WordPress is one of the most advanced software solutions the internet has even seen. What’s even more amazing, is that it’s completely free to use, and has generated billions of dollars in new business for companies that have figured out new and exciting ways to make it even better. In short, WordPress makes starting a blog easy!

In addition to WordPress making a ton of money for businesses around the world, it’s also helped fuel a whole new industry of bloggers who have gone on to some pretty amazing things. In short, WordPress is a gift from the gods — even when it’s installed and running right out of the box. However, there are still always going to be some room for improvements to make your site and content run even better, while also providing a higher level of user engagement in the process.

To help with this process, here are some recommended tools, tricks, and resources to make your WordPress site even better!

Improve Your SEO Skills

No matter how long you’ve been active in the world of content creation or blogging, you already know the rules of SEO and ranking in Google are always changing. One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition and make sure your site is ranking where it should be is to stay on top of the latest WordPress SEO trends.

Such topics and methods to always keep an eye on are making sure your WordPress SEO settings are setup correctly from day one — making sure your URLs are SEO friendly and that your WWW vs. Non-WWW aren’t getting confused with each other. SEO Plugins can also play a huge role in how your site ranks in Google, so always make sure you are using the latest updated versions, along with XML sitemaps and optimization of your individual blog posts. New WordPress SEO best practices are also changing all the time. Make sure you continue to internally link to your best content, no-follow external links when necessary and also optimize the speed and performance of your site.

Feature an Expert Roundup on Your Site

Creating content for your site is one of the best ways to provide value to your audience and increase rankings in the search results, but always coming out with the same type of content can really be a killer on your audience’s interest and engagement factor. This is especially true if you have an informational based website, where it’s mostly made of text or data-rich information.

One way to bring a fresh breath and excitement to your blog is to feature an expert roundup from industry experts in your space. The concept here is quite simple. Find a bunch of authority figures or bloggers that have an expertise in whatever your blog topic is about, and ask them all a single question your audience would find value in. Once you’ve accumulated enough responses, you can then post an expert roundup post on your site. Not only will this help with bringing a whole new type of content to your site, it will also explode your social shares, backlinks, and references, while also featuring some of the top experts within your space right on your site!

Create a Better Contact Form

By default, many WordPress blogs are set up with a contact page that allows site visitors to send emails to the owners of the blog. Popular plugins like Contact Form 7 have also been installed on millions of WordPress sites, but still… the real features and stats that could be there are simply lacking.

A better solution is WPForms, which is an advanced drag and drop WordPress form builder that allows site owners to have complete control over how and where they build forms and collect information on their sites. Not only does WPForms offers the ability to create any type of online forms you can imagine, it’s also setup for accepting online payments, creating subscription-based forms, eliminating spam with captcha features and also offering a wide range of form templates to choose from.

Simple WordPress Optimization Tips

As mentioned earlier, WordPress right out of the box is pretty amazing… but as you continue to add new plugins, content, themes, and comments build up, it can become quite a clunky and messy world in the database and backend area of your site. This is why it’s important to always keep an eye on the performance of your site and continually run optimization tests and methods wherever possible.

ElegantThemes has an excellent checklist of optimization methods that every WordPress users should be performing. Such tasks include using a fast WordPress theme, monitoring your plugins and removing any inactive ones, emptying your trash and removing spam comments, reducing your drafts, spam, pingbacks and trackbacks to your existing posts… and of course, optimizing your web images for peak performance and fast loading.

Run a Google Speed Test

You might think you have a fast website or blog, but it’s probably best to let the experts at Google decide. With Google now putting more weight on the actual speed and loading time of websites and how they rank in the search results, it’s more important than ever to make sure you aren’t hurting your site with a few slow loading images or scripts.

The good news is that this can all be tested within seconds through Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply plug your site URL into the form and click “Analyze” and you’re off to the races. Google will then provide you with a quality score for how your site loads on both mobile and desktop devices. In addition to receiving a score, you will also get a list of key areas that you can improve to further increase your site. Once you’ve made their recommended changes, be sure to run the test again and see where your new score is.

Make Your WordPress Site Screaming Fast in 2017

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to improve upon whatever you might already have in place with your WordPress site. Whether it’s improving your WordPress theme or how you are collecting data through your lead generation forms, it’s all about staying up with the latest trends and implementing such changes on your site. Be sure to run through each of the recommended resources above and don’t forget to check out our resource guide on the top website analyzer tools to continually improve the overall performance of your site.

If you want to have a successful web site or blog, you will need to rank at the top of the search results. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by staying in good terms with Google and also making sure your site follows their guidelines at all times. While most people will say Google ranks sites based off their content, it actually comes down to a number of factors (content, backlinks, site speed and more).

To help with this process (and more), it’s highly recommended that you run a Site Audit for your website or blog. There are many options to choose from when trying to analyze and improve your site, but in this example we are going to use Mondovo.com, which provides an all-in-one solution for everything you need to monitor and management site rankings, social media and improving many different areas of your site.

How to Run a Site Audit with Mondovo

The first thing you are going to need to create a free account with Mondovo. Once inside the members area (seen below) you will be able to add as many web sites as you like. At the same time you will also see the many different features, tools and reports you can run through their site. The first one we are going to focus on, is the SEO Audit Tool.

