Showing posts with label Expert Roundup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Expert Roundup. Show all posts

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts

22 Effective SEO Tips

How great would it be if we could gather all the Awesome SEO experts in just one room to talk about search engines ranks with a focus on the best SEO tips available out there? It would be glorious! Since we don’t have a room big enough to gather all the best experts in one place, we took advantage of the online “meetings” and gathered all the up to date SEO tips into an awesome expert roundup post. That is how we got the idea of interviewing 22 renowned SEO experts and how we found out 22 awesome and unique search engine optimization tips … the best of them.

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts for 2017


We’ve got answers from some of the brightest minds about the most actionable tips from the digital marketing world. We’ve found interesting news, insights and really helpful tips and guidelines about mobile optimization, metrics, qualitative content marketing, testing, technical SEO and customer centric websites. These 22 SEO Tips are some of the best for small businesses or large enterprises. Make sure you get the best of them.

1. SEO Is Not Just About Rankings


I’ve talked with many business owners that think ranking high in Google is all you need to be successful. The reality is that SEO is just one of many tactics to drive prospective customers to your website. Sure, ranking high in Google is great, but it’s also worthless if you don’t have a website that is set up properly to convert that traffic into leads and sales. Plus, you won’t rank high for long unless you have proper tracking in place and a process to monitor and analyze your SEO efforts. As you can see, SEO is not just about rankings; it’s also about website conversion rate optimization and website analytics and tracking. That’s important to understand before you start to invest in SEO.

2. Optimize Website for Visitor and Not for the Search Engines


Producing content that’s irrelevant and insignificant to your audience’s wants and needs leads to only one thing – people stop taking you seriously. People click on your links in the SERPs but they do not interact with your website and leave quickly – wasted opportunity to turn visitors into customers.

So how do I find what my buyer persona (not to be confused with ‘buyer profile’) is looking for? Glad you’ve asked, so let me give you some actionable tips. Finding questions that people are asking about your products or services. A very good place to start is Quora. I just went there and typed something very uninspiring like “carrots” (Writing content for a boring industry? No Problem).

3. Understand How Your Site Is Actually Performing Away From Vanity Metrics


If you track for the right KPIs, auditing will supply you with ongoing changes and help you focus on making the highest priority changes for you to hit KPIs and plan for the future.

4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Creative Technical SEO


People often neglect testing in SEO, mostly because it’s not easy, but optimizing CTR is a way to get some huge wins. Check out how Etsy is doing it or this recent look at approaches from Wayfair and their learnings.

I’m talking about coming up with novel ideas and analyses that help move the needle but are less about copywriting and more about technical proficiency. A couple examples: digging deep into semantic keyword research and data mining or dynamically populating title tags using the Google Search Analytics API.

5. Have Content Deliberately Written to Be Highly Linkable


Highly linkable content is content written on a broad enough topic that you can work it into guest posts and other link opportunities naturally, without the article having to be directly related to the content you’re linking to.

For example, I wrote a big piece on customer delight – a thorough guide on how to make your customers happy at every point in your relationship. I’ve been able to link to this piece within articles on topics ranging from marketing and sales to operations and employee management. Having a few of these kinds of pieces means you’ll never miss an opportunity to link to your content.

6. Do Not Underestimate How Important “Branding” Is to SEO


Do not underestimate how important “branding” is to SEO.

7. Build Your Website on a Solid Foundation of Data and Keyword Research


Your goal should be to build a customer-centric destination that works 24/7 at attracting fresh business.

My company, Search Planet, specializes in E-commerce SEO. I often see even large e-commerce Web shops leak revenue and profit because they’ll mirror their own needs and organizational structure online, instead of focusing on their customers’ needs. So the best prospects don’t find them in search results. Or when they do, they won’t buy from them – but go to their competitors instead.

By transforming your online presence to be entirely customer-focused, you’ll cut through the clutter, dominate search engines, draw a flood of targeted traffic to your website, and make more sales.

8. Spend the Time and Money to Have Your Site Analyzed in Terms of Its Existing SEO


You could have all kinds of issues that you aren’t aware of and rather than just trying to throw links at the site or find someone to write better content for your home page, put some focus on doing a thorough SEO audit.

9. Make the Best Page on the Internet for Your Topic


So here’s how I think about SEO:

  • If you made the best page on the internet for your topic …there are 2000 Math PhD’s trying to HELP you;
  • If you didn’t make the best page on the internet for your topic …there are 2000 Math PhD’s trying to STOP you.

Of course, it’s not enough just to make a great page. But it’s step one. Combine this effort with a clear understanding of off-site SEO, links and basic understanding of how to increase your domain authority and everything is going to work out well for you.

10. When It Comes to Link Acquisition You Need to Be Looking for Trust


The landscape has changed so much, we’re seeing a lot more weight shifting towards user experience, and link building has become a game of trust.

SEOs need to forget about them; there isn’t a metric out there that gives a true reflection of the value of a link, we have come across so many links with good domain authority or domain trust that we would class as toxic websites. When it comes to link acquisition, you need to be looking for trust, and you can only do this through a manual review; is this website the kind of website Google would trust and want to pass value through, is it a trusted source of information? You should then focus on how your links appear on that site, links that look like ads, in the footer or sidebars are going to be less likely to pass value in the long term.

We’re seeing a huge increase in the influence site speed has on rankings. We have run a few tests now with clients and are seeing a direct and almost immediate correlation with speed improvements and an uplift in rankings. Make it a priority, work with the development team and ensure your website is as fast as possible.

11. Invest Time and Effort into Developing a Link Earning Strategy


Do not take any shortcuts to buy or build low-quality links. While links are still a ranking factor, that is no longer their sole purpose. An effective link will provide the opportunity to improve three things; your traffic, your brand, and build trust. These are the links that should be your focal point. These types of links are found in building relationships with relevant websites and companies, creating valuable (not just quality) content, and a consistently having a giving mentality. Though it takes times, the reward will be worth it.

