Sohel Parvez Achieves Yext Certified Professional Status

I’m pleased to share the news that I become a Yext Certified Professional. This certificate marks the completion of the Yext Certified Partner Product and Sales Curriculum. Yext partnership program offers professional marketers, digital agencies, Local SEOs more control over brand experiences via AI technology and ensures a strong online presence for clients.

This Certification is just a credential that I'm expert in Yext technology.



As a Local SEO Expert, I'm partnering with Yext to level-up my Local SEO Service. This means I will be able to offer the powerful Yext platform to my clients local SEO campaign and giving my clients the ability to control even more local business listings online.

Yext is a location management service that helps to list your business on different local directories. Yext started off as a local advertising agency in 2006.

About Me

Search Engine Optimization Expert Focusing on Full Service Local SEO, SEO Audit, Technical SEO, Backlink Building, Yoast SEO and Speed Optimization, with 8+  Years’ of Experience in Freelancing.

I'm Helping my Clients for:-
✔️ Google My Business Setup and Optimization.
✔️ Local Business Listing Management - Citation Building and Cleanup.
✔️ Local and Organic SEO Strategy Development & Implementation.
✔️ BrightLocal, SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Google Search Console & Analytics Property Management.
✔️ CMS & eCommerce Site Optimization.
✔️ In-depth Keyword Research.
✔️ Safe & Efficient Link Building & Links Profile Audits.
✔️ Technical SEO Audits and Fixing.
✔️ Spying On Competitors Site and Link Profiles.
✔️ Boost WordPress PageSpeed & Performance.

Marketing Agency and Business Owner Contact Me, I’m Happy to provide Specific details on Experience or References from past Projects.

6 Tips for Researching and Attracting Local Markets

If you met someone from British Columbia, Canada for the first time and they told you that they live in West Van, you might question whether they live in a vehicle or something. However, the term “Van” is used by many locals in Vancouver to describe different parts of the city. And fyi...West Van is quite posh.

Having an online business allows you to sell to customers from anywhere, at any time. But if you aren’t speaking to local markets in a language that they understand and appreciate, you’re missing opportunities to connect with that market in a meaningful way.

Likewise, there are many local advertising and tax laws, plus important government regulations to be aware of before entering into and selling to new markets.This may be something that you wish you had the time to research. Or, perhaps it seems overwhelming to know where to start. To make your life easier, I’ve collected some useful tips and resources to help you to better understand and attract local markets. So, let’s get started.

1. Discover The Local Markets That Are Right For Your Business

Just because your business is online, doesn’t mean that you have to be all things to everyone.

So, if you’ve already been running your online store for a while, a good place to learn more about the customers who are already seeking out your products, and where they are coming from is your web analytics data.

This will help you to zero-in on your primary local target markets.

Image via webanalyticsworld.net

If you are using Google Analytics, check out the Locations Report which can be found under Demographics within the Audience tab. In Canada and the U.S. you can look at specific regions (like States and Provinces) – and even major cities tied to your customers’ IP address.

Your goal with this data is to find out which cities or regions are visiting your website most frequently. Is there a pattern that helps you identify which cities spend more with your website? And is this because you are actively targeting these markets, or are they coming to you because of what you sell?

Check out this helpful blog post which explains how to navigate your location data reports.

Once you have this information, you’ll be able to determine which regions or cities you need to tailor your message to through online promotions and your website.

2. Understand The Cultural Nuances In Each Market

Image via Pixabay
Most businesses already know that if you are selling your products in both Canada and the U.S., it is important to know the quirky cultural differences between the two countries.

However, as I described earlier, people from different regions in the same country might use unique words and expressions to describe a product (or a place in the case of Vancouver locals).They also might have different habits, beliefs, or use different languages than people in another city in the same state or province.For example, in some parts of the U.S., if you order a “Coke,” your server might think that you want to order a soda. And their next question would be “what kind?” Here’s a regional breakdown of who says what and where in regards to asking for a “soda” versus a “pop” versus a “Coke."

So, it’s really important to use the right cultural language in order to speak directly to different markets within the same country. Otherwise, your message might get lost in translation.

In fact, according to this Stanford University Business School story, “cultural biases influence purchasing behavior when information is processed in a cursory and spontaneous manner.”