On the left side area of the dashboard area you will see the navigation menu where you can navigate through the site. For this tutorial, we are going to click on the “Website Audit” option.

After clicking on the “Website Audit” feature, you will then be sent over to a form like the one below where you can start running an in-depth site audit. You will need to provide the following:

• Domain – The site you want to run an audit on.
• Pages to Crawl – How many pages you want the report to analyze.
• Optional Add-ons – Social Metrics, Google Page Speed and Broken Link checks.

If you have a massively large site, I would crawl as many pages as possible (matching how many pages or posts you have live.) I would also recommend you check off these add-ons, as these are great things to know about your site when trying to improve any errors or problems that could be affecting your site.

You will also notice there is a price associated with this as well. Mondovo is awesome with their rates, as you only need to pay for the services or reports you are interested in. As you can see in the image below, this 100+ page report with all of the add-ons, is only going to cost 68 cents. I will go into more detail on this later on.

After filling out the required information, you would then click the “Crawl” button. Depending on the size of your site and how many pages you are crawling, the amount of time it takes to complete a full site audit will vary.

Once completed, you will see a report like the one below. The website audit report is broken down into a number of categories, including meta issues, linking details, content, HTML optimization, internal links, external links and social metrics. Clicking on any of these tabs will provide a detailed report of issues, which need to be fixed and how to fix them.

You can also see an example of the Meta Issues report below. This will give you a quick overview of missing meta tags, descriptions, duplication issues and if your titles are too long — all important issues when considering how Google will rank websites based off their content structure and settings.

Clicking on any of the gray boxes will load all of the results and reasons for why each issue was triggered as one that needs to be fixed.

To see all of the reporting available through a full site audit, be sure to run your site through Mondovo today.

Run a SEO On-Page Analysis Report

In addition to a full site audit, you can also use the On-Page SEO Tool to analyze individual pages on your site. This tool is perfect if you have a site that you want to rank higher in the search result, and want to make sure it’s as clean and optimized as much as possible.

You can see an example below of how this report looks for the end user.

Monodovo will run your site through a number on On-Page SEO tests, then provide you with a report like the one below on what different areas where your site may have passed or failed. You will also see the Page Size, Page Speed, Word Count and an overall Page Score as well.

Taking the time to fix some of your best individual pages can prove very rewarding, as the more you work to improve your own site and content, the more likely you are to move past the competition in the search results. Best of all, all reports will be stored within your account for future reference and to track progress made.

Why Mondovo is a Perfect SEO Tool for Site Owners

Mondovo was created with one simple goal in mind — providing clients with the necessary SEO and social media management tools, while saving time and limiting excess costs. The mission was simple for the company, and the end result is that clients have the opportunity to save up to 80% on their month-to-month SEO and social media management.

At the same time, it’s important to not let Mondovo fall into the mix with other SEO and social media management tools on the internet today. Mondovo is a pay-as-you-go platform, which means you aren’t going to get locked into any longterm payment plans or agreements. Another area where they are clearly different, is in their pricing models.

As you can see in the screenshot below, clients can actually pick and choose how many keywords they want to track on a monthly basis, website audits they want to run, analysis reports and much more. The end result is no wasted money being left on the table month-after-month.

Since there is no monthly billing in place, and the client decides how much they want to pay (based off reports), it’s one of the best ROI tracking solutions out there for it’s dollar investment.

Start Ranking Higher by Analyzing and Improving Your Site Today

When it comes to creating a website or blog, many people will focus solely on the site’s content and backlinks. These are both important, but if you don’t have a fast loading site or Google is having a hard time crawling your site… you simply aren’t going to rank as high as you could.

It’s also important to think about how many sites there are in the world today — which is over a billion! We all know that the majority of them aren’t doing anything to improve how their site looks on the backend. This means it’s a huge opportunity and advantage for a site to move up in the search rankings when these areas are focused on.

Take the time to run a site audit on your site, which also checking for improvement after each change made to your site. If you spend just an hour a day cleaning up your site, it could make the world of a different after just a few days.

Are you a WordPress user or blogger who needs some savvy analyzer tools to help you figure out how you are doing with your SEO and rankings? Your blog is important. You use it as a way to communicate with your loyal customers about your brand, roll out new products, and survey your readers to see what they want.

WordPress users know the value of using WordPress to create great content that appeals to their target audience as well as all of the extras that come with it. You also need to have a way to analyze your blog or site on WordPress.

That’s why tracking tools are so important. You need to have ways of tracking how your site and blog are doing at any given time so that you can make the adjustments needed to maximize your impact.

There are some tools that will help you keep up with your SEO and rankings. Many of these also measure other elements of your web presence, including targeted traffic, keyword success, and popularity among several different platforms.

SEO Analyzer

Neil Patel is one of the most well-known online marketers and entrepreneurs in the world today. Consider all of the success he’s had over the years, it would only make sense for him to have a few handy custom tools of his own. One such tool is his SEO Analyzer. With this tool you can easily track the basic elements of your traffic and site. You’ll be able to enter your WordPress site URL and see how it is doing on the major search engines. It will immediately give you feedback and stats on your blog and where it stands in the rankings, as well as the links and backlinks that point to your blog.

