer with Moz Pro, Moz Pro features: https://moz.com/products/pro/features
• Montly subscriptions for Moz Pro from $100- $600, annual ~$480, 30 days free trial.

Part of the Moz Pro, MozBar is also free: https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

• Access important SEO metrics at a glance as you surf the web.
• Create custom searches by search engine, country, and region or city.
• See how difficult it is to rank for a given keyword.
• Expose page elements with the Analyze Page overlay.
• Preview and validate authorship, schema.org, and other markup inside the browser.
• View social metrics for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Google Webmaster Tools

Data on:

• Links to Your Site (total links, who links the most, how your data is linked, your most linked content).
• Internal Links

SEO SpyGlass

• A backlink research and audit software (find all backlinks that point to a website, run anti-penguin link audit to remove any harmful links, reverse-engineer your competitors’ link-building, analyze any backlink over 50+ link quality factors).
• It seems all the software functions are available for free http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/download.html, and one gets additional services if buying a license: SEO SpyGlass Professional, for website owners and webmasters $125, SEO SpyGlass Enterprise, for professional optimizers and SEO companies $300 http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/buy.html

VALUABLE, NOT FREE

Ahrefs

• Track your backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and know what your competitors are doing (site explorer, positions explorer, content explorer, position tracker, crawl report, Ahrefs alerts).
• Monthly subscriptions from $100- $400, annual $83-$333, 14 days free trial

Raven SEO Tools

• Includes a search engines report (Google and Bing), an overall picture of a website’s SEO health (summary report), link building tool (providing quality data on any URL, domain, keyword or phrase).
• Pro $99/mo, agency $249/mo, 30 days free trial.

Majestic SEO

• Good for creating a backlink profile of any site (data on external backlinks, referring domains, referring ips, referring subnets, backlink history, backlink breakdown, anchor text).
• Option for a free webmaster account – I could not find exactly what that account offers.
• Monthly subscriptions from $50- $400, annual $500-$4000.

Long Tail Pro

• Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis Software (find thousands of profitable keywords in seconds, calculate keyword competitiveness, competitor analysis on top 10 google results, check rankings of sites in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, import lists of 10,000 keywords at once, get access to the platinum vip Facebook community).
• $350 annually, or $37 monthly, $1 trial for 10 days

NinjaOutreach

• Guest post outreach software that automates and simplifies the process of attaining guest posts. Compiles useful statistics such as email open rates, click throughs and replies (Neil Patel reviewed this tool here).
• Starts from $69 per month for one user, up to $599 per month for 10 users. Offers an annual subscription discount of 25%.

EXPENSIVE, VALUABLE

Link Detox

• link risk management tool: finds unnatural, spammy links that are dragging down website’s rankings, cleans up backlink profile, builds Penguin-friendly links and detects and mends negative SEO attacks and Google Penalties.
• $450-$1300 monthly for more than one site.

GroupHigh

• Blog search engine: search 15m active blogs by content, reach, social following, location, MozRank, and dozens of other filters.
• Monitor your campaign’s progress e.g. how much traffic your influencers are driving, post engagement levels, and content summaries. Create reports.
• For managing your blogger relationships – organize, filter, contact info, template emails.
• Very expensive: pricing starts at $9,000 per year for full access, free 7 days trial.

NOT VALUABLE

BuzzStream

• Good for email campaigns
• Builds and organises a contacts database based on a list of URLs, provides theirs social metrics, helps write a personalised message to them and manages further contact, provides organisation of team members.
• Montlhy subscriptions from $24 – $999, 14 days free trial.

Followerwonk

• Twitter analytics tool for finding, analyzing, and optimising social growth.
• One profile is free but with limited data, up to 3 profiles $ 29 /mo, $280 annually, up to 20 profiles $ 79 /mo, $760 annually.

Link Prospector

• Nothing special, researching links and contacts faster due to the option to pre-select what kind of opportunities you wish to focus on, but do not offer any kind of pre/post analysis.
• Pay as you go ($5.00/credit), Consultant $47/month, Agency $127/month, Enterprise $497/month

In my industry the company Yoke Design appears at the top of Google’s search results for the phrases “web design” and “web design Melbourne” and I don’t….bugger. At the moment my website is on page two of Google for the phrase “web design”, which attracts no traffic.

