Of course, you’ll want to find the right social media software that aligns with your needs and goals. In this article, I will explore the factors to consider when choosing social media tools so that your social media marketing strategy has the power it deserves.

What to Look for When Choosing Social Media Tools

As you search for the right social media tool, here are seven factors to consider:

• Cost and features
• Contracts
• Google Analytics integration
• Supported social networks
• User access
• Access to historical data
• White labeling
• Comparison of social media software options
• FAQ: What are the key factors to consider when choosing social media management tools? 

1. Cost and Features

The price range of a social media tool can vary from $50 to $1,600 per month.

Lower-priced options usually offer basic features like follower growth tracking and reporting. On the other hand, higher-priced tools provide advanced features like social listening reports, competitive analysis, hashtag tracking, and more.

(Some tools even offer free versions that give you basic functionality.)

Consider your budget and the specific features you require to make a cost-effective choice for your business.

2. Contracts

Most social media software providers require a year-long contract. However, some options like Sprout Social and Quintly offer month-to-month payment plans, providing flexibility for your business.

Be sure to carefully review the contract before signing so that you know what you’re signing up for.

3. Google Analytics Integration

You’ll want to see if your social media marketing strategy is actually bringing in traffic, so you may want to consider a tool with integrated Google Analytics.

Some social media tools generate reports similar to Google Analytics’ Social Referrer Report. Evaluate whether separate data platforms are acceptable for your reporting needs or if integration with Google Analytics is necessary for your business.

4. Supported Social Networks

Social media marketing is not a one-size-fits-all, so decide which social networks your target audience spends time on.

While platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook are typically included, some tools offer additional integrations with platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and more.

5. User Access

Different social media software packages allow varying numbers of user logins.

Assess the size of your team and the number of individuals who require access to the software. Ensure that the chosen tool offers adequate user access to facilitate efficient collaboration and management.

6. Access to Historical Data

Historical data can help you identify which messages and strategies resonate with your audience. However, not all tools provide access to data that existed before you started using the software.

Nuvi is an exception, offering historical data for X (formerly Twitter).

7. White Labeling

White labeling allows you to customize the software’s branding to match your company’s identity. This provides a seamless integration of the software into your overall brand experience.

While lower-priced accounts often lack this feature, higher-priced options like Nuvi offer white labeling at an additional cost.

Consider whether white labeling is essential for maintaining a consistent brand image across social media management tools.

Now that we’ve covered the key considerations let’s take a closer look at some popular social media software options and their associated features and costs.

Comparison of Social Media Software Options

• Nuvi: Nuvi offers packages priced at $600, $900, and $1600 per month. Their social media software provides advanced features, including comprehensive social listening reports with advanced sentiment analysis, competitor analysis, customizable threshold alerts, and content management capabilities. It supports multiple social networks, allowing you to monitor and analyze data across various platforms. Additionally, Nuvi offers white labeling at an extra cost for seamless branding integration.
• Sprout Social: Sprout Social offers a range of plans starting from $59 to $500 per month. The lower-priced plans provide basic features such as follower growth tracking and mentions. As you move up to the higher-priced plans, you gain access to advanced reports, Google Analytics integration, white labeling, and a message approval workflow. Sprout Social supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, ensuring comprehensive coverage of major social networks.
• Quintly: Quintly provides packages priced at $129, $299, and $479 per month. While Quintly may not offer Google Analytics integration or content management features, it does support white labeling. If having control over your software’s branding is a priority, Quintly may be a suitable option to consider.
• DataPine: DataPine offers packages priced at €219, €399, €699, and €799 per month. Their software includes features such as Google Analytics integration and white labeling. However, it does not provide content management capabilities. Evaluate your specific requirements to determine if DataPine aligns with your business needs.

To get the most out of your social media marketing, it’s obvious you need a tool. Be sure to analyze your target audience and what has worked in the past to identify which tool you need.

There are many options, and most offer free trials, so be sure to try out a few before choosing the tool that will supercharge your social media marketing strategy.

What’s your preferred social media software? Share your thoughts in the comments.

FAQ: What are the key factors to consider when choosing social media management tools?

Businesses and individuals must select an ideal social media management tool based on their goals and resources. Our guide explores key considerations to aid this decision-making process.

1. Purpose and Goals:

Begin by defining your social media objectives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, engage with your audience, or analyze data? Your goals will dictate which features and functionalities you need in a management tool.

2. Platform Compatibility:

Consider which social media platforms you intend to utilize. Ensure the tool you choose supports the most relevant platforms to your target audience.

3. User-Friendliness:

User interface and ease of use are crucial. Opt for a tool that your team can navigate comfortably, as this will impact efficiency and productivity.

4. Features and Integration:

Evaluate the tool’s features. Does it offer scheduling, analytics, and monitoring capabilities? Furthermore, check if it can integrate with your existing systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software.

5. Cost and Scalability:

Determine your budget and select a tool that aligns with it. Additionally, consider scalability – can the tool accommodate your future growth without significant cost increases?

6. Analytics and Reporting:

Comprehensive analytics and reporting are vital for measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Choose a tool that provides in-depth insights and customizable reports.

7. Customer Support and Training:

Assess the quality of customer support and training the tool’s provider offers. A responsive support team and accessible training resources can save valuable time when troubleshooting issues.

8. Security and Compliance:

Ensure the tool complies with data privacy regulations and offers robust security features to protect your social media accounts and data.

9. Reputation and Reviews:

Read user reviews and seek recommendations from peers in your industry. A tool’s reputation can provide valuable insights into its reliability and performance.

10. Trial Period:

Choose tools with free trials whenever possible to see if they suit you before making the commitment to subscription services.

Selecting social media tools that meet your goals and circumstances is paramount to improve social media strategy and productivity. When selecting an application, it should help enhance both.