In other words, when someone is in a hurry to buy something, or they see an ad on a billboard or banner ad for just a brief moment, their interpretation of your marketing message is reliant on some of their cultural beliefs.

In the case of the Stanford advertising study, many Asian American students favored one promotional message which talked about the “preventative and security” features of Welch’s grape juice, whereas most Anglo American students identified more with a different promotional message which spoke to the key personal benefits that could be gained from the beverage, such as “having more energy.”

And while you need to do your homework and research important nuances for each target market, there is something to be said for physically visiting key markets, and immersing yourself in the culture, to get to know your customers personally.

Here are a few ways you might do this:

• Hire people as “boots on the ground” in key markets where you really want to dive deep into the local culture, climate (does it rain a lot or snow a lot and how does that impact what people do for fun or to stay connected as a community?) and history. These people don’t necessarily have to be running a physical store in that location - they could be remote or “virtual” employees who simply add an extra dynamic to your local marketing team.
  
  For instance, let’s say that you wanted to target the province of Quebec in Canada. You’d need to develop a separate local marketing strategy for the City of Montreal versus Quebec City and Rural Quebec, for example.
  So, you would need people in each location who can tell you more about the rich history of each of these regions, how the political climates differ (e.g. some parts of Quebec support the Bloq Quebecois, whereas other parts are more supportive of the NPD or Liberal party).
  
  In Montreal, many people are bilingual (speaking both English and French). Still, many locals will appreciate it if you try to communicate in French with them first. But in some parts of Quebec, people would want to access your site exclusively in French. So, that would play a role in how your craft your marketing messages.
  
  And Montreal is a melting pot of cultures, religions and personal beliefs, whereas other parts of Quebec are devoutly Catholic. So, although this example may sound a little crude, you could target Montreal if you sell XXX adult entertainment or toys online. But you probably wouldn’t want to target your website to the heavily Catholic populations in rural Quebec, as it may not be well tolerated.
  

• Set-up a pop-up shop in each of your target cities and invite some of your best customers to meet your team face-to-face, provide feedback and learn more about your products and brand experience.
  
  In fact, Shopify recently conducted a retail tour of major cities across Canada (via local pop-up shops) to get up-close and personal with existing customers. The goal of the tour was to “teach” versus “sell” to customers through ecommerce best practices workshops that were hosted in a casual setting. Here’s a full description of how this concept was created and successfully executed.

3. Ensure You Are Following Local Laws And Restrictions

Following the laws for each specific market in which you are going to promote and sell your products can get tricky if you are an online business. So, it’s helpful to familiarize yourself with consumer protection and truth in advertising laws which can differ across states and provinces in North America.One example in Canada is the contest laws that exist in Quebec versus the rest of the country. As this article explains, it is important to “pay special attention to Quebec” because you have to register your contest with a provincial regulator and you may have to “pay a 3% tax on the total prize value.”
Both the contest registration process and the tax payment can be a bit of a hassle. So, to the detriment of Quebec residents, a lot of companies choose to exclude the province from national contests – especially when under a time crunch to get a promotion up and running quickly.
In addition, there are different language, pricing and labeling laws across Canada and in the U.S. This Huffington Post article breaks down a lot of the key cross-border and cross-cultural challenges and differences to note.

4. Tap Into Local Government Resources For Market Data

Local government databases are an excellent source for market data about cultural nuances and consumer demographics. And since a lot of this information is free online, you don’t have to have a large market research budget to uncover great insights.

If you live in the U.S., here’s a link to a list of available databases that you can tap into by state. And if you are looking to target Canadian consumers, here’s a website that includes links to various databases like Statistics Canada which provides census data that can be broken down by region.You can also access information from individual cities like the City of Toronto’s open data catalogue. By open data, I mean information that can be freely used and manipulated by anyone. You’ll have to do a little bit of digging (and by digging, I mean web searching) to find specific open data sources by city. But tapping into this information will help you grow your business.

5. Evaluate Local Payment And Shipping Options

Image via Pixabay

Another challenge for doing business across borders and with different local regions are variances in taxes and shipping rates.

For example in Canada, each province charges a different sales tax rate. So, it’s important understand what each of those rates are and when to apply them to the products to that you sell (you might be exempt for certain products).