Using free and publicly available online tools I’ve analysed the Yoke website according to SEO principles and in no particular order I detail the elements of their site that should impact and explain their high rankings.

1. Links

Since Ancient times (the 1990’s),  the greatest influence on Google rankings has been the quantity and quality of inbound links.

According to MOZ’s open site explorer Yoke have around 9000 links from 144 different domains. A quick scan of the other sites on the first page of Google reveal that this number of links is neither massive nor small.

Here’s how many links the other top ranked sites have:

Magic Dust: 46,000 links from 966 different domains.

Chromatix: 2500 links from 100 different domains.

The variability and number of inbound links the top ranked websites have suggests the quality of the link source is important. The MOZ tool reveals these sites have links from high quality sites such as The Huffington Post (Magic Dust), Ads of the World (Yoke) and North Western University (Chromatix).

So if you haven’t yet done so, you need to think about building some inbound links. Here is a review of some useful link building tools to get you started.

On to our next topic – content.

2. Content, Blogging & Frequency

Yoke keep their content fresh by regularly posting new articles on their blog. Here are some key takeaways from their blogging efforts:

• Frequency: they posted 14 articles in 2015.
• Word count: the 14 posts from last year have an average of 1376 words each.
• Images: they’ve taken great care to add compelling images to each post with an average of seven images per post and one video per post.
• Social engagement: they’re doing very well to promote their posts via social media. Each post has an average of 300 social media shares with one post clocking 1500 shares.This kind of exposure encourages traffic back to their site, generates interest in their brand, builds their reputation as a ‘thought leader’ in their industry, increases their Google domain authority and helps to build back links to their site which increases their Google rankings.

In summary Yoke are doing a fantastic job generating compelling content on a frequent basis. I would surmise that their high Google rankings are mostly due to this.

3. Domain Age

Although a fairly insignificant factor in determining search engine rankings an older domain has more authority in Google than a younger domain.

According to a whois search, Yoke’s domain has been registered since at least 2008 although I suspect it’s older (certainly the company has been around longer than that).

4. Use of Keywords

How have Yoked integrated important search keywords into their site?

In their homepage source code, the phrase “Web design” appears 10 times and  “Web design Melbourne” appears four times. I would have considered this over doing it a little but it obviously works for them. Importantly both phrases appear in their meta description and page title.

Interestingly their homepage contains almost no text, just a few sentences with links to internal pages with keyword anchor texts. A few years ago it was thought a homepage required a lot of content to rank well but Yoke proves this is not the case.

They haven’t bothered with “meta keywords” as Google doesn’t use meta tag keywords to influence search results.

5. Optimised Images

I mentioned above that Yoke are really good with their use of images. A closer look reveals they’re doing a good job to optimise their images for both usability and SEO in the following ways:

• Image file size: A quick scan of the blog reveals images between 100kb-350kb, which is nice and low enough to load quickly (and the larger image sizes seem to be animated gifs). As images are the main thing that slows a website load speed it’s super important to have the file size of each image as low as possible whilst maintaining quality.
• Image file names: they’ve sometimes used keywords in their image file names (so Google knows what the image is about), for example “pause-fest-digital-business-transformations-yoke1.gif” . Naming your images properly also help your images appear in Google’s image search.Interestingly they’ve included their company name in all image file names, further promoting their brand as images get saved and reused around the web.
• Image alt tags: according to Wikipedia, image alt tags are “Alternative text is text associated with an image that serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image.” It’s basically a hidden description added to images that appear when the image can’t be shown or for users with visual impairments. Check out Google’s guidelines for using alt tags. Yoke have used alt tags for their images, in most cases copying the filename to the tag.

6. Page Speed

In 2010 Matt Cutts from Google declared that Google will start incorporating site speed as one of the many signals it uses to determine search result rankings. However, he mentioned speed won’t carry much weight in determining rankings and that less than 1% of sites would be affected.