Step-by-Step Procedure for Selecting Social Media Management Tools:

1. Clearly define your social media objectives and goals.
2. Select your social media platforms.
3. Prioritize UX design and make sure everything is user-friendly.
4. List the essential features and integrations required for your social media management.
5. Determine your budget and consider scalability.
6. Prioritize tools that offer robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
7. Investigate the quality of customer support and available training resources.
8. Ensure the tool complies with security and privacy regulations.
9. Research the tool’s reputation through user reviews and industry recommendations.
10. Take advantage of trial periods to test the tool’s suitability whenever possible.

Following these steps will enable you to evaluate and select social media management software that best fulfills your objectives and needs.

This article was updated on September 13, 2023.

The post Is Your Company Ready to Invest in Social Media Tools? Which Factors Should You Consider? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Google and Bing are the only parties who can see the disavow data given to them by site owners. We, the webmaster community, can’t access this data to help us make informed SEO decisions when vetting backlinks, researching sites, or creating our own disavow files, for example.

Let’s change that.

Today we’re launching DisavowFiles, a free, crowdsourced tool aimed at bringing transparency to disavow data. Sign up for free at DisavowFiles.com.

Disavow Files Are a Fact of Life for SEOs

Webmasters have to stay on the defensive in the battle against link spam. The first Google Penguin algorithm update penalizing link manipulation rolled out in 2012. Since then, black-hat linking schemes (such as link farms, buying links, and link comment spam) mostly don’t work.

But Penguin’s side effect for site owners has been harsh: Links from external sites can and do hurt your site — even if you did nothing to create those links. Too many spammy or unnatural-looking links aimed at your site can torpedo your site in the rankings. In the age of Penguin penalties, SEO-minded webmasters have to be vigilant about their sites’ link profiles.

Unfortunately, the process of backlink auditing, removal and disavowal is tedious.

First you have to comb through usually thousands of backlinks, looking at each domain and web page to try to identify the shady ones. Even SEOs who do it all the time can spend days evaluating a new client’s backlink profile. And that’s just the first step!

Next begins the process of contacting the site owner to request the link be removed, tracking the contact, following up to make sure the link is really gone, rinse, repeat. As a last resort, the search engines let you disavow stubborn links. The entire painstaking link pruning process has become an SEO necessity in today’s world of link penalties.

But disavowing links can also be dangerous. We caution users of the search engines’ disavow links tools to always work with a professional and consider the risks of disavowing links before using the tool (should you be seeking assistance at this time, please consider our SEO Penalty Assessment Service).

As SEOs, we do our best to seek and destroy just the bad links without disturbing the good ones that are actually helping a site rank in search results (see our Complete Guide to Disavowing Links for Google and Bing). Webmasters have no way to see how search engines judge their inbound links. Your site could have a horde of hooded bandits pointing links at it, and Google would never tell you.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know which sites have been voted as offenders? And see which links are bad according to everybody else? Enter the new Google disavow tool for link intelligence, DisavowFiles.

What Is DisavowFiles?

DisavowFiles.com is a crowdsourced tool that sheds light on disavow data. To be used with wisdom, it is a Google disavow service that focuses and simplifies the disavow file creation process. DisavowFiles is powered by three elements:

• Many disavow files, submitted by participants into an anonymized database.
• Reliable backlink data for each participating site, pulled from Majestic’s API.
• Software tools and reports that let participants extract useful data.

What’s the Cost?

There is no cost to sign up for DisavowFiles. You share your disavow file with the other members, and you get the tools and reports that you need for free.

To provide a crowdsourced database, we need disavow file data to produce useful results — and the more, the merrier. Crowdsourcing means that the more participating sites that join, the greater the benefit for all. So we’ve thrown the door open wide and invite as many SEOs and webmasters as possible to sign up. We have plans for additional upgrade features in the future. However, the basic service as it is launching today will be free forever.

The idea behind DisavowFiles.com is not to make a profit, but to solve a problem affecting the whole SEO community — a need for better intel to protect our sites from link spam.

What Participants Get

When you join and upload your site’s disavow file to DisavowFiles.com, you will be able to see:

1. Whether any backlinks to your site have been disavowed by other participants.
2. Whether your site has been disavowed by others in the database.

1. Whether any backlinks to your site have been disavowed by other participants:

You will be able to simply run a tool to see any pages linking to your site that other participating webmasters have vetted as spam. This red-flags links that may be hurting your site’s rankings so you can investigate whether you, too, should disavow the links. Such intelligence may ultimately help a community of webmasters clean up link spam.

2. Whether your site has been disavowed by others in the database:

You will be able to find out whether your domain or any of your web pages have been disavowed. A report tells you which site URLs were disavowed, and how many times, by DisavowFiles participants. Think of this information as a chance to look at your own outbound links and ask whether your site is doing something unnatural that needs to be corrected. Since a site’s link profile includes both inbound and outbound links, this feature could be an eye-opener that saves you from a Penguin eyebrow-raise.

Regular Email Alerts

Ongoing email alerts tell you if there’s any news — any new disavow files uploaded that mention your site, or any backlinks to your pages disavowed by others. This keeps you informed without having to go into the application regularly to check for updates.

This database can also be used to vet external sites as potential link acquisition targets and for competitive research. The Domain Look-up tool lets you type in any domain to see:

• How many times the domain has been disavowed in the database
• Number of external backlinks
• Number of referring domains
• Alexa rank (a measure of site prominence)
• Trust Flow and Citation Flow measurements from Majestic, to help you determine the site’s trustworthiness.

An export function lets you download all your newfound backlink information and other data as a CSV file, so you can work with it in Excel.

Want to check your own site against the DisavowFiles.com database? Try the free look-up.

Privacy for Members, Protection for Data

To make this service work, privacy is paramount. Participants remain anonymous in DisavowFiles. The tools and reports do not reveal the participants’ names or the websites whose disavow files are uploaded. When a disavow file is uploaded, the software automatically anonymizes the source and stores the links separately. Further, DisavowFiles.com is a secure site to help protect everyone.

Protections are built in against bad data entering the database. Similar to the way the search engines’ webmaster tools verify a site, participants will be given a customized HTML file to add to their website. Only if that page is found on the site will DisavowFiles.com then accept an uploaded disavow file. Each file is also put through a series of checks to make sure it is, indeed, a valid file. And to keep the data current, whenever a site uploads a new disavow file, it overwrites the previous one from that site.