Luckily, if you use Shopify as your ecommerce platform, you can easily set-up the taxes for different countries and regions using the Tax Settings feature. Shopify keeps that information up to date (so you don’t have to stay on top of all of the changes) and automatically applies the rate to whatever countries or regions that you add into tool. Here’s a link to the manual to help you get started.

In addition, you should consider offering free shipping to customers wherever you ship your products – even if it means cutting into your margins a little bit in certain regions. That’s because studies have shown that the cost of shipping is a big deal breaker when it comes to shopping cart abandonment rates.

For more stats and details on how to resolve this issue, check out this blog post about how to choose a shipping strategy for your online store.

Keep in mind that if you cannot offer free shipping to a specific region or country, then it’s important not to show those customers the free shipping option that is available to everyone else on the site. It’s definitely a turn-off to know that other customers are getting a better deal. See the next section for more details on local marketing strategies.

6. Tailor Your Marketing Strategies For Key Regions And Cities

Once you have all of the data and resources you need to identify your top target cities or regions, how you should speak directly to each market, and what you can and cannot do to sell to them, it’s time to build a local marketing and website targeting strategy.

While I could spend an entire blog post writing specifically about local marketing strategies, here are a few ideas to get you started:

Landing page for Florida residents



Landing page for Colorado residents

Images via Barilliance

• Create locally targeted landing pages for key markets. The screenshots above show how an online store displays two different promotions (one for Colorado residents and one for Florida residents) based on their visitors’ geographic location.
  To explain this concept further, here’s a link to a guide from Moz.com on the importance of geo-specific landing pages and what to consider when building your own. To do this with Shopify, you can either create a separate page for each market, or use Landed – a third-party partner app.
  Likewise, you can work with Shopify partners like Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely to help you geo-target specific content areas on your homepage. While this will require a bit of time to set-up, it is worth doing in order to provide a tailored experience for your local customers.
  
• Segment your customer email lists by location and customize your content to increase conversions. Again, this could mean letting specific locations know that they can get free shipping (or other promotional discounts) while excluding this information from other local market lists.
  
  This informative post from the Shopify blog explains how to segment your email list and the best email marketing tools to use.

• Geo-target your digital ad campaigns. Many ad platforms let you geo-target (meaning to deliver an ad online to a specific geographic location) right down to the postal code. This can be especially useful if you are trying to drive customers to a local retail store via mobile advertising.
  Just like the email strategy described above, you can create targeted messages and creative that will resonate with each local market. And if you are focusing on paid search or SEO, make sure you target regionalized keywords in addition to developing location-specific creative.
  Check out this overview from SiteSpect on how to leverage geo-targeting to increase engagement and conversions.
  
• Target location-specific events like the weather or local holidays. You’ll have to do research on what the key events are in each of your biggest target markets.
  But the information you uncover can help you to tailor specific promotions and offers associated with those events – like a sale on rain gear if it has been raining non-stop for a number of days in one location. Or if people in Quebec, Canada are planning to celebrate St.-Jean-Baptiste day.

• Continue to track everything in Analytics to see if your local marketing strategy is working or if it needs refining. Here’s a simple guide to making the most out of your web analytics data.

Researching and developing local marketing strategies can seem overwhelming if you sell to a lot of markets online. So, if you are just getting started, it may be worthwhile to begin by researching and testing your strategies in just one or two markets.

Then, once you have developed a set of best practices (and perhaps learned from some mistakes), you can put together a plan to roll out your strategies to other markets that you have identified and properly researched – one step at a time!

How To Create a Mobile Friendly Responsive Website?

Choose a Content Management System
Unless you have prior experience building websites, you probably want to use a content management system (CMS) to build your website. There are many options, but you probably want to go with either WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal. These are the most popular CMS systems to date, and have a tonne of useful plugins, and templates for beginners.

Create a Website Header
Keep your website header as slim as possible, and test it on small screens to ensure it scales properly.

Outline the Main Site Navigation
It is important that you keep your navigation as simple, and organized as possible. Use drop-downs to group pages under parent tabs, and apply internal linking to navigate to less trafficked, supporting pages through body text.

Create a Website Footer
Don’t underestimate a website footer’s effect on conversion. If your web page’s content is compelling this is where all your visitors should end up after reading the page, so use footer elements to continue the user’s experience.

