Those are the questions I’ve been always asked by marketing leaders, company executives, founders and investors all the time. Like it or not, the search engines and especially Google are now very important in so many aspects of our lives and when we are looking for products and services we always google it. The study from Google reveals that 89% of B2B researchers use the internet during the B2B research process and 71% of them start with a generic search on Google. Only the companies on the first page of Google will be able to drive those prospects to their websites and generate leads and sales. I recently listened to Liam Martin’s interview with Eric Siu on the Growth Everywhere podcast where he reveals some of the numbers that prove the study from Google and show that properly executed SEO can become your number one lead and revenue generation channel.

Here are some numbers that Liam Martin shared on the interview:

Time Doctor’s Revenue, Growth and Marketing Numbers

• Model: Self-serve SaaS company
• Revenue: high seven-figure Anual Recurring Revenue
• Serves clients in 32 countries
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Content and SEO spend: $50,000/month
• Time Doctor growth: 10% month-over-month
• SEO timeline:  6 – 18 months if you are an established brand and a few years if you are just starting

SEO and Content Marketing Are the Only Lead Generation Channels for Time Doctor

Liam Martin is a co-founder of Time Doctor, Staff.com and Running Remote – successful, bootstrapped and profitable companies.  These tools are helping to get the best results from employees, even if they’re working with people who live on the other side of the globe. Time Doctor offers time tracking, web usage, reports, payroll and other services.

Liam and Eric discussed how SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for them and why any founder and CEO would invest in ranking their website on Google. Liam also shared some revenue and growth numbers they achieved with SEO and content marketing.

You can listen to the full interview here:

Here is what Liam says about the importance of SEO and why every founder and CEO should make it a priority and commit to it:

Eric: We talked about this last night so basically, Liam is really good at– he not only understands how to run a business, but he understands SEO too. We’re talking about this beforehand how every single founder I know that understands SEO, they have a leg up versus everyone else, right?

Liam: Yes.

Eric: What are you guys doing to run SEO and content right now to continue to grow? That’s where the majority of your stuff’s coming from, right?

Liam: Yes, so, I defined it as industrial SEO, a lot of people poke at it as an idea, but you can’t just poke at SEO, you have to commit because it’s going to be a six to 18-month investment. If you really start to see a return, and it’s cool now, like, if we post something about remote work, or outsourcing or any of those types of generalized keywords, Google gives us the benefit of the doubt. When I go and talk to people and say, “Oh, SEO is awesome.” Yes, it’s awesome, but you got to invest a couple of years and actually building up your domain and getting the power that you need to be able to then get people to just literally give you that benefit of the doubt so, that’s a lot of backlinks.

Eric: What are you going doing exactly to run SEO, just so people have some takeaway value here?

Liam: Fundamentally, what we’ve run is, we’ve compartmentalized it, we divide lead generation, basically, our linkers from our research team. We’ve got a content team that has an entire funnel connected to it as well, and literally every quarter, we go in, we identify all of our keywords, we throw it through ahrefs.com, that’s the tool that we use for all of our SEO.

Eric: Great tool.

Liam: Fantastic tool. The Keyword Difficulty variable is just like that identifier is so easy for us. It used to take us 15 minutes to really figure out, can we rank for it? Now with KD, it’s a two-minute conversation, we can rank for this.

Eric: Cool, so what are you doing exactly? Is it Keyword Difficulty is on a scale of one to 100 and then what do you guys do?

Liam: Anything that’s below a 30, that’s outside of our realm, we can probably rank for our success rates, but 60% top 10 SERPs. Anything that’s above 30 that’s out of our realm we probably won’t really go after but if it’s outsourcing, remote work, that kind of stuff, we’re currently number one for virtual assistant, I found out just today that we’ve got number one spot for that.

Eric: Great. I need one.

Liam: Yes, there we go. You can go to our blog post and check it out.

Eric: I will do that.

Liam: Those ones have a higher Keyword Difficulty, but you’ve got to invest more time, that’s a six-month investment to really start to get all that free track. I think that’s $100,000 in traffic value, just that one keyword, which is nuts.

Eric: Cool, and traffic value is basically what you would pay Google if you’re buying the traffic?

Liam: Correct, so if you bought all those clicks from Google, we’d literally have to pay $100,000 for that ranking.

Eric: Right, got it. How much do you think you’re spending per month on content and SEO right now?