SERanking

SERanking is a powerful keyword tracking tool and SEO analyzers. From within the member’s area, users can create reports and site accounts to track all of their movements in the search results on a trending daily basis.

In addition to the keyword and ranking reports available through the site, SEO audit and competition analyzer tools are also available. The site also offers access to a wide range of additional tools and features, such as backlinks monitoring, keyword suggestion tools, marketing plans, a white label solution and also social media reports.

Link Research Tools

Link Research Tools provides you with very robust tools to get feedback on your WordPress sites. You can use it for any other site as well, including blogs, websites, and other pages. Just sign up for the trial for 30 days and try it out. You’ll have access to all of the features like the premium membership. But if you want to continue it, you’ll just need to sign up for the premium version.

It allows you to build high-quality “Penguin-safe” links that will keep you from getting penalized. You’ll be able to monitor any inbound links and delete those you don’t want to associate with your site. You will even be able to check on how your competition is doing in the rankings and adjust your campaigns to increase your competitive edge.

SEMRush

SEMRush is another great tool you can easily use with your WordPress site. This tool is different than the others in that it goes on search terms and keywords to do the analysis. Just enter your search term or keyword that you want to test to see if your site comes up. This gives you a glimpse into whether you are using the best keywords to render the results you need to direct users to your site.

It also allows you to use URLs if you choose to do it that way. It allows you to get a view of how your WordPress site is doing using a variety of cross-platform tools that will help you get a sense of what is working and what is not.

SerpStat

Serpstat lets you search a domain, keyword or search term that you wish to test. Using the easy-to-use search bar, you’ll be able to see if your domain is getting the traffic and demographics you want. You can type in a major domain or use some of the keywords that you are experimenting with.

To try this out, try using a popular domain such as amazon.com. You’ll be able to see all of the functions this way including the overall traffic, bar graphs of activity, lists of competitors’ hits, and much more.

SEO Analyzer Tools Summary

These five tools should serve to help you analyze your websites made with WordPress easily and keep records of how your sites are doing. You don’t have to pay a fortune to use most of these, and most have a free version. At the same time, don’t forget to read through our simple SEO tips for bloggers and site owners. These are the most basic SEO methods and best practices that are working today to improve site rankings and indexing within the search results.

I recommend using at least two or three different tools and compare them to get a truer picture of what your site is doing from different views and metrics and then decide how you need to change what you are doing to meet the need.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a way to track your page activity so that you can have the information you need to keep improving and collecting better leads and customers.

Way too many content creators and bloggers are focusing too much on their “content creation” and not their “content promotion”. While content is the foundation for your website or blog, it’s not going to work it’s magic on it’s own. With over a billion active sites on the internet and 300+ million of them being WordPress blogs, how is your site supposed to compete? Also, keep in mind that Google only list ten pages on their search results… which makes the concept of “Page 1” rankings seem even more impossible!

With all of this in mind, there are still plenty of ways your sole website or blog can stand out from the competition and rank at the top of Google. That little secret is called “long tail keywords”.

Long Tail SEO is actually one of the hidden gems of internet marketing and ranking in the search results. We’ve all heard of “long tail keywords” but not enough of us are actively using them within our content, linking structures and rank tracking. The common reason for this is that too many site owners are blinded by the flashy numbers of “generic keywords”, however… the likelihood of ranking for them is extremely low.

The Hidden Value of Long Tail SEO

Through the “Hidden Value of Long Tail SEO” infographic below, provided by HitTail, we can take a look at the true value of ranking at the top of the search results with long tail keywords.

To kick things off we should first explain what SEO is and why it’s such an effective method for ranking in the search results. HitTail descrives “Long Tail SEO” as”

A white-hat SEO process that involves targeting less competitive, highly specific search terms (a.k.a. long tail keywords). Since over 70% of all search queries are for long tail terms, there is incredible value in taking control of those keywords.

Here’s a perfect example of how such long tail keywords would prove more effective in content creation, ranking and online marketing.

Let’s say you wanted to create a website or blog in the financial or personal loan space. This is an extremely competitive space and if you were to try and rank for something like “credit cards” or “car title loans“, it would simply be way too competitive. Even if you wanted to pay to rank for these terms, you would be looking at several dollars per click. Instead, a better approach would be to either target a local audience or go with a long tail approach such as “best credit cards for bonus rewards” or “where to find car loan titles in new jersey”. Not only will either scenario help you rank higher in the search results, it will also allow you to know exactly what your audience is looking for as well.

In the infographic screenshot below you can see a typical scenario of what a long tail keyword looks like in reference to search demand and other top ranking keywords. You will also notice that 70% of all search traffic is based on long tail keywords, versus “fat head” and “chunky middle” keywords that many people focus too much attention on.

In the big scheme of themes, more people are now using long tail keywords in their online searches versus using generic one or two-word keywords. The reason for this is that not only are people getting smarter and more precise about what they are looking for, but Google is also getting better on delivering the best content for such search results as well. This also means that ranking potential and conversion rates are much easier to improve when using long tail keywords.

HitTail points this out in the infographic screenshot below when they state “Pages optimized for long-tail keywords move up 11 positions on average, compared to just 5 positions for head (generic) keywords.” and they also report “Conversion rates for long-tail keywords are 2.5 times higher than head (generic) keywords” — which makes perfect sense.