Create Your Home Page

1. Theater, Carousel or Slider
2. Slogan or Tagline Header
3. Brief Company Description
4. Product / Service Page Links
5. Promotional Materials: (videos, images, testimonials etc) 
6. Call to Action Button

Create Your Contact Page

1. Title: Contact (Company Name) – (Service Area). 
2. Full Contact Details: Address, City, Country, Phone Number, Email, Fax, P.O box. 
3. Map: Google Embed or Custom Design. 
4. Operating Hours: Normal hours and holiday hours. 
5. Email Contact Form: Collect at least: Name, Email, Message.
6. Location Images (Gallery) or Virtual Tour: Check out Google’s 360 tour. 
7. Social Links & Handles: Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat.
8. Leave a Review Prompt: Link to Google Maps, and other Directories.

Create Your Service / Product Pages

• Create product titles, and keep in mind how they will be read in search engines. 
• Add your service area / city in your product titles to help get more local traffic. 
• Create clever product descriptions that answer the following questions: Who can benefit from this product / service? (usage examples) What are the product / service features? (specs and options) How much does it cost? Where can I buy / pay for this product / service? Product / service specs PDF. High Quality product images from multiple angles. 
• Product videos and that highlight key features. Customer reviews / testimonials. Social sharing buttons.

Set up a Company Blog
Company blogs are an easy, and great way to keep your website updated with fresh content! One or two posts a month is more than enough for the average small-medium business.

Install Google Analytics

How to Optimize for RankBrain and Semantic Search in 2017

Search engines are currently undergoing a significant evolution in the area of artificial intelligence. Keywords are no longer relevant for SEO. Okay, that isn’t entirely true, but if your strategy still centers on identifying a handful of target keywords and stuffing those keywords into as many places as you can on your site, chances are your website will not get high search engine ranking. That’s because keyword-centric optimization has been on the decline ever since the Hummingbird update of 2013 changed the game and made Semantic Search the reigning factor in Google Ranking Algorithm.

From 2015, Google started using a machine-learning artificial intelligence system called “RankBrain” to help sort through its search results. RankBrain helps Google to process search results and provide more relevant search results for users query.

So, To be Successful in SEO, You need to Optimize your Website for RankBrain and Semantic Search in 2017.

RankBrain and Semantic Search has sparked a lot of buzz in the SEO Community. We've heard about Entity SEO, Conversational Content, Optimizing for Topics (as opposed to keywords optimization), and even completely ditching old-school SEO Tactics, like link building and Keyword Targeting, in favor of creating the most relevant and useful piece of content there is, and letting Google do the rest.

But is Google really giving up on keywords, and should SEOs do the same? What exactly does "Optimizing for Relevance" mean, how do you do it, and can you rely on it alone? How, after all, does RankBrain and Semantic Search work, and where do you get started? This article is an attempt to answer these questions.

What's RankBrain?

RankBrain is a form of Artificial Intelligence used by Google to help filter and process a large portion of search queries, so the results displayed are relevant to, and reflective of, the search intent. RankBrain uses machine learning and AI, with the ability to predict meaning, and therefore relevancy, to display the best matching results, even for previously unknown, and new search requests.

RankBrain has a core function of effectively answering new search queries and understanding what results should appear for topics with limited, if any, historical data to base relevancy and therefore ranking on.

RankBrain is the the third most important ranking factor for Google Search Ranking.

How RankBrain Work?

RankBrain's ranking component analyzes the pages in Google's index and looks for specific features (e.g., usage of certain related terms) that make those pages a good fit for the query. Such "features" are determined by analyzing the best-performing search results (according to Google's user satisfaction metrics, such as SERP click-through rate, pogo-sticking, time on page, etc.) and looking for similarities between these pages.

As a result, the pages that are deemed to be good responses to the query may not even contain the exact words from the query, but are nonetheless relevant. Google's recently said that RankBrain is "involved in every query", and affects the actual rankings "probably not in every query but in a lot of queries".

What's Semantic Search?

Semantic Search Aims to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent, contextual meaning of terms, and relationships between words to provide more relevant search results.
We should stop at two important concepts: intent and context.

Intent, which comes from the user, explicitly states what he or she is looking for. And context could be understood as everything that surrounds a search and makes this go in either direction, i.e., what gives it meaning. Thus, by understanding and connecting intention and context, search engines are able to understand the different queries, both what motivates and what is expected of them.