Liam: I’d say probably 50,000 a month.

Eric: That’s a 600 grand a year.

Liam: Yes, the returns are insane, because if your domain rating goes up, we’re doing about 500,000 in traffic value per month. When you look at it in that context, if we had to buy that traffic from Google– I think basically if you’re buying traffic, you’re renting traffic, so, once Google shuts you down-

Eric: You’re done.

Liam: -or Facebook shuts you down, the algorithm changes, it’s over. We talked about this beforehand, there are some things that Google does that are going to change things, but fundamentally, if you’re going to own a business for more than 10 years, SEO is your number one funnel. That’s what’s going to actually allow you to run a really solid, sustainable business over the long term. If you’re a bootstrap founder like me, SEO should be your number one concern, because, in the next three to four years, you’re going to have a nice funnel of let’s say, for us, it was 6,000, 7000 customers that are coming in every single month, that are literally coming through our content funnel. Outside of anything else that we’re doing, we know that that’s our solid base.

Eric: Plus, you don’t just get organic traffic, you also get to pixel them, and you also have an e-mail list. How big is your e-mail list?

Liam: We talked about that too, but it’s over half a million right now, which we have not activated which we’re freaking out over.

Eric: I just think too many people forget about SEO, anybody that comes to us so, ad agency side, anyone that comes, “Hey, we need help.” It’s always we raised a bunch of money and we want to use our VC money to use paid ads. That’s the addicting drug, but too many people are not patient enough to go with SEO, it stands the test of time, and then from there, you can diversify, which is exactly what you’ve done.

Liam: Yes, I think about it like a big T traffic, just get the traffic, lock it in now, and then figure out what to do with it later. Optimization, all those other things can be done later if you can get the traffic now. Just get it, yes, it’s not converting so well right now. Don’t worry about it, get the traffic, you’re at least going to get the referring domains that is actually going to raise your entire domain.

Eric: Those are links.

Liam: Yes, so basically, backlinks that are coming to your website.

Learn how Time Doctor Improved Their Organic Traffic and Ranking with Content Marketing and SEO

Being an SEO expert and loving analytics and data myself, I was curious to see what SEO strategies and tactics Liam and his team used to achieve such amazing results and revenue. I used the same tool they use at Time Doctor – ahrefs.com, to look at the website performance, backlinks, ranking on Google, organic traffic, paid campaigns and Conversion Rate Optimization and recorded a short video with the analysis and actionable tips that you can use for your business.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• Out of Timedoctor.com and staff.com Time Doctor is the main lead generation site with 130K monthly organic visitors comparing to 2k from staff.com
• Both sites didn’t have a solid SEO strategy and big investments in SEO and content until Oct 2016 when Time Doctor started to actively publish blog posts and build backlinks.
• Over the course of 3 years they created backlinks from 3,200 new domains and publish around 500 blog posts.
• That helped them to rank for 80,000 new keywords (an increase from 26K to 106K). The number of keywords on the first page of Google had increased from 220 to 4600.
• For the same period of time, organic traffic from Google increased from 7,000 to 130,000 visitors per month.
• Assuming the average conversion rate from visitor to trial is 8% that’s an increase from 560 to 10,400 trials per month. It’s hard to say what conversion rate they actually have without looking at their Google Analytics data but it can range from 6% to 20%.
• The remaining trials are coming from paid campaigns, staff.com marketing campaigns and other channels.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog post includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve written over 500 blog posts and created on average 5 – 50 backlinks for each post.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a free trial. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in top 3 worldwide for keyword “virtual assistant services” with 7100 searches per month just in the US as well as other 147 similar keywords and driving 1000 monthly visitors. With an average conversion rate of 8% from visitor to trial (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 80 trails from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 1 worldwide for keyword “collaboration tools” with 3200 searches per month in the US only as well as 2,300 similar keywords and driving 2,600 monthly visitors to that page. With an average conversion rate of 8% (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 208 trails from that single blog post.
• The home page only generates 13,500 monthly visitors which is just 10% of all organic traffic. Other visitors are coming to blog posts and content pages on the site.