Let’s Do This

DisavowFiles started as a wish list tool project at Bruce Clay, Inc. because, in a world of link penalties, why wouldn’t you want more disavow link data? SEOs and site owners can help each other have better intelligence on backlink disavowals with this new crowdsourced tool.

Sign up for free at DisavowFiles.com!

The post Introducing DisavowFiles: Free Crowdsourced Tool Brings Google Disavow Link Data to Light appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

In the daily world of paid search, the analyst or marketing agency makes sure that they are providing their client with opportunities of growth and most importantly ROI. Yet, what tools do advertisers consider useful for PPC management? Just recently, Larry Kim, CEO of WordStream, invited me to a live demo of their new PPC auditing tool, AdWords Performance Grader Plus. Now, as an analyst that considers herself an enthusiast when it comes to performance metrics and elaborate charts, I was intrigued to know what has changed or improved in comparison to their former AdWords Grader. Plus, any tool that might help with supporting my original analysis in efforts of providing the best results for my clients is okay in my book!

AdWords Performance Grader Plus

The new and improved features now available through the AdWords Performance Grader include:

• Performance Tracker.  Reports on your account performance every 30 days offering the advertiser another look at efficiency of their marketing efforts. Providing “overall performance and key metrics trending over time.”
• Mobile PPC Readiness Score. Reports on your Mobile PPC efforts, identifying factors of mobile optimization and evaluation.
• New and Improved Benchmarks.  Reports on metrics, specifically “competitive benchmarks” where not only does it identify your current performance but also compares your PPC efforts with similar advertisers in your industry. Areas of industry comparison includes but not limited to: wasted spend, quality score, impression share, click through rate, account activity, a few other benchmarks. 

Features of Interest

Now if you were to ask, what AdWords Grader features I found beneficial or worthwhile? Well, from the areas that Larry went over, the metrics / elements I found most interesting were, but not limited to:

WASTEFUL SPEND. Taking into account the negative keywords, how many were created in the last 90 days and how adding more negative keywords to your campaigns will help reduce the waste. Spend is also compared to similar advertisers.

TEXT AD OPTIMIZATION. Being that Ad Copy does play a factor when tying landing page relevance and contributing to quality score calculation, you want to know what has been working and possibly expand from its identified potential.

MOBILE PPC OPTIMIZATION. Confirming if all mobile optimization opportunities have been addressed, specifically mobile text ads, sitelinks, and call extensions.

PPC BEST PRACTICES. Offering additional insight for PPC experts to address if areas are missing or need improvement.

Would I Recommend AdWords Performance Grader Plus?

After reviewing what WordStream’s auditing tool has to offer, I do see myself using the grader as a supporting tool when running an in-depth analysis of an account’s performance. Yet, with real-time data and opportunities being offered through Google Analytics and AdWords, I would use the tool to confirm my reporting, like I would with other tools in my handy analyst toolkit.

What Are Some Areas to Take into Consideration?

Although, I do find the improved benchmarks great with its detailed feedback of a PPC experts marketing efforts, an expansion of discussion on comparison of “similar advertisers” within my industry is up for debate. As it can be agreed, our clients come at different sizes and with different goals, therefore, what “industry” is my performance being compared to?

Final Thoughts

Let it not be mistaken, as an SEM advertiser, I am not saying that this innovation replaces any tool, but to consider this auditing tool as another one to be added to our ever-growing bag. Google AdWords has many great features including the “Opportunities” tab and new interface, but with online marketing consistently changing, we can all agree that with marketing, specifically paid search advertising, the more tools we can use to support or confirm our methodology’s and analysis comes at great benefit, while achieving the ultimate client satisfaction.

The post PPC Tool Review: Inside the Free AdWords Grader appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

According to the Knowledge Graph (seemed like the appropriate tool to use), a zeitgeist is “a mood or spirit that defines a particular period in time as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.”

Said another way, it’s the perceived analysis of how people felt during a specific time based on the actions they took.

This is truly the perfect way to describe Google Trends – the fairly new tool that lets you evaluate consumer interest and sentiment over time based on analysis of relative search popularity.

In the 16 months since its christening as a standalone tool, it may have been tempting to write Google Trends off as “just” another keyword research tool, or that thing Google made to tell you which NBA player people are searching most frequently.

While, yes, you can perform keyword research with it, and, yes, it is a world of fun and can easily trick you into wasting an hour visualizing “hot searches,” these uses are only the tip of the iceberg. If you stop there you’re truly missing out.

Here’s a rundown of five strategic things you can do with Google Trends that make the tool much more than a state-by-state LeBron James peak interest analyzer.

5 Ways to Use Google Trends for Serious Business

Each and every one of these five items could be a full-length blog post unto itself; there’s that much power is packed into each of them. That said, here I’ve summarized each point relatively briefly.

Let’s not let the discussion be brief, though! Please ask questions in the comments section as you see fit.

Now, the list.

To put more strategy in my marketing strategy, I use Google Trends to…

1. Visually Weigh Campaign Options

Google Trends lets you graph the relative popularity of up to five topics or queries. This is a great way to get a sense for consumer interest in a niche market, how that interest has changed over time, how interest changes with the seasons, and whether a niche is gaining momentum or fizzling out.

The query comparison feature is a great tool to help you make more strategic, consumer-focused decisions year round, but it can be particularly helpful if you’re on the fence about a campaign direction or considering an increased focus on a niche segment.

Here’s an example: say you are a sporting goods company and you’re trying to decide whether you want to target hiking, running, climbing, rowing or boxing for your summer campaign. You sell accessories for all five sports in your store, but which do people care most about? Using Google Trends to supplement your internal data you can see at a glance that Google searchers show significantly more interest in running (red), and that the interest level is continuing to rise.

You may also be surprised to see a very high level of interest in boxing (purple), with spikes happening more frequently from 2011-2013, which could mean an increased interest in recreational participation.

If you need a quick, visual guide to get your campaign headed in one direction over another, Google Trends is an excellent data-driven resource. (And the color-coded graphs make communicating insights with stakeholders much easier.)