It all started with Google's Hummingbird update back in 2013. Hummingbird uses context and searcher intent (as opposed to individual keywords in a query) to ensure that "pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words".

There are many aspects to pay attention to if you're looking to embrace RankBrain and Semantic Search, from choosing what to focus your pages on to researching keywords and topics, improving site relevance and markup. Let's Start.

8 Ways Optimize Your Website for RankBrain and Semantic Search in 2017

1. Create Attractive Search Snippets

Larry Kim, founder and CTO of WordStream, recommends improving organic click-through rates to increase your probability of success, because he suspects that RankBrain’s “Relevance Score” is the same as AdWords’ “Quality Score.”

If your click-through rates are less than impressive, focus on improving your SERP snippets. Make sure page titles and meta descriptions echo the user’s need, stand out on the search results page and entice the user to click for more. Simplify URLs so they reinforce value to Google and to users. And — when possible — craft content that targets featured snippet positions in search results. Make your snippet irresistible.

2. Rethink how content uses keywords (seriously, stop procrastinating)

Keywords have been changing for years, so this is not new SEO advice — and RankBrain might be the last nail in the coffin of the old way of thinking about SEO keywords. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s seriously time.

Stop creating pages or content tailored to only one keyword or keyword phrase. For maximum effect, try composing your semantic kernel of both your targeted keywords, as well as their variations and related keywords, and additional words that most commonly appear in the same context as your targeted keywords.

Tip: Gather keywords, group keywords into clusters, and generate exemplars — Another way to think of this process is that we’re grouping keywords into concepts, and then converting each concept back into a representative keyword/phrase: Keyword –> Concept –> Keyword. The result is a specific search phrase to target, but that phrase represents potentially dozens or hundreds of similar keywords.

3. Write Conversationally

While keywords are still something you need to take into account when optimizing your website, Becaise you should optimize for your website visitor, not RankBrain.

Google’s own Gary Illyes agrees that the single most important factor in optimization when it comes to RankBrain is to create content that sounds human:

Try to write content that sounds human. If you try to write like a machine then RankBrain will just get confused and probably just pushes [sic] you back.

[I]f you have a content site, try to read out some of your articles or whatever you wrote, and ask people whether it sounds natural. If it sounds conversational, if it sounds like natural language that we would use in your day to day life [sic], then sure, you are optimized for RankBrain. If it doesn’t, then you are “un-optimized.”

4. Your pages' focus: keywords vs. topics

The very first question you should be asking yourself when you optimizing website for Semantic Search is this: How do I build my content? Should I (a) create pages around individual keywords, or (b) focus on broad topics and cover them in-depth? From the SEO perspective, these are the two (rather marginal) approaches to creating content today: (a) is the old-school way that you're probably used to, and (b) is the new-school approach that's becoming increasingly popular with the rise of semantic search.

If you took the old-school approach, you'd come up with tens of similar pages: a separate page (even if it's just a few sentences long) for each of the queries above. The problem with this is that in 2017, this kind of content will hardly ever be considered comprehensive, or even remotely useful, particularly in competitive niches. More likely than not, you'll be outranked by competitors who offer more comprehensive answers.

The new-school, topic-based approach implies creating a single page that covers all these topics, aka "The ultimate guide to buying vinyl". The basic idea behind the new-school approach is that you shouldn't be worrying about keywords at all — instead, you should build a comprehensive, original, high-quality resource, and Google will figure out the rest. Alas, for the time being, it's unlikely that it will.

You see, your "ultimate guide" may rank for the more generic terms like "how to buy vinyl". This is the kind of a broad term where the searcher isn't researching a specific aspect of the process, but rather researching the entire process and looking for the steps. Even if you include paragraphs on "where to buy rare records", Google won't always be able to figure out that that's something you should also rank for — simply because you're focusing on too many things with one page, and eventually each concept's prominence (or each keyword's term frequency, if you will) is diminished due to the length of your content and the number of micro-topics you're trying to cover.

5. Relevance

Now that we've figured out you need keywords to understand searcher intent and create content that matches it, it's time to move on to the role of keyword research and targeting in semantic SEO.

The first thing Google does when it receives a query is go through its index to find the pages that match it, likely using the TF-IDF algorithm. The process isn't always straightforward: the query may have to go through several refinements before Google retrieves possible search results from the index, and these results may be then further filtered according to various relevance and quality signals… And while it's true that in 2017, you can rank in Google for a keyword that's not even mentioned on your page, it only makes sense if you like to have things the unreasonably hard way.