There are 4 components to successful blog posts that generate traffic and leads:

1. Keywords research and writing outstanding and engaging content
2. Building links to the blog posts as you would do for the home page
3. Internal links to that content from other blog post and pages on the site
4. Conversion rate optimization for blog posts. Adding exit intent pop-ups, live chats, floating bar with Call To Action

Takeaways and Next Step

As Liam advised you need to commit to SEO and content on your website if you are looking to build a solid, sustainable and profitable business over the long term. The success won’t come overnight and you need at least 1-2 years to start getting a good amount of leads and sales. I hope that his insights along with my review of their SEO and content strategy will help you get a better understanding of how SEO works, how long it takes, how much investment it will require and what results it can deliver in terms of traffic and revenue.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 4 step process:

1. Perform keywords research to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and digital marketing consultant who helps companies like Time Doctor to grow their traffic, leads and revenue. I specialize in performance and inbound marketing, SEO, Google Ads, content marketing and also consult on web design, CRO, social media and email marketing.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about how I can help you and what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program and B2B SEO offerings today. You can also book a call to review your project and see if we might be a good fit for working together.

The post How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Like how “location, location, location” is a popular mantra in the real estate industry, we can also say that “traffic, traffic, and traffic” are the three most important things in a website’s performance.

However, growing our website traffic is often easier said than done. After all, there are billions of websites today and there are millions of blog posts being published in a single day. How can we stand out among all those competitors?

Don’t be discouraged, though, as in this guide, we will discuss an effective tactic to grow you traffic in just six months with a step-by-step guide.

Let us begin.

Step 1: Know Your Audience Through Keyword Research

The first, and the most important step here is to do as much research as possible with two main goals: understanding your audience; and understanding how your competitors are approaching their marketing strategy. 

SEO strategy remains one of the most effective ways in building website traffic, so keyword research is very important. Find your target keywords according to these three principles:

• The keyword must be relevant to your business, product, and/or service—pretty self explanatory—. Sometimes there are keywords that aren’t so obvious but can be a good opportunity (i.e. ‘slam dunk’ if you are a basketball-focused site).
• The keywords must be relevant to your audience, signified by a high monthly search volume
• According to your budget and timeline, the competition for the keyword must be manageable. 

You can use various keyword research tools to help with this, and you can also use some of the tools to perform competitive research. Gain as many insights as possible about your audience and your competitors to develop your strategy.

Step 2: Competitive Research

In the first step, we have briefly discussed how we should perform a proper competitive research based on the target keywords. 

You can do this manually by doing a quick Google search for your target keywords. Check out the top ranking sites for these keywords (if possible, check out all that are ranking on the first page, but at least the top 3). 

Your goal is to create a (significantly) better content than these pages, so analyze various aspects from their content quality, style and tone, structure, how they use images, etc. It’s also possible to take a different approach and discuss the topic from a unique angle—you can even disagree with the content and deliver your argument—. 

Alternatively, you can also use keyword research tools to analyze these pages. This way, you can gain insights about various metrics from their monthly traffic to readability to backlinks profile. 

You can also check various other areas of these competitors’ marketing efforts from their social media presence and engagement to their advertising campaigns. There are plenty of tools that can help you with this.

The better you know your ‘enemy’, the better you can plan your strategy. 

Step 3: Develop Your Content

There are two different types of content in a website.

First, there’s the static content—the ‘fixed’ information that is always there— like your about us page, your product listing, and so on. The thing is, if you only have static information in your website, you don’t give enough reason for them to come back after they’ve checked out your site.

So, here comes the second type: dynamic content. These are the pieces of content that are updated time and time again (i.e. blog posts), so when a new content appears, a website visitor might visit your site again and probably share it to their friends—netting you more visitors—.

Both dynamic and static content have their purposes, so the idea is to develop content according to the target keywords we have discussed above.

One of the most important things to remember is although SEO is about optimizing your content for the search engine, Google, Bing, and other search engines are now getting smarter. Their goal is to provide the most relevant search results for human audience, so your content must also have the same goal: bring as much value and relevance to your ideal audience. 

So, include your keywords naturally, and focus on readability for human readers. 

Step 4: Build More Backlinks

Backlinks are the commodity of the internet. Think of backlinks—or inbound links—, as a ‘vote’. The more backlinks you have, Google and the other search engines will determine your site as relevant and you will climb the search engine rankings. 

The higher your search engine ranking, the more traffic you will have. This is the main goal of SEO.