12. If Everyone Else Is Zigging, Then Zagging Is a Strategic Opportunity


If you just want one SEO tip, then let me share the insight that led me to co-found SEO-PR back in 2003. Hundreds of SEOs optimize web pages hoping that they will get a high ranking in Google search results. And many of them do a great job. But only a small handful optimize news stories, blog posts, or press releases hoping that they will get a high ranking in Google News search results.

Now, the Google News algorithm is similar but different than the Google algorithm. Why? Because inbound links aren’t as strong a signal of the importance of a story. This puts a premium on relevance. But, the big mistake that many SEOs make is assuming that the popularity of keywords used on Google is the same on Google News. They often aren’t. You can see this for yourself by using the Google Trends Explore tool. The default result for any keyword will be web search interest. But you can use the drop down menu to see news search interest. And the trends are often different.

In addition, Google says that 16% of searches that it sees every day are new. Well, ask yourself: “Where do baby search terms come from?” And you’ll discover that the stork doesn’t bring them. They are generated by the “news.” So, these are search terms that your competitors haven’t been optimizing their web pages to get high rankings for 15 years. So, you have a better shot of getting your news stories or blog posts (if you’re a news source) and even your press releases to get high rankings for than you would for yet another web page.

Now, admittedly, your ranking in Google News may only last a day or two. But, for near term news and events, this is the opportunity to drive traffic to a relevant landing page on your website. Now, the links in press releases are no-follow, so there is no “link juice” in them. But, they can still drive visitors to a page with more information — if it’s relevant and important. We used unique tracking links in four press releases for Southwest Airlines to generate $2.5 million in ticket sales. And when the CFO asked how we knew that they came from the press releases, we showed him that the tracking parameters on the links weren’t used by any other element of the company’s marketing. And when he suggested that we were merely harvesting interest that had been generated by the company’s excellent TV advertising, we showed him that the releases were for new service to cities where Southwest Airlines had never run an ad. He asked what else we knew. Well, we’d analyzed the database of people who had purchased tickets and found that two-thirds had never flown Southwest Airlines before and that they were generally purchasing round-trip tickets for two people.

13. Invest More in Content


Invest more in content. This is without a doubt the thing that people underinvest in the most, yet, doing so almost always brings great yields, both in terms of conversion and SEO.

14. Run Your Own SEO Tests Across Different Search Categories


Don’t believe everything you read and watch on the internet about SEO. Most of the best SEO’s I know don’t even have a Twitter account. Run your own SEO tests across different search categories.

15. Perform an In-Depth SEO SWOT Analysis


My best SEO tip is to do an SEO SWOT analysis. What are your SEO Strengths? What are your SEO Weaknesses? What are your SEO Opportunities? What are your SEO Threats?

If you create a basic SWOT grid and start to detail your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can start to get a better idea what kind of SEO you need. This is exactly how we work at Bowler Hat and even our SEO service page details how you need to identify what kind of SEO is right for you.

16. Understand What Your Targeted Audience Might Be Looking For


Make sure you understand what your targeted audience might be looking for when they might search for a site that you are optimizing.

What words they might use when they search for it, how they might construct their query and what words they will expect to see on your pages. Also what questions they might have about the goods or services offered on that website; and the answers to those questions, so that you can provide answers, and begin the journey towards having them become customers of your site.

17. Test Longer Strategies over Tactics and Measure Each Step of the Way


Is it possible that a single implementation could make a big difference? Yes. Is it likely? Not really. If you’re investing in SEO, you’re accepting a long game.

Google wants to rank the sites that earn their users’ satisfaction. Google isn’t as easily influenced, thanks to new search models and AI that are designed to truly understand the value of a page the way a user would.

18. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly


There are many things you can do to your website to improve SEO, but I would say right now that you should focus on making sure your site is mobile-friendly.

At the moment, Google uses your desktop site to rank you on desktop searches – Mobile First turns this on its head because it will base your desktop rankings on your mobile site. So if your mobile site is very poor, or even if you don’t have one, expect mobile first to cause you problems.

19. Create Your Own Websites and Experiment Things Risk-Free


The one SEO tip I would offer, that applies to both those who are new or more experienced, would be to start your own websites as soon as possible.

When I started out in the industry I was obsessed with consuming every SEO article that was published, but ultimately things really took off when I started launching websites. None of them are particularly successful, but they allowed me to try things risk-free without jeopardizing a client’s campaign. I was able to freely dive into onsite SEO, and I also dabbled in the ‘dark arts’ of link building which of course led to one of my sites being penalized..all fun and games! In order to truly understand how a website works I think it’s important to have some hands on experience, and getting that is easier than you might think. WordPress websites are simple to set up, and building up a bit of traffic can also allow you to experiment with advertising, log file analysis and more!

20. Focus on Content Quality


The single biggest tip I can give SEOs for 2017 is focusing on content quality. Over the last year, I have extensively been running experiments on how much the swing of search results has moved to the quality of the content.

It seems that the Google algo is getting better and better at pulling out content and really starting to understand how that content answers a query. Traditionally we used to talk about “content” and used to hammer in content in areas where really there was no structure, for example on product category landing pages in eCommerce websites. That used to be good enough to dominate the short, mid and long tail of queries as long as you had a decent volume of links.

21. Find a Way to Create Attention


Attention creates awareness, which in turn creates (brand) traffic and links, which will improve your SEO. You need to find a way to create attention (to your product/service/brand/company/website).

22. Hone Your Technical SEO Skills as Much as Possible


If I had to give one SEO tip it would be to hone your technical SEO skills as much as possible.