Here’s another example of how we are currently using this method on Blogging.org. While the main focus of our main page site is on “how to start a blog“, that’s a pretty generic topic. For all other phrases and topics around blogging, we have detailed sub-pages and guides that really drill down on each of these topics. A good example of this would be our “make money blogging guide“, which ranks for multiple keywords and phrases around the concept of making money with a blog.

Also with that in mind, articles using long tail keywords in their headlines and titles also tend to get higher click through rates as well. HitTail reports “Clickthrough rates increase as keywords become more specific”. So if someone was searching for “how to make money with a blog”, they would be more likely to click our article titled “Make Money Blogging: From Start to Business” versus a generic title like “Make Money with a Blog”.

You can also see in that chart below a comparison of 3, 4 and 5 word keywords, ranking based on their click through ratios.

Lastly, if you want to make the most out of your content creation and long tail keyword efforts, you need to know how to take action and put all of these key metrics to work. Here are a few recommended tips from HitTail.

• Add New Content on a Consistent Schedule
  – Publish one targeted article of blog post for each underperforming keyword of at least 400 words in length.
• Use a Variety of Long Tail Keywords
  – Search engines love sites that target a diverse set of keywords. Fortunately, there are plenty of long tail keyword to choose from! There are many sources for long tail keywords, but the best are those that you mine from your own content.
• Speak the Word
  – Build a social media presence around your website or blog. Use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube

No matter how you attempt to make long tail keywords work for your website, blog, brand or business — the two most important factors are your content and the type of links and social signals you point back to your site. You can focus on creating the best content in the world, but if you don’t have anyone pointing links back to your site, it will simply never rank or compete against the bigger players in the industry.

Implement all of these tips into your existing content creation and promotion methods, while also taking a look at what HitTail has to offer through their long tail recommendation service.

With hundreds of millions of blogs in the world today, the focus shouldn’t be able just creating content. With that many sites out there already, there is a very good that whatever you were just about to write about, is already out there. Instead, you need to focus on the core of your site, the type of content that brings value to it and how you can further establish the reach and credibility of your brand.

In this article, we are going to be taking a look at seven things you should consider before publishing that next article on your site. Each of these factors will not only improve the content you produce, but also the quality and engagement with your audience as well. Remember, real people are coming to your site because they are looking for something — it’s your job to provide it to them.

7 Blog Content Factors You Need to Consider

You most likely already have a blog of your own, if not click here and I will walk you through the process of how to get one up and running in the next 20 minutes. For everyone else, run through the list below and see how many of these key points you consider before clicking the ‘publish’ button on your site.

1 – Does this content provide any real value?

It’s a silly question, but you would be surprised how many people publish content on their site just for the sake of putting something out there. If you have a real site with real visitors coming to it, you need to provide real value. You can easily tell if your content is good or not based on how well it reads and related to it’s topic.

For example, if you came across a site with the same article you just wrote — would you want to read it?

2 – What this topic already discussed online?

As mentioned at the top of this article, it’s very hard to write about something that wasn’t already written about. However, what you can do is write it better and provide more value. A great way to do this is to look at the top sites ranking in Google for whatever it is you are writing about, then site them as examples and before sure to provide even more value and content then they are. This should help you also rank higher in the search results, as Google loves longer content.

3 – What this article written for SEO of a real person?

Combining the previous two points… is your site content providing value or was it written just to rank in the search results? The correct answer is that it should be for both, but not noticeable to the average person reading the content on your site.

Google isn’t stupid. In the past you could stuff keywords into your articles and rank, but that no longer works. What works today is providing the best value possible, getting social shares and more links back to your site.

In the recent discussion about digital marketing by DSG, they had the following to say on their blog:

The truth is, blogging is one of the most valuable SEO techniques to use these days. In the first place, it helps you publish lots of good content that your audience is looking for — leveraged correctly, this content will get your site ranked on page one. Secondly, consistent blogging means you’re updating your website regularly, meaning that you’re adding another page once a month, week, or even day! That literally tells Google: “Hey, look at us! We’re working really hard here, so come and check us out!”And guess what? That’s what Google will do — it will check your website more frequently to crawl and index new pages. If your content is good, and people love it, then those pages could be ranking at the top of SERPs. Pretty cool, huh?

In short, write for your audience and not for search engines — but also write in a way Google will see value in your SEO and content as well.

4 – How can I share this content with its target audience?

Getting people to find your content and share it with their audience is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your site. To do this effectively, you will need to know who your exact audience is — such as age, gender, location and interests.

By knowing this information, not only can you better cater the content to who is reading it, but you can also share it with others who might find value in it as well. The best way to approach this is to tag it when sharing it social media, posting your content to relevant forums and guest blog posting on other relevant sites.

Each of these methods are great for increasing traffic back to your site, while also reaching out to know audiences who are already looking at relevant content.

5 – How can I bring more awareness and shareability to my content?

It’s one thing to publish content to your site, it’s another to actually get people to keep coming back to your site. There are many ways to accomplish this, such as organic search rankings, social media and getting creative with your content. All social sharing and links back to your site help with getting more traffic, so make sure you have social sharing buttons set up on your site and that you do focus on link building from time to time.