I suspect that because site speed affect other signals used to determine rankings (user behaviour, bounce rate, etc.) the knock on effects of a site’s load time may have a bigger impact on rankings than suggested by Matt Cutts in the article above.

However, I may be wrong; Yoke’s Google page speed scores aren’t particularly great and it certainly hasn’t hurt their rankings:

Still, they beat my current scores of 65 for desktop and 52 for mobile. Something I can improve on.

Another nice tool to analyse page speed is Pingdom’s speed test tool. Yoke score quite well with 87/100 but their load time of 4.62 seconds could definitely be improved. Directly underneath the speed test Pingdom shows a list of every element on the page and it’s file size and load time. An excellent tool for identifying areas of improvement to a site’s load speed.

Summary

The above analysis shows Yoke are doing all the right things according to Google best practices, but I think what places them at the top of the pack is their successful blogging.

ASOS.com is one of the world’s largest online fashion retailers with a market capitalisation of 2.51 Billion British Pounds (4th March, 2016) so it would be a fair guess that they know a thing or two about how to present a product on a website.

Below is a screenshot of an ASOS product page with notations on 5 simple presentation tips you can use to make your product pages better.

In detail…

1. Reassurances – at the top of the page are three reassurances aimed to ease any doubts in the buyer’s mind before they click the purchase button. ASOS must have tonnes of intelligence on why their user’s don’t purchase, and these reassurances aim to address that. Knowing about shipping costs and returns are obviously large mental roadblocks for consumers of fashion online, so are immediately and prominently addressed at the top of the screen.

2. Contrasting Colours on the “add to cart” Button – the goal of any product page is to have the user click the add to cart button and ASOS make this as easy as possible by using a highly contrasting colour to make the button stand out against the background.

Importantly the button is ‘above the fold’ so users don’t have to go hunting for it. They simply select the colour and size then add to cart.

3. Product Images & Video – ASOS use multiple product images taken from various angles and different contexts (standing / walking). They also show a video of the product in action. Highly recommended for selling clothing online.

4. Social Proof – Immediately below the product is a social media ‘share’ bar. Lot’s of likes and shares indicate the popularity of a product with other users, so may help sell the product. Unfortunately, low or no likes and shares can have the opposite effect.

5. Above the Fold – keep everything that’s important above the fold, including:

a) The price
b) The add to cart button as well as the size and colour buttons
c) The images
d) The product title
e) Everything required to sell the product

After working for years on many small business’ Google AdWords campaigns I’ve come to notice six common problem areas that when improved, easily halve a budget and attract higher quality leads.

Try these six easy tricks to double your campaign’s effectiveness.

1. Do Not Use Broad Match type for your Keywords

The worst mistake every new advertiser makes is using the broad match option for keywords. A broad match keyword has no punctuation defining when your ad will show and will result in wildly irrelevant keywords triggering your ads.

Here’s a real example from an online towel retailers’ campaign of a broad match keyword option for the phrase pool towels:

This broad match phrase triggered the client’s ads to show for irrelevant phrases such as “towel racks” and “pool chairs” which the client didn’t sell and wasted the budget. Adding quotation marks “ “ to the keyword means your ad will only show for your exact keywords in order plus any words either side of it.

For example the phrase matched keyword “Pool Towels” will show for “Pool Towels on sale”, “Pool towels online” and “where to buy pool towels”. Here’s what it looks like in the account:

This simple step makes your ads so much more relevant, targeted and effective.

How to change to Phrase Match Keywords:

Simply click on your keyword to edit it and select phrase match from the drop down menu to add the quote marks ” “ to the keyword and hit save.

2. Use Separate Ad Landing Pages for distinct Products and Services

Don’t send everybody who clicks on your ads to your homepage.

If you’re advertising a specific product or service then direct your ads straight to that page on your website. For example, if you’re an online store selling Brother Ink Cartridges, then make sure the user is taken directly to the Brother Ink Cartridge page rather than the homepage showing all ink brands.