While SEO is a relatively broad discipline, the technical aspects of it are relatively opaque to many, and there is no shortcut for. On top of that, it is a skill that will likely always be in demand.

The Best Link Building Tools By Experts Choice

best 3 link building tools


Think you need dozens of tools for link building? Think again. I asked 60 Solopreneur, SEO Experts, Copywriters and Bloggers a simple question:

“If you could only use 3 SEO Tools for your link building campaigns which 3 would you choose?”

I wanted to know plain and simple which tools I must seriously consider and what I can live without.

As a newbie blogger I’ve been overwhelmed by all the top 10, 20 and even 100 lists that have got me nowhere closer to choosing a manageable selection of tools. That’s why I decided the only way to know for real was to ask the experts and see if the best tools in the industry would indeed reveal themselves.

Read on to discover each expert’s favorite 3 SEO Tools along with their awesome tips on how to use them! You can either skip to your favorite expert using these quick links or grab a coffee, get comfortable and commence scrolling!

60 SEO Experts Reveal 3 Favourite Link Building Tools



Neil Patel
Majestic SEO,  Scrapebox and Open Site Explorer.

Pawel Grabowski
BuzzStream – Great tool for blogger outreach and prospecting management. Think of it as your link building CRM with research tools built in (my personal definition of it of course :)). A tool I simply can’t live without. Oh, an important thing, their support is absolutely magnificent. One of the best I have ever seen.

Link Prospector by Citation Labs – A tool for finding link building opportunities. It’s fast, super easy to use and can find plenty of great websites you can build links from. Although as with any tool of that type, the results you get largely depend on what information you put in first (just thought I’d mention).

Rank Tracker – Perhaps not the most ideal tool but the one I use so thought I’d include it here too. It’s good for checking out your rankings but since it runs from your local machine, make sure that you use some sort of proxy or VPN if you want to check results from other location than yours.

Brian Dean
Good question ahrefs buzzstream and excel not sure if MS office is on Twitter.

Aleyda Solis
I really like Buzzstream, CognitiveSEO & Link prospector.

Amal Rafeeq
I think I’ll be going with Alexa. It records backlinks more quickly than others I think. And I recommend you NOT TO care much about the backlinks and Social Shares. Just continue what you are doing, produce great content and natural links will flow to you.

Chris Dyson
my top LB tools Scrapebox ahrefs & followerwonk

Miguel Salcido
First off, 3 tools is tough! Link building is so dynamic and encompasses so much. But if I had to only live with 3 tools for link building they would have to be Link Prospector, Google Docs, and BuzzStream.

Google Docs is just invaluable for things like organization, collaboration, and data management. What I mean by data management is being able to slice and dice data for different URLs or links and pull in metrics, contact info, etc. There are also tons of great tools built in Google Docs that one can leverage to generate content ideas and search queries.

Link Prospector is great for quickly developing lists of potential link targets whether it’s guest blogging, niche directories, contests, etc. This tool, I could not live without! It does what many of us had to do manually for years in terms of finding link prospects. It’s also extremely affordable and pays for itself easily.

And Buzzstream is useful for contact management, task management, and finding contact information. You can get alot with the paid version, but their free tools are excellent as well! You can use their free tools to find contact information, generate search queries, build lists, etc.

With these three tools one can build a very successful link building campaign that can last as long as you can keep working.

Adam Connell
BuzzStream – this is an essential part of our process at UK Linkology. It allows us to manage large guest posting campaigns with ease, track links and social mentions – even prospect for link building opportunities. The built in CRM is perfect for link building and it makes what can easily spiral out of control into something that’s easily managable.

Ahrefs – I use a couple of different sources for examining link profiles, but Ahrefs has got some really impressive tools that make it stand out… the way they break down anchor text into different numbered terms makes identifying issues very easy.

The crawler comes in handy, along with the mentions and batch analysis tools. The graphs it spits out come in handy for reports too.

Advanced Web Ranking – I’ve tested a lot of rank tracking tools and I know that tracking rankings is really difficult, lots of factors involved but you still need a bench mark – this bench mark will help you identify possible issues in the future.

I’ve tried desktop and online based tools to track rankings and I’ve had problems across the board – lack of features, poor reporting but AWR does everything that I need with some crawling and site evaluation tools too.

Paddy Moogan
BuzzStream – most people know that I’m a big fan of BuzzStream, it has so many uses but ultimately, it lets you scale link building in the right way because you build up your “black book” of link building contacts which can help you get more and more links the more you use the system. It also does a great job of pulling in link metrics so you can do quick link analysis tool

Followerwonk – I like link prospecting with Followerwonk because it lets you find true influencers in an industry which means that if you can build a relationship with them, the value goes far beyond just a link.

Google – you can find all the link prospects you’ll ever need by learning how to use Google properly. It sounds basic but you often don’t need fancy tools to scrape Google for you, you can get much more granular by refining your own queries quickly and pulling in the results manually than having to rerun tools.

Andy Crestodina
Links happen when great content becomes visible to someone who creates links. Who creates links? Writers, bloggers, editors, journalists, podcasters and event organizers. In other words, the trick to link building is to create visibility among creators.

So here are three networking tools that can be used for link building. I recommend these tools because they focus on research.

FollowerWonk, InkyBee, and Topsy.

Silicon Beach
to be different Twitter outreach photoshop creating content & feedly keeping track of target blogs for engament

Jon Dykstra
My 3 most-often used tools are:
Google Keyword Tool – I have Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro, but tend to use GKT the most.

Google Trends

Camtasia Video Screen Capture – I make tons of videos and transcribe them. It’s one of my favorite content-generation methods these days… plus I put the videos on YouTube.