It is, however, important to understand that today, quality is more important than quantity. If you get one backlink from a reputable site in your industry, you get more ‘vote’ than getting 5 backlinks from lower-quality sites. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time might get you penalized by Google. 

Aim to get just 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks a month. Yet, this can be easier said than done. 

How to get backlinks? The most effective way is to actually have a high-quality content. If your content is good, interesting, and informative, you will get backlinks sooner or later.

Yet, how you promote the content is also important. Utilize all the available channels from social media to working with influencers to investing in paid ads to promote your contents.

Content promotion can lead to more organic traffic—our main goal—, and get more backlinks in the process, which in turn will produce more traffic through SEO. A win-win investment!

Step 5: Optimize Your Website

Again, there are two main goals in optimizing the technical aspects of your site: pleasing the search engines (making sure your site is easy to index properly), and bringing value to the human audience.

As this can be a very broad subject, you might want to check out this technical SEO checklist for this step. However, here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Optimize your website’s speed. More than half of mobile users will bounce from sites that load in more than 3 second. 
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and preferably mobile-responsive
• Make sure your website is easy enough to navigate according to UX principles. 
• Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google by optimizing robots.txt file and optimizing  redirects
• Regularly check for broken links, and fix them

Step 6: Invest in Paid Advertising

We can consider this as an optional step depending on the results generated by the previous steps.

The idea of using paid advertising is to cut downtime. Paid advertising—and other paid channels— can virtually generate traffic instantly, as long as you have the budget. 

Find the right balance between your paid advertising budget and time invested. Doing this correctly can maximize the generated website traffic in six months.

The key of online paid advertising is targeting: the more specific you can target the right audience, the more cost-efficient your campaigns will be, and the more conversions you’ll get. 

Conclusion

By doing the six steps we have discussed above, you can significantly increase your website traffic.

The key here is maintaining consistency and work with SEO expert if necessary. So, regularly monitor your progress, evaluate, and re-optimize your strategy accordingly.

The post How To Grow Your Website Traffic In Six Months appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Thankfully, there are now a lot website analysis and SEO tools that can assist you in this long, often arduous process, and on this guide we will discuss 10 of them, which in our opinion, are some of the best ones available.

Using these tools properly can turn your SEO strategy into the next level, allowing you to find out the areas where your site is currently lacking and how to optimize them further.

Without further ado, let us begin with the first one.

1. SEMRush

For most SEO practitioners, the name SEMRush shouldn’t be a stranger, being one of the most popular (and powerful) SEO tools available.

SEMRush, in essence, is a dashboard with various detailed reports of a web domain. Simply enter the site’s URL on SEMRush’s search bar, and you will get various information of the site from what keyword it is currently ranking, the search volume for that keyword, and so on.

SEMRush also offers various SEO-related features from the Site Audit tool, On-Page SEO checker, and their famous SEO Toolkit. The SEO Toolkit is extremely handy as you can get detailed reports on your competitors’ SEO approaches, identify your competitors’ traffic sources, identify keyword and backlink gaps, as well as in-depth keyword, backlink, and traffic analytics.

Very easy to use even for a complete SEO beginner, and although we can’t say that SEMRush’s packages are cheap, they are definitely worth it if you are serious about SEO.

Main Purpose: Keyword research and competitive SEO analysis

Key Features:

• Analyze various keywords and which ones will be valuable for your brand
• Easily find out the top competitors in your niche and who’s ranking on your target keywords
• Track your own target keywords and monitor the results of your SEO efforts
• Determine the most valuable keywords of your competitors

2. Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools, and especially Google Search Console is very effective, and totally free tool for your SEO initiatives. In general, the Webmaster Tools are especially useful because they allow you to see your site just as Google sees it.

There are several tools included in Google Webmaster Tools. For example, there’s the Fetch as Google tool, allowing you to analyze how Google will crawl a specific URL. This is critical especially in measuring the SEO performance of your site.

Another useful tool is the Structured Data Testing Tool and Structured Data Markup Helper. Implementing structured data is now a relevant part of the SEO game, allowing you to be featured in rich snippets, which will translate to more traffic.

The list of useful tools don’t end just there, and considering the Google Webmaster Tools is totally free, you should definitely make the most of it.