A good example of this would be in our make money blogging article where we have over 2,000 words of text, but we also went above and beyond by also creating an infographic for the article. This allows you to easily reference back to your site with infographic exposure on other sites, while also bringing a more visually appealing look to your content.

Another great way to make sure your site brings focus to its content, is to make sure you have a website design by Quikclicks. No matter if you have a static website, a blog or even an ecommerce site, be sure to remove all unnecessary distractions and make it easy for your audience to share your content. Include social sharing buttons at the top and bottom of all posts, and if you can even using a plugin like “Floating Social Bar” to have it follow the user as they read through your content as well.

6 – Do I have a monetization plan in place so I can make money with my content?

Speaking of making money with a blog, that’s what many bloggers are struggling with today. This all goes back to providing value with your content and knowing who your niche audience is. Without knowing these answers, how are you supposed to monetize your site.

Once you know who is coming to your site and why, you can then start serving relevant affiliate offers to your audience. A good example of this would be if you made a site all about completing online surveys for cash. A great way to monetize the site would be to add survey affiliate links, which would then compensate you for every new signup you send to their sites. Amazon.com also has an affiliate program, which means you can make money off anyone you send to their site who ends up making a purchase.

7 – Did I provide my audience with a call-to-action or let them leave my site?

At the end of the day, the reason why we all create content is because we want people to come to our site. Did you know that 7 out of 10 people will never come back to your site? It’s true — and it was reported by the team over at OptinMonster.

So what does this mean? It means you need to have a call to action or something in place so you can get users to keep coming back to your site. This can be as simple as setting up a mailing list, using content upgrades, popup windows or redirecting your audience to a final lead generation form.

No matter what you do… just don’t let your audience read your content and then leave.

It’s All About Your Site Content

After running through the list above, you should now understand why content creation is so important. Even more important than the content you create, is the promotion you do for it afterwards. It’s much easier to promote something that provides real value and that you can put your name to, so make sure you only create the best of content for your site.

It is not so simple to explain what SEO is and what the best SEO tactics you should use to improve website performance. It requires not only knowing SEO tactics for your clients and having some technical skills, but also need to have much patience and useful SEO tools to handle your daily tasks.

Fortunately, today it is easy to get this information, as SEO experts are incredibly generous with their knowledge. I have asked 20 online experts two simple questions how they develop their marketing strategies and what SEO tools help them to improve their marketing tactics.

Here are the answers to the questions and top SEO tools recommended by the experts:

The Best SEO Tools (voted by 20 experts):

1. Ahrefs – 5 votes
2. SE Ranking – 5 votes
3. Screaming Frog – 5 votes
4. Semrush -5 votes
5. MozBar – 4 votes
6. BuzzSumo – 4 votes
7. Google Analytics – 3 votes
8. Google Search Console – 3 votes
9. Google Keyword Planner– 2 votes
10. Open Site Explorer – 2 votes

Pam Sallegue from SEO Hacker

#1. Our marketing efforts always start with identifying who our audience is, the demographics, even their professions, or positions in their marketing team – there we found out that we have good numbers of marketers as audience that want to know more about SEO and content marketing. That’s why we’re building content that aims to teach people how to optimize websites, how to build content that converts, and everything else that we know will cater to the needs of our audience. Our objective has always been to maintain the right audience – we don’t need audience that don’t need us. That’s why we still try to focus on creating content that matters, not just any random content.

#2. There are lots of tools that we’re using. One is Qeryz, because aside from Google Analytics, we get a better understanding of who our audience are by putting a microsurvey tool. To check website positions and backlinks SE Ranking tool is a great SEO helper for us. You can check our Toolbox to know all the tools we’re using.

David Trounce from Mallee Blue Media

#1. I believe that people who usually know the most about a business are those actually running it. Whenever I begin a new marketing consultation I always start with some broad questions to get them talking about what they think they are doing. 

This not only helps the prospective client, but it very quickly gives us a picture of whether we are going to be able to provide any value to their business. 

1. Auditing the Business Objectives 

In order to develop a marketing plan for our clients, we first want them to be able to answer three questions for us. Answering these questions not only helps us to develop a plan of action, it is often very enlightening for the client. Those questions (if they are in the service industry, for example) are usually questions like: 

• Can you narrow down your core business to three key services?
• Who are your most important clients or target audience?
• What do you want to achieve by hiring and SEO or Marketing Consultant?

Here is the motto that runs our development stage of any marketing plans we create… 

If you aim at nothing, you are sure to hit it. 

Before we begin giving them direction, we want a crystal clear picture of where they think they are at. This is our opportunity to really understand what is driving the business and gives us good information to guide us in the audit stage. 

2. SEO and Marketing Audit 

Once we have some clear business objectives down on paper, we want to take those and apply them to the current circumstance. These stated goals, services and objective become our measuring stick for auditing the current state of affair and for the subsequent development of an actionable marketing strategy. 

If the focus was on developing a SEO plan as a part of their marketing, we would want to: 

• Undertake keyword and competition analysis
• User experience, on page call to action and design
• Measure the results of their existing marketing efforts

With this information, we can develop a marketing strategy grounded in the stated objectives, nature and niche of the business. That keeps us speaking the client’s language. We can make recommendations and steps into the relationship with greater confidence that they know we are going to do, and so do we. 