Ann Smarty
MyBlogGuest, BuzzStream and Google search

Iness Bokhan
As for the 3 SEO tools I’d use for link building, I’ll probably pick the following ones:

1. SEO Spyglass – the tool has a huge database that gets regularly updated and it brings back the unlimited number of backlinks and analyzes top backlink page factors (PR, age, Alexa, anchor text, etc.).

2. Google Analytics – pretty obvious, but still, this is the tool I keep open in the browser tabs most of the time.

3. The SeoQuake plugin for Firefox – for instant analysis of potential backlink pages.

Chris Ainsworth
My answer would depend upon the purpose for your link building tools. If you’re looking for link analysis tools in the post-Penguin era then personally I would have to say:

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Ahrefs
3. Link Detox If you’re looking for actual link building tools (i.e. automated tools) then don’t!

Otherwise if you’re looking for tools to help with the placement of links (i.e. identification of a trustworthy domain) then there are an array of tools such as Archive.org, WHOis, Majestic SEO etc which will help to establish the history of a domain.

My answer would depend on your goal for the tools but getting it down to just 3 may be a problem. Any SEO with clout will advise using an array of tools to ensure you obtain the widest overview possible. I hope that helps.

Tim Grice
response source, follwerwonk and Google That's for link building, link analysis is a different story.

Gabriella Sannino
One thing that’s apparent, if you’re paying attention to the changes occurring in SEO: it’s more than analytics, technical and content strategies – it’s about human behavior, too. How are people making those connections? The easiest and most time consuming way is earning links. That is important for SEO. Actually it’s two-fold process.

The first and most important reason is the connections you make outside your digital footprint that reinforce and add value to your readers. The second reason of course, is that search engines use those signals. Yes, search engines view links as part of the authority given to your web presence and will continue to do so, while updating algorithms that combat crappy links.

I’m sure you’ve seen those comments people make. “Google is ranking company xyz better than ours, yet our content is better.” I get it, really I do. But at the end of the day, allowing Google to dictate your day-to-day operations is like being a hostage with no clarity for your future. Let me be clear, ranking should not become your Holy Grail. Contradiction much you say? Sure, but at the end of the day ask yourself who’s buying from you? I’m pretty sure you’ll agree it’s not Google.

Maybe you should add earning links as your top must do in 2015. It’s an organic process and yes, its time consuming but when done organically it’s like a facelift, it becomes ageless. At least for the next 3-5 years LOL. Which when you consider how long a strong organic link lasts, the odds are for you, and not against you.

Below are my top three organic link-building tools. Each one offers a variety of options that will not only help with your organic efforts, but that will point you in the direction of “where” you should look first.

Link Prospector from Whitespark, Google Webmaster Tools and Majestic SEO.

Gregory Ciotti
For the sake of being different, I’ll try to include a few of the less obvious options.

Yesware – I’ve written thousands of words about email outreach and networking over email and if there is one tool I can’t live without, it’s this. Reminders, tracking, customizable templates, it’s got everything a link builder needs for email.

Ahrefs – Simply put, the premier tool for checking links. Their mentions tracker is also highly underrated.

AuthorityLabs – Instead of wasting time tracking the results of your linkbuilding, tools like AuthorityLabs let you get an overview of your current rankings quickly so you can go back to (surprise!) building more great links.

Geoff Kenyon
Link Prospector: The Link Prospector by Citation Labs is a great tool for finding outreach targets – it’s easy to use, fast, and while you can use advanced search queries in Google, this scales a lot better making it a much more efficient way to do your prospecting.

Open Site Explorer API: Once you have your prospects from Link Prospector, you have to determine which targets you should pursue as not all sites and links are equal. The OSE API provides a fast way to do this. There have been several posts written about using gdocs to access the API, but the best way is to use Pyscape.

Additionally, OSE (and Pyscape) are great for doing competitive analysis so that you can determine where to concentrate your efforts.

Google Analytics: Your analytics is ultimately what you need to turn to in order to determine how effective your link building is (You don’t have to use Google Analytics, I just like GA, more on that here). Rankings don’t matter, your organic traffic and your revenue matter so it’s important to spend more time in your analytics, understanding what’s happening on your site rather than checking ranking reports.

Chris Antoni
3 Essentials to my link building:

Community Specific Forums, YouTube, and Guest Posts.

I don’t need no stinking tools! Just playing with you, but that is my real answer.

Matt McGee
I can give you one tool: Help A Reporter Out , also known as HARO. It’s a great place to discover journalists and writers that are looking for expert sources, and then reach out to them to be interviewed for their reporting needs. That can lead to great mentions and links from trusted websites — so-called “editorial” links that are given freely and seem to be highly valued by Google. Hope that helps. I don’t do “traditional” link building anymore, just PR/outreach like I’ve described above.

Mauro D’Andrea
I love Long Tail Pro. You can integrate it with your Moz free account so that you’ll have the chance to analyze your competitors and their links pretty easily. Other than links you can check site age, domain authority, page authority and page rank of many sites at a glance.

Open Site Explorer is another powerful tool. It gives you many insights about links pointing to a certain page.

As a third tool, I’d think about Microsoft Excel, or other similar softwares (even though it isn’t really a SEO tool). With it you can track your link building strategy, your search engine rankings, your keywords, important websites and email contacts.

Mike Essex 
Majestic SEO: Fantastic for checking which links have been received and analysing competitor strategies

Gorkana / HARO: Both great ways to see active PR queries that journalists need help with

TweetDeck: I add lists of journalists on Twitter so I can see whenever they have questions and can interact with them, building long term connections

Bill Hunt
Google Webmaster Tools – to find broken and misdirected links often to the home page.

Majestic SEO – for bulk links and drill down in link value.

Link Research Tools – primarily for their Link Detox tools to weed out bad and old links.

Nick Eubanks
hmm tough one, I would say SERP IQ, ahrefs, and buzzstream.

