3 Digital Tools to Go One Up on Your Competition

Nov 30, 2022 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

Not very long ago, promoting a brand was a drastically different task from what we know today. Thanks to the internet, over 40 percent of the world’s population is logging on to a computer and using that tool to gather information. As a result, the way in which we define competition has changed. Businesses today must go to great lengths to market their brands to stand out in a vastly overpopulated market.

In most cases, it’s a safe bet to say there are hundreds — if not thousands — of other people trying to do the exact same thing. So, what does it take to stay ahead of the curve?

Truth be told, there are very few things written in stone when it comes to digital marketing. However, there are a number of fundamental practices that put businesses in a better position to get their name out there. Here are three tools to consider when incorporating these practices into your strategy.

 

SEO Power Suite

Google now processes 3.5 billion searches a day. Think about the sheer number of online experiences that begin with a search engine! Given that few of those searches go beyond page one of the results, you can’t afford to omit an SEO strategy in your marketing mix.

SEO requires a great deal of research and attention to detail. SEO PowerSuite is equipped with four major tools to cover all the bases of an SEO campaign.

  • Rank Tracker — Thorough keyword research is the backbone of SEO. This software allows you to track an unlimited number of keywords and phrases across many search engines (both global and local). This tool even compares present keyword rankings to any other point in time so you can easily determine which ones to pinpoint based on historical performance. Going even further, you are provided with recommendations from 20 different sources of words to use in your strategy.
  • Website Auditor — Conducting a website audit is one of the first steps involved in an SEO campaign. The Website Auditor allows you to conduct an in-depth analysis of your platform and identify any issues that are potentially hurting your rankings. From there, you are given recommendations of how to optimize your landing pages to get the best results.
  • SEO Spyglass — This is the real essence of organic competitive analysis in your search marketing efforts. SEO Spyglass helps you gain a strong knowledge of your competitor’s backlinks to get a feel for his or her strategy, identify that brand’s strengths and weaknesses, and determine where your links intersect. This knowledge puts you in a much better position to build quality links to your own website.
  • LinkAssistant — SEO PowerSuite compiles a detailed list assessing your link-building opportunities, with various techniques like guest posting and reviews. Then, it checks the SEO value of each target and evaluates its quality. It also provides outreach options, verification and reporting functions.

Once you have all this great information, the software allows you access to such huge amounts of data that your competitors might never have. It also integrates data from sources such as Google Analytics, AdWords, Webmaster Tools and more.

Related: 10 Free Marketing Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About

SEO plays a huge role in how people find your business. Take your time and equip yourself with the best resources to gain a competitive edge.

 

Avario

Believe it or not, a large portion of marketing involves no public action. The best strategies start with you listening to what people are saying within the industry. A big part of content marketing is simply knowing what topics to create your material around. Once there is a firm grasp of the hot button issues and concerns, you are better equipped to create relevant and meaningful messaging.

Awario helps this process by serving four major functions:

  • Brand awareness — Social media has made the concept of tracking brand mentions easier than ever. Awario keeps up with the top social networks and over 13 billion pages each day to track what people are saying about your business in real-time.
  • Market research — This is perhaps the most important step in starting (and running) a business. Awario allows you to glean knowledge about the hot button issues across your industry as well as the profiles you need to appeal to.
  • Sales opportunities — While monitoring conversations about your brand or field, Awario keeps track of potential customers looking for services you provide. From there, you can target them with your messaging and offer solutions to their problems.
  • Influencer marketing — Awario uses analytics to identify influencers pertaining to your niche. Collaborating with the right figures can do wonders to grow awareness of your brand in different communities. Just be sure you have a good plan on how to reach out!

This program is truly a go-to resource for gaining the proper insights to craft your branded material.

 

Contently

Now that you’ve learned the basics you should know about incorporating SEO into your marketing mix and the pressing topics to address, you need a tool that will help you create the best content and track its engagement.

Enter Contently. This tried-and-true program is meant to help you with three of the main tasks involved in content marketing.

  • Creation — Contently uses key insights mined across the web to push you in the right direction in creating brand material that gains significant traction. Each step of the process is streamlined across your team, from ideation all the way to final approval.
  • Connect — If you are working in a startup or small business, chances are, you are juggling a lot of different tasks. When this is the case, Contently’s software is set up to match you with freelancers through the company’s extensive network of content creators. Once the material has been crafted and approved, you can easily publish it on your most important channels.
  • Data — Without proper analytics, creating quality content is much harder. Using the tracking dashboard, you will gain vital information as to how your content is faring across the web. These metrics are crucial to identify strengths, or how you can improve your messaging.