#2. I really like using Ahrefs. It provides a good amount of quality data on content performance and engagement across a range of industries. For Link Research and competitor analysis, I like the clean interface and amount of useful information I find on Similar Web. 

As someone who likes to hold on to his money until I have really become familiar with the SEO tools and marketing resources that a site can provide, I like to stick to a number of really cool free tools. 

Those tools include: 

• Google Trends and Google Alerts
• BuzzSumo
• Moz

My choice of tools is always based on a clean interface, uncluttered and clear navigation and the ability to store and retrieve data. If it keeps historical data (like link and position tracking), even better! 

Cormac Reynolds from My Online Marketer

#1. I think that a warts and all effort tend to be the best way to start off with a client. Obviously, asking them their aims and goals is one thing, albeit something most but not everyone asks a client. I also think that asking them about issues and problems they have in the business is very important. A lot of companies are happy to discuss why they’re fantastic but not the things holding them back or limitations. Knowing these limitations allows you to work within their boundaries or even resolve them and I think that’s very important. 

#2. At the moment I absolutely love Ahrefs – it’s really come on in leaps and bounds in the last six months and provides a very up to the minute links data base, as well as the excellent positions explorer tool – something we loved SEMRush for until now – we also used Majestic. When contrasted with the way these tools were 12-18 months ago, it’s way ahead of the game and something we’d find it hard to deliver without. 

Jane Kryukova from Texterra

#1. The development of a marketing strategy always begins with the clear understanding of the aims of the project. What do you want to achieve by doing this or that kind of promotion? The answer should be as concrete as possible. “We need more traffic” or “we need more clients” are too abstract. You need to have a clear aim that can be easily measured. For example, if you need more traffic, you should say how much traffic exactly you need, how much time you need to achieve these results, what strategy will help you to achieve them as soon as possible. The more details you provide at the very beginning, the more effective your promotion will be.

#2. I personally adore the following tools:

• BuzzSumo. This is my number one tool. I use it almost every day when searching for new ideas for our company blog. 
• Monosnap. I adore this tool for ease of use and beautiful design. Use it in all my guides with tons of screenshots.
• Hello Bar. A free tool that helps me to promote new blog posts, promotional events and ebooks.
• Reformator. This is a Russian tool but the language doesn’t really matter. It’s an online service that helps you to quickly code your new article. What you should do is to simply paste the text of a new article from your editor.

Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea

#1. I ask my client about their audience, and try to understand who that is; I look at their industry to get a better sense of it.

#2. I like to spend significant time with a client’s website and do a Screaming Frog crawl to learn about its structure.

Michiel Heijmans from Yoast

#1. One of our main goals, besides keeping our business healthy, is sharing knowledge. We do so by writing a lot of blog posts on Yoast. Content is king, right. We write a lot about what is going on with Google and share a lot of best practices for website owners. Most of that content is optimized for certain keywords. Practice what you preach. We are only focused on white hat SEO techniques, and optimizing content is a very large part of that.

#2. We monitor a lot, using for instance Searchmetrics.com and Google Analytics / Google Search Console. These tools help us identify keywords we need to push. One of the tools less people will point you to, are simply the main SEO blogs (like Googleblog). Keep a keen eye on developments and try to anticipate as soon as possible!

Cyrus Shepard from Moz

#1. How do I develop a marketing strategy?

Because I work primarily in SEO and product marketing, there are two questions I’m continually trying to solve for:

How can we increase the visibility of our website/content/service/product to the right audience?

After we capture our audience’s attention, how can we help them complete their task?

In my opinion, too many marketers focus on the first question, while paying too little attention to the second. In SEO, it’s no longer sufficient to “win the click” – what’s increasingly important to both humans and search engines is what happens after the click. Does the user find what they want? Are they satisfied (even delighted)? Are we helping them to complete their task? If the answer is “no”, then there is no reason for Google or other search engines to continue promoting us in search results.

So much of SEO today is focused on keywords, which leads us to ignore user intent. So that’s where I start to develop my SEO-focused marketing strategy: smart keyword research followed by deep diving into the user intent implied by those keywords. For example, if I’m marketing for a car mechanic, I might find highly valuable keywords such as “best car mechanic in New York”. My next step is to try to tease the intent behind that keyword, which is someone looking to actually hire a mechanic. In the end, my marketing strategy will focus not on helping establish my client as the best car mechanic, but instead helping users to hire a good car mechanic, and I’ll structure my campaign from there.

#2. What SEO tools help you to improve your marketing tactics?

A few SEO tools I commonly use:

• Google Search Console
• MozBar
• Screaming Frog
• Open Site Explorer

Francisco Meza from Planet Marketing

#1. The way I develop a marketing strategy is based around the company’s business objectives. I learned that from my old coach Avinash over at Google Analytics. I normally meet with the company in person if I can. Then I ask them about their company and how it works. Sometimes it makes sense to use PPC while other times a straight out email marketing campaign might be more useful.

Here’s a real example. I have a client that cannot wait for organic rankings. So, we have to throw a Hail Mary right now by sending out 10000+ emails using SendBlaster. This morning I was told we are having a very good response. 