Using keywords in your content helps inform search engines that your page is related to that term; in other words, it significantly boosts your chances of becoming one of the search results that will be considered for being ranked for the query.

In the age of semantic search, keyword research may have gotten less straightforward, but no less important. The two underutilized sources of keyword ideas that I feel give the best suggestions, particularly in the context of semantic search, are Google Autocomplete and Google Related Searches.

6. Meta-Relevance, Latent Semantic Indexing, and RankBrain

By now, Google's got a bunch of pages that it initially selected as potential matches to the query (with relevance 1.0). But how does it determine which results better fit the searcher's need and are more relevant to the intent behind the keywords? That's where semantics comes in.

LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, is a technology Google uses to understand the relationships between words, concepts, and web pages. By analyzing billions of web pages and the terms used in them, Google learns which terms are related, which ones are synonyms, and which commonly appear in the same context. This, in turn, lets the search engine build expectations as to the terms that are likely to appear in a given context.

So in a sense, both RankBrain and LSI are geared towards figuring out whether a page covers the topic thoroughly. But does thoroughness translate into rankings? Backlinko did a massive study to measure this. In it, they used MarketMuse to examine 1 million (!) Google results and the correlation of their topical authority (i.e. thoroughness and depth of expertise) and rankings.

7. Became a Knowledge Graph Entity.

Google's semantic search is powered by the Knowledge Graph in numerous ways. The Knowledge Graph is a collection of entities - specific objects that Google knows a few things about, such as persons, places, and things. The Knowledge Graph's impact on search results stretches far beyond the branded panels that are sometimes displayed to the right of organic listings.

Knowledge Graph data is used in organic rankings, rich answers, and various query-specific types of search results. One such type that seems to be gaining momentum is the "carousel" displayed for queries that name a certain category that a bunch of entities belong to:

If you do find an entity but aren't completely happy with what you see, go to Wikidata and use the search bar to find the listing about your company. Here, you'll be able to edit the details about your business, such as its description, official website, etc.

8. Improve User Experience

The role of user signals in SEO is controversial, and this article isn't the place to debate it. In the context of semantic search though, it's crucial to understand that the fairest measure of the effectiveness of any new component in Google's ranking algo (be it RankBrain, Hummingbird, LSI, or anything else) is user satisfaction. Satisfaction may be measured with metrics like SERP click rate, time on page, and bounce rates.

There are two ways Google obtains these metrics: through Search Quality Rating and real-life experiments in Google search. The scale of the latter is surprisingly vast; Google's Paul Haahr mentioned that whenever you run a Google search, you're in at least one experiment.

Conclusion

Above are some of the useful ways to optimize your website content for RankBrain and Semantic Search. Hopefully, you find this post useful and consider these methods while optimizing your site. All of these ways are some of the genuine ways used by the experts from SEO industry. You can use these means to Improve Your Website Search Engine Ranking.

22 Effective SEO Tips by SEO Experts

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.

10 Social Media Posts Ideas to Keep Your Small Business Internet Presence Fresh.

Many small businesses find a lot of value in building their internet presence through social media. It gives them a way to share a side of the business that is not all about products and promotions. The best way to establish and strengthen your brand is to share the story that comes with it.

Humanize your business, put a face to the name, and tell people what there is to love about your work besides the features and benefits. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snap-chat give you the tools you’ll need to tell your story from a personal perspective.

Check out these 10 Social Media Posts Ideas to Keep Your Small Business Internet Presence Fresh.:

1. Post in real-time
People are now breaking news in real-time before it becomes official news. It’s no wonder Snapchat is an ever-growing trend. Remember, your posts don’t have to be directly related to your products or services however, what you share should “talk” around your brand. Embrace the rise of real-time social storytelling!

2. Engage With You User
Share articles and interesting finds from all over the web, whether it’s an image, a how-to guide, current news, etc. Again, it doesn’t have to be about your business, it can be anything that speaks for your brand or has something in common with it.

3. Create a Contest
Who doesn’t love the feeling of winning? Host a contest on Facebook or Instagram and offer your followers a chance to win something enticing like a free product or service. Encourage your followers to “Like”, “Share”, or “Comment” to increase their chances of winning.