Anthony Mangia
I love the Moz Keyword Analysis tool. I don’t think there’s a better tool on the market to quickly analyze the SERPs and really look at how competitive a given keyword will be to rank for. The interface is slicker than ever with the re-brand from SEOmoz to Moz, and their Full Reports are as in-depth as it gets. I use this tool a ton when I’m prospecting for new niches to enter when building websites for myself.

GroupHigh is my favorite blogger outreach tool. It’s Buzzstream’s slicker, more powerful, much more expensive older brother, but I think it’s worth every penny for some of my larger clients. Being able to mass import URLs by the thousands and pull down basic blog information, SEO and traffic metrics, social networking stats and even things like whether or not the blogger normally runs giveaways/guest posts/sponsored posts makes prospecting for new blogger connections a breeze.

Evernote isn’t really an SEO tool, per se, but it is my whole life. I use Evernote to organize any and all information relating to various clients and websites I own, including notes, to-do’s, new content and any important files. This allows me to access the files I need from any device, whether I’m at my apartment, at a client’s office, or on the road.

My favorite feature of Evernote, however, has to be the Clearly extension. Whenever I see an article on Inbound.org that I know I want to read, I just hit the Clearly button and the content of the article gets scraped and saved to my Evernote account in a clean, easy-to-read format that I can access offline on my iPad, which makes my Subway rides a million times more productive.

Zac Johnson
Three tools that I like to use are:

Google Keyword Tool – always a good resource for people just starting out and don’t have money to spend on premium services.

Serpfox – a nice little site that keeps me updated with all of my site rankings and movement.

Long Tail Pro – an awesome software application that provides deep research and numbers or finding winning keywords.

Jason Acidre
SEOquake, Google Search and Ahrefs.

Nicole Beckett
One tool would definitely be Open Site Explorer. Some of the best SEO advice I ever got was ridiculously-simple — Google your target keywords, and see what kind of links the top 3 results have. Then, try to get links from the same places (like publishing a guest post on the same blog, etc.). It’s easy to do with Open Site Explorer and it really works!

Another tool I use is Google’s “sites like” option to find guest blogging opportunities. For example, I have alot of articles published on Site Pro News, but I’m always looking for similar sites that I can contribute to. The “sites like” option has helped me find websites that I may never have found on my own.

I think those are the only 2 tools I really use. Since SEO has changed so much over the past few years, I’ve focused more and more on other opportunities (like guest blogging and even *quality* forums that I can join and build relationships on — not just drop a link on). Luckily, I’ve gotten some great exposure AND some really great links in the process!

Kane Jamison
In a hypothetical world where I only get 3 tools, the best answer to this question will always be the following:

  1. An email client
  2. A Google search box
  3. A spreadsheet to track it all


I think the smartest link builders would argue that a phone is just as good as an email client. That said, linkprospector.citationlabs.com is the one paid tool I wouldn’t give up – it greatly speeds up the prospecting process. After that, OSE & BuzzStream are the next best additions to our toolset.

Darren Paterson
Personally, I find the following three tools to be the most important and potentially invaluable in terms of my day to day activities and “tools for your offsite link building campaigns”:

Open Site Explorer – There is really no need to explain in detail why and how we utilise OSE, but mainly the ability to download and manipulate backlink profiles for both clients and competitors is quick and simple.

Ahrefs – I have found Ahrefs to be a great secondary tool, which provides a lot of data, which is easily accessible, which otherwise would involve hours of work when using OSE. For example, anchor text distribution graphs are automatically created and require no additional work when entering a URL into Ahrefs.

Google Webmaster Tools – Although not necessarily within the “tools for your offsite link building campaigns”, it has to be one of the main tools I use day-to-day. A lot of my my time, especially within the last few months, has been focussing on identifying measurable backlink data. Therefore utilising the the ability to download ‘discovered’ backlinks over the last few years is incredibly useful. Especially when conducting backlink audits for new and potential clients.

Bill Sebald
BuzzStream would be my first. My love for BuzzStream knows no bounds.

Second would be RankRanger, a daily rank tracker with a lot of different metrics and a great whitelabel option. This is a big time saver with clients

Third is the Web Developer plugin for Chrome and Firefox. I use it all the time for audits.

Marcus Taylor
The three SEO tools I use the most (besides the really common ones) are SEMRush, URLprofiler, and Screaming Frog.

While SEMRush has a lot of cool features, I’m a particularly big fan of their site audit feature, which tends to flag a lot of site issues missed by Google Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog.

On top of this, the competitive data that you can get from SEMRush is extremely useful when doing competitor analysis, and a (surprisingly) accurate way of seeing which keywords are generating the most traffic for a given site.

URLProfiler is one of my favourite tools for scraping link data, as it collects data through Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs’ APIs, and then allows you to export the information with a lot of control over different filters.

Finally, Screaming Frog is my go to tool for getting a birds eye view snapshot of a website’s onsite structure and general health. It’s also particularly useful when you need to get a snapshot of all of a site’s title tags and meta information, along with the character length of each.

Bob Jones
Raven Tools – The link manager is an essential part of our daily link building hustle.

Majestic SEO – Although we also use OSE from Moz and Ahrefs, Majestic seems to have the right type of functionality for us when it comes to competitive research.

Google – This includes GWT but also Google.com itself. Learn all about advanced search operators and you’ll be able to find fantastic link opportunities if you do it right.

Samuel King
My 3 top tools are:

Google Analytics – This is the only tool I need to evaluate campaigns, track conversions and monitor set KPIs.

Google Webmaster Tools – Another google tool. Tells me what is going on with links.

Raven Tools – A very robust SEO assistant that pulls in data from multiple sources.

Chris Gilchrist
I don’t have time to explain all the choices but, Majestic SEO, BuzzStream and Screaming Frog.