This provides the following benefits:

• Your visitor will find the product or service you offer far more easily than if they were directed to your homepage and made to navigate your site.

• Google will increase your keyword’s quality score and reward you by ranking your ad higher for the same budget.

To do this you will need to create separate ad groups for your keywords.

How to Direct your Ads to Separate Landing Pages:

After creating separate Ad Groups for your various products or services, navigate to your Ads tab and create a new ad. Click on any of your ads to edit it.

When the editing screen is open (see below) make sure the destination URL in your ads points directly to the product or service described in your ad.

In the fictional example below, my ad is for “Dry Dog Food” from an online pet food store. Rather than direct the user to my homepage, I want to send them directly to the page which sells the dry dog food, so I enter that URL in the field at the bottom – as highlighted below.

3. Define the Geographic Area your ads will show in

I often see campaigns that haven’t properly defined the physical locations in which their ads should show. I recently fixed a campaign for a dentist located in Western Sydney whose ads were showing in London. Quite a waste of money.

How to define your Geographic Advertising Area:

To properly define your advertising area make sure in your Campaign settings you have All features selected in your campaign type:

Then scroll down to edit the Locations -> Advanced Search:

Then select Radius targeting to set a circular area on the map of where you want your ads to show:

A big tip: Google targets this area using user’s IP address information and its fairly inaccurate. As a general rule of thumb you’ll want to at least double the intended area where you want your ads to display to make sure you’ve got your actual intended area covered.

4. Use Negative Keywords

An absolute must for every campaign is to use a long list of negative keywords. A negative keyword is a word that you DON’T want your ad to show for. For example, I noticed in a chiropractor’s campaign that their ads were triggering for the phrase “chiropractor pillows”, which wasn’t relevant to the client, so we added “pillows” as a negative keyword.

How to add Negative Keywords:

To create your negative keyword list, go to the Keywords tab, scroll to the bottom until you see the +Negative keywords link:

Then click on the Add tab and Add keywords link in the drop down at the Campaign level:

As a start, almost every business can use the following list of negative keywords to immediately start saving on their budget and attract more relevant clicks:

“free”
“reviews”
“jobs”
“courses”
“books”
“apprenticeship”
“DIY”
“education”
“exam”
“discount”
“seminar”
“college”
“bad”

Notice I’ve used the phrase match option for the negative keyword list.

5. Bid more for your Keywords

This may seem like an odd tip if you’re trying to reduce your AdWords spend, however I’ve seen that increasing your bid will increase your campaign’s effectiveness and here’s why; generally, the higher you bid the higher your keyword will rank which means you’ll attract a better quality lead.

For example, if you’re ad is ranking in the 5^th position on Google and you receive an enquiry, chances are that that enquirer has already contacted the four businesses ranked above your ad for quotes, i.e. they are a tyre kicker. People who only click the first or second result on Google are not as price sensitive and these are the people you want to attract!

How to Bid more for your Keywords:

Click on the Keywords tab, scroll down to see your keywords and across to the Max. CPC column, click on the price you see listed, change it and press save.

6. Match your Ad Text to your Keywords

Often a business will create a campaign with only one ad group with a long list of keywords set to trigger just one ad. For example, a dentist’s campaign I looked at recently had one ad that showed for keywords as diverse as “snap on teeth” and “pulp capping”. These keywords should have been broken up into separate ad groups with ads written specifically for those services. This provides the following benefits:

• Because your ad is more relevant to the keyword it’s triggered by it will receive more clicks, or a higher ‘click through rate’ (CTR), and more relevant enquiries to your business.
• Because your CTR is higher Google will reward you by ranking your ad higher on the page for the same budget.

How to Create a new Ad Group:

Click on the Ad Groups tab then click the red +AD GROUP button:

Select the campaign you wish the ad group to appear in then select continue:

The next page is simply a repeat of how you created your original ad group – creating an ad then choosing keywords to trigger that ad. Hit the Save ad Group button at the bottom of the screen and you’re done.

If you have any questions on improving your AdWords campaign feel free to email me at mail@yarraweb.com.