Main Purpose: various aspects of site analysis

Key Features:

• Various analytics tools by Google. Meaning, you can see everything as Google sees it, which is extremely relevant for SEO

3. Ahrefs

In many ways, Ahrefs is quite similar to SEMRush, as both are powerful keyword analytic tools. A lot of similar features are shared between both tools. Both tools are great for keyword research, capable for processes like SEO competitive analysis, backlink analysis, topic ideas, and of course, keyword analysis.

The clear difference between the two is how Ahrefs shines in the backlink analysis department, while SEMRush has more powerful keyword analysis tools overall.

So, Ahrefs, is especially useful if you are looking for a backlink analysis tool, as many SEO practitioners regarded Ahrefs as the absolute best in this aspect.

In general, Ahrefs is a more robust and complete SEO analytics tool if you are looking to invest on one of them. However, Ahrefs and SEMRush working hand-in-hand, along with the other tools we have on this list, will be a more ideal approach.

Main Purpose: backlink analysis and keyword research, all-in-one SEO analysis tool

Key Features:

• Extremely powerful backlink analysis tools to check your competitor’s backlink, the quality of backlinks, and so on
• Decent keyword analysis tools and topic ideation
• A complete all-in-one SEO toolkit package

4. Check My Links

Check My Links is a Google Chrome plugin with one purpose, which as the name suggests, check all the links that crawl through your site to look for broken links.

Broken links, both internal and external is not a direct ranking signal for SEO. However, it can severely hurt the overall user experience, which can affect dwell time and bounce rate, which are direct ranking signals.

Check My Links as a tool is extremely easy to use, and will be extremely useful when your content has a lot of links.

Also, checking for broken links can be an effective link building tactic, a strategy often referred as “broken link building”. Here, you can analyze sites that can potentially give you quality inbound links, and check whether they have broken links. You can inform the webmaster regarding this link, and offer them to link your site instead,

Considering Check My Links is totally free, this is a very valuable tool to have in your SEO arsenal.

Main Purpose: check for broken links

Key Features:

• Checking for broken links in a matter of seconds, extremely easy to use

5. HubSpot Website Grader

Hubspot’s Website Grader is a web app capable to generate a personalized, detail report on several important metrics like:

• Whether your site is easily indexable and crawlable by Google and other search engines, as well as whether your site can be easily found by human readers
• Analyze your site’s page size, loading speed, and other key SEO metrics
• Analyze mobile-responsiveness of your site
• Analyze various security aspects of your site like SSL certificate. Security is a very important visitors’ concerns nowadays, and might affect your overall traffic.

Hubspot’s website grader is also very easy to use, simply input your URL and email address, then you’ll get a score of 1 to 100 along with a detailed report. You get all this in just a matter of seconds.

Also, Hubspot offers various SEO tools to help your SEO activities, and let’s not forget the fact that HubSpot’s blog is an excellent information source not only for SEO but also for other marketing activities.

Key Purpose: site performance analysis

6. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a relatively affordable tool to manage your outreach efforts in getting more backlinks.

Backlinks are extremely important ranking signal for Google SERP. Yet, the outreach process in getting these inbound links can be painful and difficult, quite similar to cold calling. BuzzStream can significantly help you in this arduous process from researching the relevant site/people, designing an effective email message, and keep track on who have accepted your link requests.

An extremely important feature is how BuzzStream can effectively identify outreach candidates based on their industry and how they are engaging in various different social media platforms. So, you can effectively determine the quality of the inbound links.

Main Purpose: link building management

Key Features:

• Identify key candidates of inbound link outreach
• Keep track of the inbound link candidates that have accepted your link requests, and those who don’t
• Design effective email messages for your outreach

7. Upcity SEO Report Card

Upcity’s SEO Report Card is a free tool to analyze how your site currently fares against your competitors’ sites.

Considering it’s totally free, except your contact information, the SEO Report Card offers a fairly detailed report covering various SEO aspects like:

• Inbound Link Analysis: a fairly detailed report on the total number of sites that link your site
• Rank analysis: a report on where your page(s) currently rank on major search engines. When you first enter your information, you will need to enter a target keyword. Your report will be based on this keyword
• On-site optimization analysis: mainly covering the keyword density throughout your page
• Indexing analysis: a report of how many pages on your site have been indexed by the search engines
• Accessibility analysis: from your site’s load time and whether it’s easily indexable by Google
• Authority metrics: a report on your current level of authority

Main purpose: site analysis

8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

SEO Spider by Screaming Frog is a very powerful, and relatively affordable tool for any SEO practitioners.