James Agate
Very quickly… Google Docs, Trello, and Link Prospector.

Carrie Hil
My 3 go-to tools for linkbuilding are:

Raven Tools – their Backlink explorer and link manager are awesome.

Open Site Explorer – you don’t need both Raven and OSE, but if you have them, they’re great!

HARO – Help A Reporter Out service looks for niche experts to provide info to reporters and journalists. A great resource for certain businesses looking to get the word out.

Harris Schachter
I love following tools:

Ahrefs domain comparison. I’ve always been a fan of Ahrefs and this tool tucked away in the site is no different. With it, you can compare up to 4 of your competitors alongside your own domain. It presents very useful data, including link and referring domain counts, backlink sources, TLD types, link types, authority metrics, social lovin’ and more.

You can quickly size up the competition with this, before diving into the individual sites. Once you identify some top performers, you can then go into the main section of Ahrefs and export all their links and pivot in Excel to find some great opportunities which your competition has but you might not.

Browser Addon/Plugins. I know this is kind of cheating because it’s more than one tool, but the Moz Bar, Check My Links, Web Developer Plugin, and some handy bookmarklets are too crucial not to mention.

LinkRisk. Simply put, you can’t grow a garden without pruning some things here or there. I got in during the beta, but I’ve really been digging on LinkRisk. It does a great job of identifying bad and risky links which you might want to consider disavowing or removing.

For sites with a ton of backlinks, this tool saves a lot of time and can also serve as validation for your own opinions about the quality of links, as sometimes this type of judgement can be subjective. I love that you can take an ahrefs or Majestic export and plug it right in, identify different classes of risk and then automatically export a disavow file. It’s simple, useful and plays nice with other tools I already use.

Rhea Drysdale
Majestic SEO, Screaming Frog, and Google Webmaster Tools.

Nathan Rossow
There are a few tools that I use in my day to day work. My Top 3 are LongTail Pro, Moz Pro, and Bright Local.

Sohel Parvez
I love Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Majestic and Open Site Explorer.

Gianluca Fiorelli
The tools I would use – and that I actually use – are:

BuzzStream, which is the state of art CRM for link builders. It solves tons of time consuming tasks so you can spend your time for what it counts: outreach.

Majestic SEO/OSE, for finding opportunities and doing competitive analysis.

Followerwonk, because I consider that the best way of doing link building is targeting your audience well – its tastes, dislikes et al – but especially analyzing those ones who influence your audience. Try to understand what they like, what they share, from what sites and create that kind of content and target the sites they read and share things from, because it works!

Philip Bryant
My top three SEO tools for linkbuilding would have to be: Majestic SEO, BuzzStream and Google Advanced Search Operators.

Debra Mastaler
Hub Finder from SEOBook – Finds co-occurring sites. Link Detective – Analyzes back links by type and Social Crawlytics – Identifies most shared content.

Sean Stahlman
Three link building tools I can’t live without? While I use BuzzStream for management, I think there is some great value in the following tools. With the recent Google updates, I’m spending significantly more time for clients auditing link profiles and cleaning them up before earning them some great value.

Screaming Frog – I use this for anything from site audits, detailed backlink analysis, redirect mapping and so much more. Pair it up with data exported from other tools and it’s a massive time saver. You also can’t beat the customer service that Dan delivers!

Majestic SEO – I know there are a variety of 3rd party link tools available but Majestic has always been one of my favorite sources. It’s affordable, fast and provides the majority of information I’m looking for. That doesn’t mean I don’t still leverage OSE, FWE or other tools for some missing components.

Google/Bing Webmaster Tools – Free information directly from search crawlers! Regardless if some data (links) is not entirely complete, I think it’s extremely valuable to know how crawlers are interacting with your site, how their index matches up with the actual amount of content you are presenting and what roadblocks are being encountered. While I wish the link data from Google was more accurate, I’m happy to have a fairly solid starting point for reviewing potential threats.

George Stevens
I’d probably say:
1) Google Webmaster Tools – gives you your fundamentals – a place to check how Google is looking at your website. Also one of the best lists of backlinks you can get – links that tools like MajesticSEO and Open Site Explorer don’t pick up. I’ve found link lists in Webmaster particularly useful for combating negative SEO.

2) Majestic SEO – I prefer MajesticSEO to Open Site Explorer. I use this for lots of backlink profile metrics.

3) Moz (SEOmoz) – wide selection of tools to help with SEO. E.g. checks websites for errors and issues and gives keyword competition.

Joel Widmer
My top 3 are: Open Site Explorer, BuzzStream and SEO Toolbar by Moz.

Sebastian Cowie
Top 3 Tools / Sites for me:
Ahrefs – Invaluable and definitely the leader of the pack when it comes to backlink data and competitor research.

Scrapebox – Too many tools to list, but it’s basically got everything you could ever need for data collection, scraping, rank tracking… the list goes on.

Google Webmaster Tools – Great at detecting issues and the backlink data is definitely more accurate and inclusive. Also offers insight into key term visibility and effectively does your keyword research for you.

Nick LeRoy
The three SEO Tools I rely on the most are Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and good ol Google Docs. I like OSE and MajesticSEO as tools to do competitor research. Not only is it good to find links going to their websites but also other websites the sites link out to which might be relevant for me to hit up in the future.

After that i am a purist — i like google docs and excel spreadsheets. I’ll simply keep a list of what site i’ve reached out to, dates, domain value (seomoz metrics & PR) and relevance. I also utilize this spreadsheet as a little black book in case any of these websites i’ve received a link before are relevant for future projects! It’s as simple as that for me. No fancy tools in my arsenal!

Ryan McLaughlin
BuzzStream – Every time I discover a new opportunity, I immediately click my Buzzmarker in order to get it queued up in this tool. As someone that really appreciates easy organization, BuzzStream is a lifesaver.