2. Get a More Comprehensive Idea of the Popularity of Search Concepts

Below your query selections in Google Trends you’ll see a fine-print message letting users know that Trends is measuring interest in topics – not necessarily just search terms. To glean insights about interest in a specific search term, the message tells you to make sure the “search term” category is selected.

What does this mean?

Measuring interest in topics, not queries (unless specifically designated), means that Google is clumping together several terms that it infers to mean the same thing. A clump may include questions searchers ask to find out more about the query without ever typing the exact query words. Google Trends returns all of that data, together, as part of the topic’s 1-100 relative popularity “score.” (I say score in quotation marks because I am calling the data Trends returns a score; Google has never called it that.)

The example Google software engineer Gil Ran gives is the popularity of queries like “Gwyneth Paltrow (Actress),” “Gweneth Paltrow,” “Gwen Paltro,” and “Lead actress in Iron Man” all being cumulatively considered and returned when a user enters “Gwyneth Paltrow (Actress)” into Google Trends.

Data based on topics, not individual queries, is incredibly useful because it truly helps us get a better, more complete picture of what the searcher wants when they are searching (which is what we need to know if we are looking to be there with what they need before they know they need it.) When someone types “Lead actress in Iron Man” they want info about Gwyneth Paltrow, even if they don’t say “Gwyneth Paltrow” and Google Trends has found a way to articulate that implied intent as data.

(It’s awesome.)

How do you select a topic or get query popularity by designating “search term”?

If you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, you should make sure all your search queries pertain to the same topic – like, sports in the case of our above-mentioned hiking, running, climbing, rowing, boxing example. When you type in your query a drop-down list that offers your word in several topic contexts will automatically appear; this is Google making it easy for you to choose the right topic category. If you want to analyze the popularity of the term “boxing”, not the topic, choose “Boxing (search term).”

3. Get Specific Insights about a Term’s Connotations

Scroll down the Google Trends search page and you will see a Related searches section with a column of Topics on the left and Queries on the right. There are two options you can choose for each list, Top and Rising. The Top option lists the most popular terms that are related to the topic you entered, while Rising shows you terms that have seen a significant increase in interest year over year (or month over month, or week over week, if you have your search narrowed to only a 30-day or 7-day period).

Both Top and Rising lists are a great way for you to get just a bit deeper into the mind of your consumer by digging just a bit deeper into their specific interests. For instance, looking at the Top topics within our Running category we see “Shoe”, “Nike” and “Marathon” – which tells us that people who are interested in the topic of running may also have a particular interest in buying Nike shoes, and that they want to know more about running marathons. This is excellent information that can lead visual campaigns (show someone running a marathon in Nike shoes to get their attention), or content marketing strategy next steps (consider writing more how-to articles about marathon running and preparation).

Looking at the Rising portion of the Queries column within the Running query we can also see that there has been an increased interest in technology that helps runners map their runs. Again, this information is great content marketing fuel, whether you take it simply to write more strategic blog content (think articles that review run mapping technology) or to propose that your company create its own branded run mapping app.

4. Leverage Trending Cultural Topics to Add a Sticky Flair to Content

Google Trends is a great resource if you want to know what shows people are watching, what celebrities they’re talking about and, in general, more about what’s trending in pop culture. This function of Google Trends might be the most fun a non-statistician can have with data, actually. That said, why are we talking about this? I thought this article was about how serious Google Trends is?

We’re talking about this because knowing what TV shows are trending is a great way to wrap your head around what TV shows people are interested in, which can be a great way to know how to get the people’s attention. The trick is to leverage what’s happening in pop culture (the start, end or re-release of a TV show, for instance) to add a sticky spin to your content marketing efforts.

HubSpot does this really well and got it particularly right with their article, “What the Arrested Development Re-Launch Tells Us About the Future of Mass Media.”

As Mary Poppins said, a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, and a dash of pop culture makes the marketing tutorial less dry.

5. Visual Data Makes It Easier to Parse Opportunity and Learn from Off-Season Spikes

As you look at more and more of these Google Trends graphs you’ll start to see that usually companies and topics have a natural ebb and flow as the seasons progress. For instance, like clockwork, there is always a major spike in queries for bike companies like Trek, Cannondale, Giant and Schwinn in July, a smaller spike slightly earlier in April or May, and a plummet in December.

Because Google Trends displays all of its data in color-coded line graphs, seasonal changes like these are incredibly easy to parse at a glance. This visual representation of data also makes it easier to pick out historical spikes and changes in places where they don’t usually happen.

Looking for these off-season spikes is kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, but if you see one, hop on it! Hover your mouse over the unnatural spike to see what month and year the spike happened in, then do some in-house research to get an idea of what you were doing at that time. Were you running any special campaigns during that month and year? Did you host or sponsor any events? Was there an external event or some press coverage that could have caused a heightened interest in your brand? Could this be a spike from negative media coverage?

Sometimes it will be obvious what was happening at that time with little effort; sometimes this back-story search will take more work. The key is to try to learn from what happened at that time because, whatever happened, it worked – it caused your consumers to adjust their normal routine and heighten their interest in your brand when they wouldn’t have done so otherwise. Learn from this spike and, if the spike was caused by something positive, try to reproduce it – and the spike – if you can.

Google Trends: Your Wacky, Fun Friend Who’s Actually Really Smart

Let’s recap:

Can you glean insight about keyword popularity using Google Trends? Yes! Can you look at sentiment for LeBron James state-by-state? Yes! Is that all you can do? No!

Google Trends is an excellent marketing tool that helps you get just an inch or so further into the minds of your consumers and their preferences. While it will give you data on keyword research, it’s the tool’s ability to return topic insights, shed light on trending cultural interests and visualize data in ways that make insights easier to parse, making it far more than “just” a keyword research tool.

I don’t expect you to use Google Trends data as a replacement for the insights you glean from Google Analytics, traditional keyword research or any other consumer data flow you have coming in. In fact, I would highly advise against it.