4. launch a New product
From time to time, you can post about new and exciting developments like, new products, flavours, styles, and more. These posts can be of a promotional nature if you’re introducing fresh new content.

5. Use Multimedia
It’s no secret that multimedia gains more traction and engagement than even the most insightful articles. Boost your social voice with interesting images, memes, and real-time videos.

6. Use Hashtags
Use hashtags to link your posts to people who share similar interests. #seo #google #googleseo #localseo. Online resources can help you Find trending hashtags in your area and industry.

7. Share tips, how-to guides, and DIY projects
People are always searching the web for new ways to be inventive and creative from home. Did you know you can learn to be a professional makeup artist from YouTube? Or how about learning to change your own car battery? Show up in search results by sharing this type of content.

8. Occasional offers
Offer your customers discounts or promotions from time to time however, do this without coming across as too promotional. As much as people enjoy getting a good deal, they also don’t like seeing it flood their news feed. In fact, turn to influential bloggers with a substantial following and who you believe would speak strongly for your brand. Ask them if they’d like to feature your business and your current offer to their followers. Share their blog post on your business page!

9. Share customer photos
A strong online reputation is important for all businesses and what better way to build on your reputation than with popularity. If your customers are posting about their recent purchase from your store, share their post! It not only shows your business is desired by others but it inspires trust. Every time a customer proudly shares something about your business, think of it as another positive review.

10. Poll
You can create a poll directly from your Facebook business page. Ask for your customers opinions and you may even be surprised with some of their answers. If you own a restaurant, ask your customers what soup of the day they prefer? Or what they prefer a cocktail, beer, or wine with their dinner.

Believe it or not, social posts may turn out to be your most effective marketing strategy for your small business. Keep in mind, you wouldn’t post the same material to every social platform as each has it’s own tone and environment. Learning how to effectively fit into each social environment is key to social success.

Make Your Cleaning Services Business Stand Out From the Crowd

It’s no secret. competition is booming in the business of cleaning services. But that doesn’t mean that your small business can’t be extremely successful. Don’t throw in the towel just yet. There’s room for everyone, you just have to make sure you get to it first!

The good thing about cleaning is that it works like Mother Nature, it’s inevitable. People are always going to need it, mess happens, and it doesn’t just disappear on it’s own.

That’s proof enough that the business makes sense, but the challenge is how do you rise above your competition? How do you get clients in your area before another company does?

Like most companies, cleaning services work best when you build a good rapport with your customers, so that they will return to schedule regular cleaning services.

First, let’s look at simple and effective ways to engage people to notice your small business, and by that we mean, doing a little more than taping flyers to the community mailbox.

Keep your website updated
This will probably be the most important tip, although they all play a crucial role in building your online presence. Having a website that is current gives your company that much more credibility to potential customers.

There’s nothing like visiting a website and noticing that the last time the company posted was in 2013, it makes you wonder if the company is still in business.

Since the wide majority of customers are browsing from their mobile phone or tablet, your website should be mobile and tablet friendly.

List Your Business on Local Business Directory
business listing sites increase your company's online exposure and help improve your local search ranking results in major search engine.

You should make sure you have a listing on the following local business directories:

• Google My Business
• Yelp
• Bing Places
• Better Business Bureau
• Angie's List
• Merchant Circle

Create a listing for your cleaning service on classified websites
Online classified advertising can be a very effective marketing tool for certain small business types, however it’s not for everyone, cleaning service can certainly benefit from it. It shouldn’t be your only marketing tool.

It’s proven effective for products and services that are local, specifically, for businesses that need to operate locally, like cleaning services.

Use Google Adwords
Place your ad directly on Google with Google AdWords. This would be the most effective way to show at the top of search results.

Be seen by customers at the very moment that they’re searching on Google for the things you offer. And only pay when they click to visit your website or call.

Post videos online
Create how-to videos related to your service. Provide relevant information that people often search like: “How to remove tough stains from your carpet” or “How to clean windows and mirrors without leaving streaks”. Link your website to your tutorials, and advise your audience to contact you for more information.

Share your videos among multiple social media platforms like facebook, twitter, google+, etc.

Being a small business owner may also mean you don’t always have the time to invest in online advertising and social media marketing. Services are available which are committed to helping you build and protect your small business internet presence.

The Best Link Building Tools By Experts Choice

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?