Open Site Explorer – Of course, for backlink research everyone has their preference (whether it be OSE, Majestic, ahrefs). Personally I use all of them, but my “go to” is usually OSE. The export of competitor’s backlink profiles in order to identify their top links is one of my first things I check.

Google Search – Advanced queries in the big G are invaluable to the link building process.

Simon Penson
BuzzStream, Ahrefs, our tool for finding influencers

Peter Attia
It would depend on many factors including the type and scale of link building. I’ll focus on traditional outreach link building, as I feel that’s what most people are seeking. However, the scale of link building is still a factor here. For example, if I was working with a high budget business with a team of link builders who are getting as many links as they can, all day every day, I would say:

BuzzStream – To keep track of who got a link where (so two link builders don’t approach the same person) and to churn out outreach emails more efficiently.

Ahrefs – To keep track of my back link profile and make sure things look organic and healthy.

Excel – To organize everything properly, keep track of budgets, and assess which terms to go after moving forward.

For a low budget business that is trying to get a small amount of high quality links, I would say: Followerwonk – To find higher quality candidates with healthy social profiles. Ahrefs – For competitive analysis and to see if I can mine some higher quality leads from competitors. Boomerang – To make sure I send out a follow up email if I don’t get a response from someone.

Sujan Patel
My favorite tools are: Open Site Explorer – Finding the competition’s links. Ontolo – building a contact list and Cognitive SEO – for link cleanup and removal. Because these days everyone needs to remove a few links.

Wiep Knol
If I could use only three, it would probably be: Majestic SEO (for raw data) Cognitive SEO (for detailed analysis) BuzzStream (for campaign management).

Dan Stelter
As a copywriter, I don’t get into the SEO side of things too extensively, but some concepts, like keyword research and on-page optimization, are critically important for my copy to succeed. I use some tools to check SEO health too, but when I’m talking about SEO, I’m more discussing tools I use for keyword research etc…

1. SEMrush – I use this tool mostly for keyword research. You don’t even need the paid version. Basically, you can type in competing domains and see the exact keywords they’re targeting, as well as where they rank for those keywords. It works great for generating ideas.

2. SeoQuake toolbar – This toolbar is pretty awesome for checking competition. It gives critical stats like domain age and page rank of the pages you that show up in Google’s SERPs. This information is vitally important for me to have when determining which pages and keywords to target when designing clients’ or my own websites.

3. My own eyeballs – I use these because Google wants to give the best rankings to websites that provide the best user experience. That can only be judged by looking at the site yourself. About 80% of the guest post requests I get come from spammy, awful websites I’d never link to. The same goes if I’m guest posting on someone else’s website – I know I’ll get the best SEO value if the site has great content and comes across as a credible resource.

Sanket Patel
Three tools which i use always are:

BuzzStream – As far as finding good link prospects is concerned, I love this tool. I have made many channels through this tool and recently have added one more to have a far and wide reach to bloggers. I have been able to pick microinfluencers having conversations about their products. This software really helps me in finding better opportunities easily.

Moz – The best thing i like about this tool is the toolbar provided by Moz Community. It gives us a bunch of SEO metrics in few seconds. I am able to evaluate many things for the initial start-up of the web promotion. I love other stuff too, like OSE for link analysis, Onpage checklist analysis and recently added Followerwonk for twitter analysis and many more tools which enables quick tasking. All Moz tool makes your workflow easy at the end.

IFTTT – If you are running social media campaign then do not forget to add IFTTT. You will get powerful connection through normal triggers via ‘if’ & ‘then’ statements. There are 57 channels which are associated to this tool. I have setup the same for youtube, twitter and many more channels and i am getting quick reactions through those trigger which i have set already. It becomes easy to measure all social signals from one easy platform.

Lyndon Antcliff
Email, Twitter and occasionally the free Moz bar.

I am a content based linkbuilder, a buzz marketing, newsjacking, linkbaiting type. I no longer care about seo as such. Don’t get me wrong it’s certainly not dead and never will be. But the aim of the game is to get links, improve brand awareness and improve customer base.

The three tools I mention are what I could not do without, although most will not think that Email and Twitter are a tool, but that is how I use them. My experience tells me what I need to know about a website these days. Few tools can replicate that

Dan Petrovic
There are many great tools which my team uses for link building and link management. This includes Majestic, Raven, Moz, BuzzStream, Ontolo and recently we’ve been looking at Cognitive SEO as well. But since the question is about what I use I’ll have to go off the beaten path, so I hope it won’t disappoint.

Google Webmaster Tools: I’ve built so much functionality around Google Webmaster Tools data that I would find it really uncomfortable to plan my campaigns without it. Before I create an outline for a link building campaign I look at the pages that have already attracted natural links and ask a question: “What made this content linkworthy?”.

Once I answer that question I can then plan content creation strategy and then focus on outreach. Google Webmaster Tools also helps me prioritise which type of content and keywords are worth targeting. I even built a custom tool which helps me crunch all the Webmaster Tools numbers and streamline the decision making process.

Fresh Link Finder: I try to keep link creation process as organic as possible and for this reason I’ve built a tool which helps me track natural links as they happen. Fresh Link Finder analyses three link sources: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytcis and server log files. It’s also capable of tracking referrer string data with .js much like Google Analytics code.

I log in daily and observe what content has attracted links and the quality of links generated. This allows me to connect with fans, build new relationships and credit those who link to me. From time to time I’ll have an opportunity to correct a link or in rare cases request a removal (if I feel the link is a risk to our link profile). One fun thing is that I can tell that I will get a link from an article before the article goes live (e.g. blogger clicks the link in a post draft before publishing the story).