Instead, regard and use Google Trends as a supplemental marketing tool that effectively gives marketers a relevant, big-picture sense of a topic’s past, present and future popularity – all wrapped up in a visually engaging, easy to understand package.

Or, if you can’t shake the idea of Trends as the guy who’s wearing the lampshade on his head at the Google tools party, I encourage you to think about it like a wacky, fun friend who’s actually really smart. Google Trends has no problem talking about popular celebrity breakups for a couple hours if that’s what you feel like doing. But he also knows how to get down to business when it’s time.

For even more great ways in which Google Trends can enhance your search marketing techniques, check out our 5 Enlightened Ways to Use Google Trends for Keyword Research post!

The post 5 Ways to Leverage the ‘Always-On Google Zeitgeist’: Google Trends appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

SEOs familiar with the selection of page speed evaluation tools on the market will likely recognize a common limiting factor. Each page speed tool I’ve ever used only goes so far as tell you what the problem is, with very few telling you how to fix it. For example, a typical page speed tool may report that a site has a lot of thumbnail images and the page may benefit from using CSS sprites – something like that. But none of the tools will suggest why this observation is important, at least from a mobile perspective.

User Experience Report in Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool

The PageSpeed Insights tool defaults to the mobile tab (we can read between the lines however we want), but newly added to the tool is a User Experience section which is currently in beta. It shows what specific items need to be addressed and how, and (in unique fashion) offers context as to why they need to be addressed, in order to improve mobile UX, as shown in the image below:

From an objective SEO perspective, there is no ranking or inbound traffic benefit from creating larger “tap targets” or creating a mobile web page with legibly-sized text, for example. What we get here is a window into what Google ranks as important to mobile optimization: a well-executed mobile user experience is highly correlated to mobile optimization. To Google, they are one in the same, regardless of whether or not you have a responsive design site (which is the mobile solution Google has thrown its weight behind) or a separate mobile m-dot site.

Recommended Mobile Optimization Resources

There are a ton of resources out there for creating optimal mobile user experiences, and Google is one of them. Google has dedicated a whole section in Google Developers to creating sound smartphone optimized websites and if you haven’t watched Maile Ohye’s videos on optimizing mobile UX through Google Analytics, I highly recommend that you do so. She gives a thorough step-by-step process of how to address problem mobile pages on an individual basis to improve user experience. Also, be sure to peruse the checklist for mobile website improvements.

The post Mobile User Experience is Mobile Optimization: Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool for Mobile appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Our feature interview with Bing Webmaster Tools manager Duane Forrester goes behind the scenes of Bing Webmaster Tools’ Phoenix update. Forrester explains Bing’s efforts to assist the SEO community through the Phoenix Update:

• Why Bing partnered with the SEO community to launch new tools and features.
• The technology powering the new Link Explorer, SEO Analyzer and Fetch as Bingbot tools.
• How Forrester would use the new tools to improve his workflow and data collection if he were an SEO.

“Investing in Webmaster Tools is a way to partner at scale with website owners. If we offer insights that help them improve their site, those improved sites provide us with better results for searchers. Be that through a better user experience on the site, or through fixing issues which might impede discoverability. It makes sense to partner with webmasters and enable them as best we can,” Forrester says.

In a past Back to Basics article, we covered our SEO tools that you shouldn’t live without. These trusted tools were developed to help you analyze the performance of your domains, pages, keywords, and rankings. We cover a few favorite tools including:

• The newly launched Keyword Report which allows you to find keywords with a profitable balance between search activity and competition.
• The Domain Ranking Report and its Keyword Ranking Distribution, a visual analysis of raw keyword rankings across search engines.
• The Single Page Analyzer’s link information report to help SEOs channel link equity through the site.

New tool releases were driven by Web Development Manager Aaron Landerkin, who brought new tools and features crafted from user requests and in-house expertise. Many of the enhancements were subtle yet provided more in-depth analysis.

This month’s contribution from Bruce Clay Australia reports on Google’s official guidelines for mobile SEO. Google announced that its preferred method of mobile site configuration is responsive design, a single Web page that detects the device and adjusts content delivery accordingly. This article outlines:

• The three mobile site configurations supported by Google.
• The advantages of responsive design and resources for implementation.
• A mobile SEO checklist and best practices.

In newly published guidelines for Building Smartphone-Optimized Websites, the company says: “Google supports all the different ways the standards allow for using media queries in your code. Each implementation technique has pros and cons and you can use the one that works best for your site and users. As a general rule, if your site works in a recent browser such as Google Chrome or Apple Mobile Safari, it would work with our algorithms.”

Enjoy this month’s articles and all the month’s news in this edition of the SEO Newsletter!

The post SEO Tools Edition of the Newsletter: Under the Hood of Bing Webmaster Tools and the SEOToolSet appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Bruce is in the solution spotlight for this session and we all have him to thank for last night’s beverages. Salud!

Mike King @ipullrank is our first speaker. He’s got his preso available online: http://acq.co/toolspullrank3

Mike’s a programmer and an SEOmoz associate. Whatever biases you think come from that, he has them. He thinks you should build your own tools. He says its easy to learn how to code – take the classes from Code Academy and Audacity.

iAcquire is not a tool. It’s not a link network. It’s links from outreach. It used to be brute force outreach. Now it’s content-based outreach.

What tools do you use for on-page analysis?
Screaming Frog – can’t live without it. Crawl a whole site in minutes
Scraper for Chrome – export straight to Google Docs
HTTPFOX – see header codes
Page Speed Plugin – for Firefox and Chrome

Keywords tools?
Yahoo Clues – put in a keyword and see the people who search for it
Keyword Eye – visualization of keywords, their importance per URL
Soovle – suggests for Amazon, YouTube, etc.
Ubersuggest – suggests for Google
Scrapebox – use for quick keyword research
SEOGadget – AdWords API Excel plugin

Content ideas?
GoFish – put in a keyword and it pulls last 200 tweets and delivers keywords used along with it
SEOGadget Google Docs
Facebook Recommendation Demo – widget for your site gives suggestions based on already popular content
ImportXML for Google Docs

Link Tools?
Link Research Tools
Link Detective

Competitive Analysis?
Searchmetrics Essentials – the only game in town, in his opinion

Awesome things with analytics?
Keyword-level Demographics – search for the post on SEOmoz
Google Analytics Debugger

How can you find your target audience?
Facebook Ad Creator – is a segment worth targeting?
Facebook Insights
Doubleclick Ad Planner

Link building quick hits?
Brand Fans – download all the Twitter users, download link profile, do V lookups and find those following you but not linking to you

Visualize data?
Infogram
Piktochart
Dipity
Storybird

Other link data sources?
AHREFs
Blekko
Link Diagnosis

Rankings tools?
STAT – tracking keywords for different brands in different verticals. When algo updates come out he checks if sites have been hit.