I find that business are just like people; they have the same stresses and want to make more money. Only with a custom marketing strategy can this be accomplished. For many clients, Social is not a priority because of their industry or the amount of time it takes to build that following. 

#2. I use a lot of tools, but for many I don’t use daily.

• Ahrefs
• SEMRush
• SE Ranking

Adam Connell from Uklinkology

#1. There’s a lot more to a marketing strategy than I can include here, but here’s a quick snapshot of what I’ve found to work well:

Every marketing strategy starts with understanding your goals. From there you need to get a handle on who your target customer is, the problem’s they face and how you can help them. Persona’s are a great way to do this.

The next step is to figure out where you fit in the market. How do you shape up against your competitors? What makes you stand out? What can you improve?

Then you can figure out who and what influences your target customer, and plan a strategy that has the ability to leverage the power of that influence.

Above all else, focus on solving your customers problems in the best way possible. Make things easy for them, and switch your approach to helping rather than going for the hard sell right away.

#2. Tools that I use are:

• SEMrush – Possibly one of the most useful tools I’ve used so far. SEMrush tells me what keywords my competitors are ranking for. It’s the perfect tool for keyword research and so much more.
• BuzzSumo – The truth is that content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand so you need to be able to quickly spot trending content, monitor and analyze to find what’s working as well as being able to find influencers to help your content go further. BuzzSumo makes all of this possible in one tool.
• SE Ranking – While SEMrush has rank tracking built in, I prefer SE Ranking’s interface and find it much easier to navigate.  
• Ahrefs – This is an incredible backlink checker. The interface is slick and there’s plenty of data. What’s even better is that they’ve rolled out more content-focused tools such as the content explorer.

Michael Bergen from Riverbed Marketing

#1. The backbone of any good marketing strategy is developing smart goals based on in-depth research and informed planning. For this, you will need a plan on what you aim to achieve, and utilize tools to find the supporting information you need to make concrete decisions about what the strategy is. Basing your goals on competitor difficulty, what it will take to match competitor influence, and many other details will help you create actionable strategies with realistic timelines.

Establish a specific goal that clearly defines the objective (Traffic increase by X unique visitors with a 0.1% conversion rate by DATE). Make sure your performance in meeting the goal is measurable through tools. Determine whether the goal is attainable with well-informed decisions based on research and the past experience in the industry. Ensure the goal is relevant to the company’s overall objectives. Always set a specific date for when your goal should be completed.

#2. For the research components of my marketing & SEO strategy, I like to use a series of tools that cover several key areas. Covering research of competitors in areas of Backlinks, social engagement, on-page practices of top ranking competitors all play a vital role in the decision making process of building your strategy.

• RavenTools – On-page analysis & backlink analysis using Majestic SEO api.
• SEMRush – Competitor research and ranking analysis, one of the best industry tools in terms of historically indexed data. This help show competitor traffic estimates and their top performing pages at a glance.
• Screaming Frog – Website crawler for on-page seo analysis. I like to use this on competitor websites to get a sense of the common title tag and meta strategies of top ranking competitors.

Atish Ranjan from TechTricksWorld

#1. Marketing is the most important thing if you want your blog posts to be viewed by hundreds or thousands of people.

When it comes to promotion, I am a strong believer of SEO because SEO helps rank well in search engines. Ranking well in SEs is the best thing a blogger can do because it helps drag massive organic traffic that is the best traffic source among all.

I optimize my content with profitable keywords, and I follow all the On-page strategies to ensure that my blog posts are better optimized.

After content creation and publishing, I work on to build some quality backlinks to each of my blog post. I also share my blog posts on social media sites, blog communities, and send newsletters to my subscribers.

#2. Here are a few SEO tools that I use:

• Long Tail Pro: I use LTP to research profitable keywords. The best feature of this tool is that it shows you the keyword competitiveness (KC) that helps you know which keywords are easy to rank and which not. You can choose the keywords that have medium competition with good search volumes.
• SE Ranking: Though this tool offers a lot, I use it to track my blog’s keyword positioning. I have added my keywords, and it sends a weekly report in my email about the position changes. It is such a relief that I don’t need to check the rankings manually.
• Ahref: I use ahref to analyze my blog’s backlinks to find out if some bad neighborhood links are there.

I also use it to keep an eye on competitors’ backlinks and then do reverse engineering to beat the competition.

These 3 SEO tools are the ones I am using primarily, but there are a few more I use sometimes which are given below:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Majestic SEO
• Webmeup

Matthew Boley from Marketing of America

#1. I develop my marketing strategy by testing what is working and is ethical.  I start by reading blogs, threads, and discussions in the MOZ forums.  I like to watch the whiteboard Friday videos by Rand Fishkin.  When I find something that is new or that interests me I test it on my own websites.  If it works and isn’t just another spam tactic or short term gain, I then implement it and deploy in my marketing campaigns for clients.  I feel that if you stay away from short-term gains, anything that is unethical, and any type of automation do it all SEO program you will succeed just fine. 