Muil: Link building is relationship building. I like to start with my existing connections to source links from, rather than begging for links form complete strangers. What better place to start with than your own followers on Twitter? I drop my Twitter username in Muil and it gives me a list of users and their websites/blogs in a CSV file.

For me that’s a great starting point when building links through relationships. Of course you wouldn’t spam people all at once as social outreach works best when applied on an individual level.

Chris Higgins
As a marketing agency we are fortunate to have access to a whole host of cool tools and pieces of software to help us with our day to day tasks.

They all do their job really well, but I definitely have my favourite and as you may expect these are the ones I use most often at all stages of a client’s campaign, from inception through to ongoing monthly delivery.

SEMrush, Ahrefs and LinkRisk.

If you could only use 3 tools for your link building campaigns which 3 SEO Tools would you choose?


Top Marketers Say: Stop Doing These Things for Greater Success in 2017

It’s always easy to find advice on what new strategies, tactics, and tools marketers should add to their mix. Especially this time of year, the internet overflows with advice. Start this new habit. Try this browser extension. Use this time management plan.
It’s good to learn and grow, of course. It’s great to add to your skill set or your toolbox. You can’t add on forever, though—eventually you need to take a few things out to stop from getting in your own way.
We asked some of our favorite marketing experts what you should stop doing in 2017 to be more productive, more efficient, and achieve better results. Here’s what they had to say.

Marketing Experts Say: Stop Doing These Things in 2017

1. Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions
In 2017, marketers should stop thinking in terms of campaigns. Every time a campaign ends you give your audience a reason to reconsider how relevant your company is to their needs. This is especially true if the campaign ends before they know everything they need to make a buying decision. Most B2B campaigns do, forcing your buyers to go find someone else who’s telling the rest of the story they want to hear.
Marketers who choose campaigns are also choosing to alienate their audiences when the campaign ends. Instead, focus on a continuum of engagement that builds momentum over the course of the customer relationship— at a minimum from prospect to customer, and if possible through to advocate. This requires the continuity, compassion, and commitment that campaigns inherently lack.
2. Gini Dietrich, CEO, Arment Dietrich, Inc.
The one thing marketers should stop doing in 2017 is THE WRONG MARKETING AUTOMATION. Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell that, but let’s get real. Just because you CAN send multiple emails if someone doesn’t open a previous one, doesn’t mean you should.
I’ve seen two big trends this year: 1) The email that says, on the third or fourth try, “You haven’t responded to me, which means you a) must be rude; b) must not need us; c) must be trapped under something heavy and can’t call for help.” And 2) The email that says, “You must be busy so I’m popping this at the top of your inbox so you can get to it more quickly.”
Both of these approaches assume marketers have the correct list and the people they are emailing are, at best, warm leads. When, in fact, most are cold leads and are from purchased lists. This strategy does not work. So stop it. Stop it now!
3. Amy Higgins, Strategic Marketing Consultant
I wish marketers would stop deciding on their tracking parameters as the last step to their marketing campaigns. Many marketers will publish and promote content without adding trackable data parameters. Or, they add one-off trackable data parameters that are not related to a high-arching goal or campaign metric.
Worse, many add the tracking parameters at the last stage. This is where mistakes can happen in a last-minute effort to getting a campaign launched. You could even end up with trackable data that goes nowhere or adds extra complexity to your data reports.
If you develop your data strategy while you are developing the campaign, you can map the customer journey and decide what metrics you need and do not need to track.  Ask yourself, what's the main goal of the campaign? What journey do you want your customers to follow? What are you trying to get your audience to do at each stage?
4. Doug Kessler, Creative Director & Co-Founder, Velocity Partners, Ltd
Marketers should stop kissing the asses of our executive 'stakeholders' and start standing up for what we know to be great marketing.
A dumb idea from a Senior VP is still a dumb idea.
Marketers need the backbone to point that out, instead of rushing off to execute it.
They know their stuff. We respect that. We need to start insisting that we know ours.
5. John Lincoln, CEO, Ignite Visibility
I can give you a long list of things that marketers should not do next year. There's so many ineffective strategies that people are wasting their money on right now. It's really sad to see. That being said, the one thing that really resonates with me is that marketers should absolutely not be blogging without any clear goals in mind. I cannot tell you how many blogs I see out there with absolutely no purpose.
What these people do not realize is that their blog traffic can be used for remarketing, it can be used to capture email addresses, it can be used to push people into their sales funnel, it can be used to strategically target large keywords on the internet that have buying intent, it can be used to grow the size of your social media community significantly, it can be used to create ecourses and it is the single most important part of your business for thought leadership (in most cases).
If you know how to blog correctly and you're adding something new to the conversation it can dramatically increase the size of your business. It is at the heart of your entire marketing strategy and most people are doing it just dead wrong. In 2017 I encourage everybody to really define their goals for blogging and study up on how to get there and really maximize the potential of their blog. Most marketers are leaving money on the table there. They don't realize the power that their blog has and next year they really need to grab a hold of it and not continue to make this mistake.
6. Katie Martell, Marketing Consultant
Please, stop buying technology when you really need to solve your strategy problems. Many tools create efficiency, many tools make you more effective, but no tool will help you if you are lacking a foundational strategy. Invest in understanding your customers. Invest in improving your story and your content. Invest in aligning with sales.
With so many options in MarTech, many teams face a new challenge: managing their existing tech stack. Don't get caught up in the hype and when you do make a purchase, hold your vendors accountable to helping you get the most out of your money spent. 
7. Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute
According to CMI/MarketingProfs latest research, 70% of marketers are planning to create more content in 2017.  For most companies, I believe this is a mistake.  The majority of enterprise content does nothing for the intended audience. 
I would focus on creating less, but more impactful content on fewer channels...on initiatives that are truly differentiated and truly help us to create better customers.  Consolidate what you are doing so that what you keep makes the most impact possible.