Reaching influencers?
Followerwonk
Outreachr
Knowem
Mentionmap
IFTTT
Rapportive
Boomerang
Buzzstream
Zemanta
ManageWP – if you manage lots of blogs

The most important tool? Your brain. Don’t fall victim to tool gluttony. You’ll use 2 or 3 that work for you.

Merry Morud @merrymorud is next.

Organic social questions:
What are my goals?
What are my KPIs?
How big is my circle? Degrees of separation?
Where can we associate convos?
To what extent was content exposed?
Types of content got most exposure?
How did users engage rebroadcast? Like?
What demographics of your audience?

Facebook Insights: Reporting Gems
Finding what people are hiding – Lifetime Negative Feedback

Identify needs:
Page management
Manage multiple accounts
Social listening
eCommerce
Robust analytics
Reporting

Button and URL analytics
Bit.ly
ShareThis
Add This: assign welcome messages
they’re free, location demographics, identify influencers, other interests of users

Social and Open Graph Site Tool
Janrain: stores users demographic info, socially share activity, loyalty reward games

Google Social Interaction Analytics
Associate social conversions, last touch interactions, which networks are brining your traffic and money. Look at how long people are spending on site. Sort by visit duration and evaluate.

Social Monitoring Tools
Social Mention
TrackUr

Twitter Specific Tools
Track keywords:
The Archivist
Tweet Reach

Track profiles
TwitterCounter

Page Management Tools

Facebook Tools with Tab and Contest built in
CrowdFactory
WildFire
Shoutlet
PageModo
Vitrue – multilingual

Facebook management and analytics tools
Hootsuite
MediaFunnel
Buddy Media – posting intelligence, know what time is best to post
Awareness
Lithium
Sprout Social

Posting + Listening + Analytics Reporting Powerhouses
Sysomos
Radian6

SEO + PPC + Social + Analytics
Raven Tools

Rhea Drysdale @rhea is going to talk about tools in terms of personnel and processes. We were hired to think, she says. Running a tool is not sufficient, you have to do something with it. Tools + brains can = incredible.

Epic fail tool case study: all traffic to client domain is a very gradual upward slope. Unfortunately the organic traffic target keywords is a downward slope, coinciding with the new CMS. What went wrong? New CMS contract got chosen by executive team. Launched on real site rather than test site. IT had no training on the CMS. Poor communication between SEO and IT departments. Unplanned and extended code freezes. SEO agency was positioned as a vendor, not a consultant – they weren’t able to inform the purchase decision.

How’s it getting fixed?
Immediate SEO audit and ongoing analysis as more issues are discovered
In-person visit of client by agency, met IT
Bribed IT with donuts and work gets done
Agency positioned as consultant with more management of the SEO process and internal teams.
Halted development of new CMS on other properties

Actual cost of tool includes a switch cost. For this project the actual cost included:

The actual cost of the new CMS
Internal time
Agency time
Loss of sales due to drop in organic traffic
Agency SEO audit and consulting
Travel down to see the client
Internal team morale and productivity
Turnover
Missed opportunities

Criteria 1: Access

Is the tool accessibly by Windows and Mac users?
Is the tool/product of tool viewable in a variety of web browsers?

Criteria 2: Cost
Remember all the other stuff that happens

Criteria 3: Usability
What’s the training entail?
Does the tool have a robust and easy to use Help section?

Criteria 4:
Does the tool protect your personal data?
Does the tool protect data submitted through the tools? If data is shared, is it anonymous?
Does the tool allow you to retain sole IP rights to content you create?

Criteria 5: Resource Management

Criteria 6: Added Value
Can the tool be easily replicated with an internal resource or hired contractor for the same budget?
Does the tool provider customize the tool to meet our needs?

The Business Case: Tool Value – (True cost + Risks)

Handy spreadsheet of like EVERY tool, price, use, etc.
http://outspokemediacom/seo/link-building-strategies-spreadsheet/

The post Hardcore SEO and Social Power Tools – SMX Advanced 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Moderator:

Speakers:

Cameron Cowan, Product Manager, Adobe (@SEMCameron)
Patricia Hursh, president and founder, SmartSearch Marketing
Ted Ives, Owner, Coconut Headphones (@tedives)
Keri Morgret, President, Strike Models (@kerimorgret)

Ted starts and says that there was a good report on Predicting Bounce Rates in Sponsored Search Advertisements. The findings were:

1. Quality Score is largely related to CTR.
2. When CTR is unavailable, Google uses a proxy.
3. Bounce rate is highly predictive of CTR.
4. Variable that most correlates to bounce rate is relatedness of KW to creative.

The keyword [bicycle] is related in decreasing amount to:

• itself, [bicycle]
• stems
• synonyms

The AdWords tool is unreliable. Protect yourself against it – use other tools. Is there anything that can automate this? Have you seen Kentucky Fried Movie? There’s a scene where a Bruce Lee type character comes to rescue a girl. The girl says he’s assuming too much. A bunch of guys with mics are all around listening to them. She says we’ll have to bribe the guards. He says money is no problem. But it would be wrong.

This is like Google – they say not to use other tools like scrapers, but they tolerate some. He says Ubersuggest is a good tool. LSI Keywords is a tool where top SERP results for a keyword are gathered and those pages are analyzed.

