SEO is Hard, Here's how to Make it a Bit Easier
Apart from having a wide knowledge of the overall digital marketing industry, as an SEO specialist, you also need to dedicate yourself to learning new stuff constantly and keeping pace with one of the fastest moving world’s industries.
How many times have you heard someone say that SEO is simple? For any aspiring digital marketing specialist, this statement feels like a dagger in the heart. Optimizing sites for search engines is extremely complex, risky, and responsible.
Apart from having a wide knowledge of the overall digital marketing industry, as an SEO specialist, you also need to dedicate yourself to learning new stuff constantly and keeping pace with one of the fastest moving world’s industries. Working with hundreds of clients and managing god knows how many projects on a daily basis, digital marketing agencies spend a huge amount of time on estimating, analyzing, building strategies, and reporting. At the same time, their business has to expand, drive more leads, make clients happy and, of course, generate higher revenue.
But, how in the world can someone achieve all this simultaneously? By automating their SEO efforts, of course.
Let’s find out how to do so effectively.
1. Keyword Research Tools Help you Monitor Relevant Keywords
“You don’t want to just say ‘Mount Everest elevation.’ You want to say words like ‘How high is Mount Everest’ because people are going to type ‘How high is Mount Everest?’” Google’s Matt Cutts pointed out a few years ago.
What we can conclude from this statement is that keyword analysis is crucial for any SEO campaign. It helps you target not only keywords relevant to your industry, but also those your potential customers would type in Google’s search box. However, to predict the shifts in keyword demand, keep up with the market conditions that are changing at an astounding pace, and provide your customers with relevant content, you need to automate the process of keyword analysis. There are numerous keyword research tools, including Google Keyword Planner, KWFinder, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, and SEMRush that will help you do so.
2. Use Reporting Tools to Create Awesome Reports
We all love data. It shows us whether our digital marketing efforts are profitable or not. Moreover, our clients love data even more. This is exactly why client reporting is considered the holy grail of SEO. By creating detailed, visually appealing, and easy-to-digest reports, you will manage to give meaning to your SEO efforts, justify your actions, and strengthen relationships with your clients.
But, if client reporting is that important, why do many agencies still fail at it? Well, collecting all this data manually, organizing it in spreadsheets, creating charts, and writing detailed reports for each of their clients on a monthly basis is a daunting task. And, they probably don’t have the right software to back their efforts.
Those who are more resourceful take advantage of a plethora of reporting tools that practically do all these tedious tasks for them in a matter of seconds. Such platforms give you the opportunity to tailor the process of reporting to your needs. With them, you can view and measure only those metrics vital for your research, as well as monitor all vital KPIs on a single digital marketing dashboard. Most importantly, the majority of these tools help you personalize your client reports by adding your logo and choosing the date range, the font type, and colors.
3. Optimize your Content with the Right Platform
Content is not only the king, but also the backbone of every successful SEO campaign. According to some recent studies, 72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO technique. But, to deliver highly engaging content, you need to keep pace with the latest industry trends, cover trending topics, answer popular questions, and turn to interactive content types (infographics, gifs, memes, and videos). Most importantly, you need to make sure that every piece of content you create is data-oriented, relevant, entertaining, and easy-to-understand.
To maximize your content marketing effectiveness, you need to have a full understanding of the keywords you build your content around, as well as determine how well similar pieces of content perform. Here are several tools that might help you when doing so:
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BuzzSumo helps you find the most authoritative influencers in your industry and do a detailed competitor analysis to find out which content is shared the most.
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nTopic tells you whether your website’s content is relevant, based on the keywords you enter.
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Scoop.it is one of the most famous content curation platforms. It allows you to either upload your own curated links or share relevant content from other sources.
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Scribe analyzes your document and makes keyword optimization recommendations.
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Copyscape tells you if there are any unauthorized copies of your articles on Google.
4. Use Link Building Tools to Make the Most of this Process
Even though Google tells us to stop building links, this practice still dominates the world of SEO. Namely, 64% of digital marketers say that over 25% of their SEO practices is dedicated to securing links. Now, as quality backlinks are the basis of your SEO strategy, you need to find the best link building prospect. With the help of link prospecting tools, such as Ontolo, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, and Raven Tools you will manage to take your link building efforts to a whole new level. These platforms will provide you with a website preview, display contact information, as well as give you invaluable insights into the site’s domain authority, referring pages and domains, a spam factor, and so on.
Conclusions
As you can conclude from the examples listed above, SEO is hard. But, where there's a will there's a way. With the rise of technology and sophisticated SEO tools, you are given the opportunity to automate all complicated aspects of your SEO campaign and focus on building and nurturing stronger relationships with your clients. Hopefully, the tips listed above will help you do so.