#2. A list of a few tools that I use are the following: 

• Google Keyword Planner – I feel this is a must for anyone. 
• MOZ – for statistical information and a great community to answer a lot of questions this is a must and well worth the fee they charge monthly. 
• HREF – I like this better than MOZ’s open site explorer tool in some instances, because it finds and shows more backlinks. 
• Majestic SEO – I like to see the dropped links and some of the statistics that their tools allow me to see. 
• I use MOZ chrome add on so I can quickly analyze a websites domain authority. 
• I use Wappalyzer to analyze the apps or platform that someone has used to build their website. 
• I use Meta SEO  Inspector for a quick analysis of someone’s meta tags to insure they are properly setup and not over the character limit.

Seph Cadiz (@sephcadiz)

#1. I like to treat each client as a special case study. Each client is different, and yes, of course each case study falls into a particular ‘persona’ or ‘category.’ However, many variables like: industry verticals; market trends; marketing objectives; expected volume, budget constraints, client expectation, agency standard play a role in the overall outcome. So, after I probe and identify the key problems and key performance indicators and ‘show off’ my oh-so-shiny-fundamental sales-and-customer-service skills with a client, I identify the special case. Depending on whether the lead meets with my standard of trust, I identify each special case and provide each problem with an analysis. Now I take this analysis and try to inform and educate the client as much as possible. From there I tailor marketing strategies to help solve each problem. From there I set the baselines for research and development and work my magic. 

#2. Google has been very generous to the SEO community. They offer the best analytical tools for webmasters to aggregate insightful data; simplifying our audit process. SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool all help provide insight on the overall health of a special case. Other SEO tools one can use to help improve marketing tactics are tools like SEM Rush or Open Site Explorer to assess specifically the SEO execution of website predecessors and our competitors.

Martin Harrison from Copify

#1. We have tried many things in terms of marketing our product, Copify. What works best for us is a focus on lead generation through keyword targeted landing pages which we promote through high quality outreach and thought leadership pieces.

Increasingly, we are also driving traffic through content marketing efforts such as guides. Generally, we find that Google is looking for long-form content – 800 words plus to have the best chances of ranking. We don’t spend too much time on social as it is very difficult to assign an ROI.

#2. We use a very simple ranking tool: Rank Watch – to keep tabs on rankings, but this is the only paid tool we use.

I’m not a big advocate of data analyzing from different sources, I mostly go on gut instinct in terms of what is and what isn’t a good thing to do. Focus on producing content that is genuinely useful, interesting and engaging and the rankings will come. Content and links that are easy to come by aren’t likely to have much impact.

Sean Si from SEO Hacker

That’s quite a handful and I hope you’ll take time to try some of those tools. We don’t have a lot of people in our team (right now we’re just 22 strong) but because of the tools we use, we work like there’s over 50 of us. The time it saves us coupled with the extra work it helps us to do is just too much to overlook.

• Qeryz – We use this to find out what topics our audience prefer to read. Content marketing is a huge way to leverage SEO these days after all.
• SE Ranking – Tracking your rankings online can be a huge pain if you need to run a rank tracker manually each day. SE Ranking takes that off and tracks your rankings quite accurately online.
• Buzzstream – Doing outreach to influencers is easy when you’re doing it solo. However if you’re doing it as a team, you could waste some of your efforts if you’re not careful on reaching out to an influencer your teammate has already reached out to. Buzzstream helps us manage our efforts toward efficiency.
• Screaming Frog – There’s just no better crawler than Screaming Frog. We use this for on site audits, finding broken links, content gap analysis, you name it.
• Cognitive SEO – This is the main backlink checker we use for our site and for all our clients. I’ve yet to find a better backlink checking tool than Cognitive SEO.
• Monitor Backlinks – After you’ve built links, you have the responsibility of monitoring it – whether it’s live, it’s 301’d, it was nofollowed, or if it went down. It’s a hassle to check each one everyday so we use Monitor Backlinks to automatically email us about our links. Makes life easier.
• Ninja Outreach – You just can’t have enough outreach tools. Ninja Outreach is like Buzzstream and Inkybee in one. If you’re running on a budget and you want a simpler dashboard, this is for you.

Mike Ramsey from Nifty Marketing

Tools I use often: 

• ScreamingFrog – I can quickly crawl sites to pull valuable error information, title tags, anchor texts, missing h1, h2 tags, redirects, and about anything else you could imagine. This is a great quick glance tool that is mostly free to use on small websites and is so valuable. 
• Google Webmaster Tools – The free data that Google provides you about how they see your website may not be exact, but it is closer to the truth than most other tools I see. We constantly use webmaster tools to learn about rise/drop in overall site impressions, average keyword rankings, crawl errors and stats, link history, and link disavowal tools constantly.
• BrightLocal – If you do any local SEO for small businesses then this tool can help you determine where you sites are, where your competitors are, and what it will take to beat them. They have a decent ranking tracker, competitive intelligence, onsite audit, and citation reporting system that currently isn’t offered a package from other tool sets. They are one of the original pioneers into local search tools and continue to get better and better. 
• Cognitive SEO – This is the best link tool I know of to give you link information. I am not crazy about the layout of data, but overall you can get about whatever type of information on backlinks you need. Anchor text, spam scores, link to page spread across a website, history over time, lost links, and about anything else you could ever imagine. 

Now that you’ve seen some of the top research and SEO tools being used be experts around the world, it’s time to create accounts with these recommended solutions and do the same!