In WWII they wanted to figure out where on B17 planes were most susceptible to bullet damage that would take them down. Abraham Wald, a statistician for the military, said to paint a sample plane with dots every time a plane came back with bullet holes. Instead of saying that the areas with clumps of holes should be reinforced, he said to reinforce areas without holes. Those were the holes on data not observed, the planes not making it back to the ground.

Think outside the box of categories of data you can look at.

Keri is next. She posted a negative keyword hacks post on the seoMoz blog. She also gave me her slide deck last week for me to include portions of in this coverage. Why use negative keywords? Let’s see.

Search for the movie [moving malcolm] delivers a lot of “moving” ads. These ads will get clicks but they’re not quality clicks. Don’t let your keywords battle each other. But don’t just apply these guidelines without thought. English words have multiple meanings a lot of the time. If you exclude Georgia the country, you may exclude Georgia the state unknowingly.

AdWords has a negative keyword list. Bing has a tool for adCenter that notes conflicts of keywords. Now we’ll leave the search engines’ tools and go out into the world.

She restricts her searches in IMDb search to TV and movies.

Worksheets for teachers are often done in text lists. When people search for movers they may talk about a couch or a sofa. Get ideas for additional terms that are relevant or not.

If you’re bidding on Whitney Houston, check out JC Whitney’s keywords and negative keywords for ideas.

Tools:

• Monitor with Google, Twitter Trends
• Table2Clipboard
• OutWit Hub

Patricia will talk next about organizing, analyzing and prioritizing keywords once you have them. She looks at several parameters related to keywords:

1. Business relevance
• specificity
• uniqueness
• small set
• top priority
2. Search volume: what’s the potential opportunity
• volume
• cost
• rate
• have to look at all of them
3. Competition: find low-hanging fruit
• Compare volume and competition
• If you can find kw with decent amount of volume but lower competition, should be easier to compete.
• Focus on positions 2-1, 3-2, 4-3. As you select kws look for the biggest bang from your buck
4. Conversion: what kw drive business results
5. Current visibility: improving a kw’s visibility, what will it do to bottom line?
6. Searcher intent: where is the searcher in the buying cycle?
• Reach people throughout the buying process

The vast number of queries are informational. Sometimes you can tell someone’s trying to navigate and asking around it.

foundation: business releavance. Above that, you consider conversion and volume, then look at competition and visbility and then searcher intent.

We’re here because we have a problem, Cameron says. Customers have thousands or millinos of keywords. The biggest problem he said sas deadweight keywords. Zero impressions, or impressions but no clicks, or no conversions.

The asnswer is relevance, business relevance. What you can prove based on traffic volume and overall conversions.

Pockets of opportunity:

• broad match
• high CPC
• high click volume

Beyond PPC:

• If you can do that for paid search, do it for organic. Look at how users are entering your site from organic search.
• Internal serach terms: leverage hyper relevance
• Social keyword monitoring: understand how others talk about you. A cloud of words will develop. Use it to expand reach. Refine terms and ideas and phrases you don’t want to be associated with.

The post SMX West 2012: Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Oh good. Bryan’s given me fair warning that his presentation will be next to impossible to liveblog. Something like 125 tools and 60 slides. Eep!

Tim’s presenting first. He’ll be telling us about 5 tools today. CrazyEgg, ClickTale, UserTesting, CrossBrowserTesting and AttentionWizard.

All these tools will help you identify problems with your site. He asks everyone to raise their hand and say “my baby is ugly.” Your landing page has fundamental problems. These tools will help you find them.

CrazyEgg

Type: in-page analytics

Key features:
Mouse heatmaps
Click confetti
Link click overlay

Conversion applications:
Clicking on non-clickable images
Behavior changes based on screen size and traffic source

They aggregate people’s mouse movement on the page which generates a heat map and that lets you know where people are focusing.

He compares two pages with a similar layout and you can see that on one the search button and nav get attention, whereas they don’t on the other. What’s the difference? Window size. So consider moving elements up even a little to fit into a smaller window size and it can make a big difference.

Pricing:
30-day money back guarantee
Different levels

ClickTale

Type: In-page Web analytics and user monitoring

Key features:
User session recording and playback with downloading
Click heatmaps with adjustable display
Advanced link analytics

Conversion applications:
How far do people scroll
Do they reach the bottom of the page
What form fields are commonly left blank
Which form fields cause most delay confusion
Which links are hovered over but not clicked
User session playback based on business rules

Conversion report: A conversion funnel that is very granular, inside the page, shows percentage and number of visitors travelling through the path.

A time report shows you the average length of visitor interactions in each field.

Blank field report: Only ask for info in forms that’s absolutely necessary to complete a task. These tools will help you identify how many people are wrestling with certain fields.

Pricing:
Different price levels

UserTesting.com

We often live in hermetically sealed boxes. We don’t ever talk to people, users. This gets you in touch with people actually using your site. It’s a way for you to have someone go through a process you define. There are also first impression tests, or have them do a common task. Because they’re uninterested visitors, that’s more representative of real users than you. If you run it on your competitor’s site, even one a nugget of info might reveal an “ah ha!” moment.

Type: online usability testing

Key features:
Online test setup specify task to perform on your site
Pre-screened subjects (taught to speak out loud)
Very quick results (start getting feedback within 1 hour
Get audio video recording and text transcript

Conversion applications:
Observe actual problems that uninterested visitors have
Run tests against your benchmark competitor’s sites
Get unexpected ideas for problems/testing

Pricing:
$29/participant
5-pack recommended as minimum
100% guarantee

CrossBrowserTesting

Type: cross-browser testing

Key features:
Test different OS, browser, application combinations
Pay by the minute for screenshots or live testing

Conversion applications:
Identify usability issues with different configurations
Find broken or suboptimal site operation
Find distorted spatial relationships

Pricing:
Basic is $19.99 a month

AttentionWizard

Type: simulated visual attention tool

Key features:
Creates “attention heatmaps” of web pages
Works with live and mocked-up designs
No actual page visitors required
Instant results – just upload an image

Conversion applications:
Identify visual elements that distract from goals
Determine exact amount of emphasis for key elements
Improve a landing page design before you publish it

A designer may want to include a design element like a drop shadow. But as a general rule, embellishments are distractions that hurt conversion rates. How do you prove that? With a tool like AttentionWizard, that predicts where a visitor’s attention will go on the page. You can fine tune things before they go live, making sure the focus on what you want them to focus on.