Content marketing is currently one of the hottest topics in the entire business world. Rightfully so. Studies have found that when content marketing adopters and non-adopters are compared, the adopters have conversion rates that are nearly six times higher than their competitors’. These statistics cause brands everywhere to make room in their budgets for a plan. Therefore, you need to go the extra mile and use the right tools to make your material stand out.

Related: 14 Free Tools Every Solopreneur Needs

Ever since the first transaction in the history of humankind took place, the goal has always been to stay ahead of the competition. As time goes on, this task gets harder and harder. The name of the game is combining superior intellect with the right tools to get the job done. Use these resources to put your messaging in front of as many eyes as possible.

Website Design Alabama – Internal Linking Strategy for Website Design

Nov 30, 2022 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

It’s crucial for SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy on a regular basis. By adding the right internal links you make sure Google understands the relevance of pages, the relationship between pages and the value of pages.

 

The ideal structure

We always advise website owners to imagine their website to be a pyramid with the most important content on top. We call those articles cornerstone content. There should be lots of links from topically related pages in the pyramid to that most essential content. By doing that, most link value is passed to those pages. On the other hand, you should also link from those top pages to subpages about related topics. Linking internally to related content shows Google what pages hold information about similar topics.

 

Linking your cornerstone content: an example

We’ve written a cornerstone content article, called ‘The ultimate guide to keyword research’. We want this post to rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results. By adding internal links from other relevant articles, like ‘How to start with keyword research’ and ‘7 keyword research mistakes to avoid‘ to the main article, Google will start to understand that the cornerstone content article holds most information about this keyword. So after a while, Google will rank the cornerstone content above the other, smaller posts about keyword research.

 

Don’t forget to link from the top too

Besides linking from topically related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. If you do this, the most important posts or pages will get a lot of link value and will become stronger in the eyes of Google.

 

Linking to taxonomies

If you run a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags, helps Google to understand the structure of your blog and helps visitors to easily navigate to related posts.

 

Linking to related posts

Linking to related posts helps Google to understand your site structure, as mentioned before. To read more about a certain subject you can link to one or more related posts at the end of your article. There are plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use such a tool, we do recommend testing whether the related posts are actually the best related posts. When you’re not sure, linking to posts manually (or using our internal linking tool – more on that later) would probably be a better solution.

 

Linking to popular or recent posts

The last option we want to mention is linking internally to the most popular or to the newest posts on your website. This section could be added to the sidebar of your blog or the footer of your website to show it on all pages and posts.

The benefit of creating such a popular or recent posts section, is that link value passes to the linked posts from lots of pages and posts. Moreover, visitors will easier visit the posts and getting more traffic is a positive sign to Google as well.

 

More on internal links…

No-follow links

Probably you’re also showing links on a page that aren’t important for SEO. If you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, for example, you don’t want that link to leak link value to your login page: that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results.

In the past, you could prevent losing link value to such links by giving them a ‘no-follow’ tag. A ‘no-follow’ tag means that Google shouldn’t follow the link to the target page: so no link value would pass through this link. Now you might think: “I’m going to ‘no-follow’ less important links to give the most important links more link value.” This used worked in the past indeed, but Google has become smarter. It seems that the link value now just completely disappears when you add a ‘no-follow’ tag to a certain link. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of ‘no-following’ some of the links.

Please not that adding a ‘no-follow’ tag doesn’t mean that people can’t find those target pages in Google’s search results. If you don’t want pages or posts to show up in the search results you should give them a ‘no-index’ tag as well. The ‘no-index’ tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.

 

Anchor texts

If you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, it’s important to use the right anchor text. The anchor text is the text that visitors see and where they can click on, so the link is added to this part of the text.

It might hurt your website if you over-optimize anchor text. With over-optimizing we mean keyword stuffing. In the past, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword and Google made your website rank higher for that specific keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text is telling more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So make sure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: you can definitely use keywords but don’t add the exact same keywords to each and every one of your anchor texts.

 

Go link your content

Without links your content can’t rank! With a solid internal linking strategy you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and users will understand your site better, which will increase your chance of ranking.

 

if you are looking for SEO IMPROVEMENTS, contact us and we can move forward on site your company with excellent SEARCH ENGINE PLACEMENT!