Bryan’s next. Buckle up! At least he’s not just making my life crazy. He just apologized to the video guy because he’ll be walking all around the room. He’s going to cover all the tools from this session in his next ClickZ column.

When he thinks of CRO, he thinks of 3 parts:

1. Tools: insights, creating pages, testing, personalization, campaign and automation
2. People: insight, management, creative execution, test setup implementation, outsource
3. Process: planning and creating new ads and content, optimizing old ads and content

$56.8 billion will be spent this year on generating website traffic, but only 2%-3% of visitors will actually convert. There’s more tools, more knowledge, people are more comfortable putting their credit card online. So why haven’t conversion rates gone up at all in 10 years?

Companies typically spend $92 to bring customers to their site. Only $1 of them convert.

Don’t do slice and dice optimization. The problem is:

• You need resources to create all these variations
• You need the traffic to test them
• If you don’t have these, this kind of optimization strategy won’t work.

Responses of a survey of the effectiveness of using dedicated landing pages:

• Somewhat effective 49%
• Very effective 43%
• Not effective 8%

Where is the landing page opportunity?

Every keyword is a unique campaign and should approach the visitor differently. With slice-and-dice optimization you’re putting lipstick on a pig. You still have a pig. You’re not getting very far. You should understand why people are buying.

76% don’t have a structured approach to CRO. 48% say they have limited time and resources. 61% do less than 5 tests per month.

Customer behavior in the last 5 years has changed so radically (mobile, social). You should be doing at least 20 tests per month. Amazon does 200 tests per month. They get 30% of every dollar spent online.

Tools time!

• Omniture and Google Analytics
• Form analytics like ClickTale
• Voice of customers like 4Q and Kiss Insights
• Call tracking like ifbyphone and mongoosemetrics
• Speed check like websiteoptimization.com and Loadsin (every second delay in load time is 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page vies and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction)
• Image optimization like smush.it and Dynamic Drive
• Tag acceleration like Tag Man and Site Apps
• UserTesting.com for PPC keywords
• Wirify.com creates wireframes of your site
• Mockflow can help you mock out a page before you give it to your designer
• BO.LT lets you take your landing page, upload it, and let you make changes to it
• Get Premise is a landing page generator for WordPress (check out their landing page for one of the best landing pages on the Web)
• 5 Second Test lets you get initial feedback
• Behavioral targeting like BTBuckets. You can see segments of visitors, geographic, devices, browser, seasonality, and a lot more.
• Site testing like with Google Website Optimizer (follows his rule: get good at free, then pay)

What are some of the first things you should be testing:

1. Headline copy
2. Content of images
3. Body copy
4. Format of layout

• Message consistency: average conversion improvement range 5%-20% (as high as 100%)
• Badging: Conversion impact as high as 55%. Overlaying a badge on top of a product image lets viewers focus in
• International: conversion improvement as high as 100% (don’t need a whole site, just a message that you can ship there, for example)
• Tax free
• Email acquisition: acquisition improvement as high as 1000%.

AdWords Performance Grader for Google AdWords campaign. Don’t write an ad your landing page can’t cash.

TagCrowd will show you what your page is about. If your keyword doesn’t show up, smack yourself.

BoostCTR.com crowd sources new ads for your product and you only pay if their ads perform better. Focus on conversion per ad impression.

Now you have the info and the tools. So now you have to speed up. A lead looses effectiveness by 6x within the first hour. Efficiencies of speed is what optimization is all about.

Finally, it’s not the tool, it’s how you use it. Check out http://mo.am/21secrets for how.

For related information regarding conversion tools, see our Conversion Ninja Toolbox post.

The post Conversion Tools of the Master Craftsman appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

You just haven’t been able to listen to it lately, what with the crazy time of year. I know how it goes. So to help you jump back into the podcast, here are your SEM Synergy extras for December’s episodes thus far.

Ask.com Develops New Q&A Search Technology, Aims to Index the Human Source

If you’re an online marketer interested in keeping up with the bleeding edge of search, you really can’t miss this podcast. Doug Leeds, the president of Ask.com U.S., talks to me about the company’s strategy for developing the next generation of search. And unsurprisingly, it’s got less to do with waves and goggles and more to do with human brains. Picture natural language, Q&A search, and a way to index content not yet published on the Web!

Listen to Ask.com U.S. president Doug Leeds map out the future of search.

SEOToolSet Free Tools & Training

What do you want for the holidays this year? How about a free piece of the SEOToolSet pie? The SEOToolSet is a subscription-based suite of SEO diagnostic tools. The SEOToolSet training course presents attendees with Bruce’s time-proven SEO methodology, continuously updated to stay in line with search engine guidelines and best practices. Together the two are like a daring duo of search marketing readiness, aptitude and ability.

As a holiday treat, Bruce gives listeners a free sneak peak into the tools and training course, including a walk-through of the free SEO tools available for use on SEOTools.com.

Listen to Bruce Clay’s demo of the SEOToolSet tools and training.

PPC News & Broad Match Tactics

With this week’s episode of SEM Synergy you’ll find a PPC package wrapped under the tree. Some search ad platforms have been rolling out new opportunities as well as changes to management tools, which Bruce recounts on the show.

In our liveblog coverage of SES Chicago earlier this month I came across a recommendation for taking advantage of the SEM long tail. A speaker said that bidding on broad match would negatively affect campaigns because long search terms could push headlines over the 25 character limit. In the past I’ve also heard cautions against using broad match, so I thought I’d ask an expert I trust for his opinion and settle my confusion once and for all.

Listen to PPC pro Jim Stratton’s recommendations for precautions and tips on the wise use of broad match.

As always, thanks for joining us on SEM Synergy!

The post SEM Synergy Sync Up appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..