As the name suggests, the SEO Spider crawls your website according to your URL, and analyze the site for important SEO issues. Doing this process manually can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming, especially for large sites. With SEO spider, you can do it in just a matter of minutes instead of hours or even days.

SEO Spider is also fairly easy to use with an intuitive interface. If necessary, you can export parts or all of the report into an Excel sheet. This is also useful as you can upload .csv file format to various SEO tools.

You can use SEO Spider for free with several feature limitations like limited configurations, source code, and you can only scan 500 URLs per site. You can also use the full-version of the tool for around $160 annually.

Main Purpose: site analysis

9. Moz’s Pro Tools

Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO suite widely regarded as one of the best in the business. The catch? it’s not exactly on the affordable side, as the cheapest package will cost you $99 monthly.

However, if you are serious about your SEO effort, the Moz Pro toolkit will be totally worth it, offering virtually anything you need to monitor and control your SEO tactics in just one dashboard. The Moz Pro can analyze various ranking signals from search visibility, competitor rankings, keyword analysis including local keywords, to the highly advanced SERP features.

Also unique to Moz Pro is the Crawl Test Tool. Here, Moz’s web crawler -the RogerBot- will crawl your URL and analyze up to 3,000 links. This is a pretty powerful feature on its own, and you will also receive a very detailed email report detailing the data for every crawled page.

As mentioned, not a cheap tool, but a great investment if you are serious about SEO.

Main Purpose: very detailed site analysis

Key Features:

• Virtually everything you need on SEO analytics from ranking signal analysis, keyword analysis, backlink analysis, traffic analysis to an advanced site crawler

10. Found SEO Audit Tool

This SEO Audit Tool by Found is a totally free and easy to use site analysis tools. With the SEO audit tool, you can easily identify common SEO issues on a specific URL where you can quickly take action to fix them.

As mentioned, it is very easy to use. Simply enter your site URL, and you will get an automated SEO audit report covering three main aspects:

• External link analysis: analyzing both the quantity and quality of your external links
• Content analysis: checking the content optimization aspects like keyword density and META data
• Technical: on-site optimization factors like XML sitemap and various others

Once you are done, you can also download the result as PDF for documentation and sharing purposes.

Main purpose: as the name suggests, SEO audit

End Words

The 10 SEO tools we have shared above are certainly not the only ones available. However, they are among the best and the most effective ones to assist you with your SEO activities. Keep in mind that each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages, covering different aspects of SEO. The key here is to combine several tools in one integrated approach to cover the different areas. While SEO can be a long-term, difficult process, having the right tools can tremendously help you. You can also request an SEO consultation to ensure you use them the right way.

The post Top 10 Website Analysis and SEO Tools You Should Try appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The lines between the two are now (very) blurred, and with all the available channels, new tactics, and the increasing number of personnel, the need to streamline all these marketing and sales processes in one single app/solution is now more important than ever.

This is where HubSpot gained its popularity as a platform that simplifies and takes care of the whole business process in one single dashboard.

More About HubSpot

Let us first discuss HubSpot as the benchmark in this guide.

The name HubSpot has been really dominant in the digital marketing niche for the past decade. Every digital marketer out there knows about HubSpot and probably has attended the famous HubSpot academy or at least registered for its webinar at one point or another.

HubSpot is especially successful due to the popularity of its blog and various other resources, making it the go-to site when you want to learn about digital marketing. In short, HubSpot practically invented and established the inbound marketing practice.

Behind its (very) strong online presence, Hubspot is a company selling various marketing and sales tools, but it’s especially well-known for the HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and HubSpot CRM.

In practice, the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, integrated with the CRM, combined as an all-in-one digital marketing automation solution where we can automate various touchpoints from the first time a website visitor is attracted to your site, to the lead generation process, and the lead nurturing process until they are finally ready for purchase.

It’s difficult to discuss Hubspot as a platform in its entirety, so let’s instead discuss the three different solutions on their own.

The HubSpot CRM

We can get the basic HubSpot CRM for totally free, while the advanced CRM is included with HubSpot Sales Hub (more on this below).

In fact, HubSpot offers a free version of its tools for all categories (CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Service). We will briefly discuss them in their respective sections below.

Hubspot Free CRM tool provides a solution to manage all the necessary tasks associated with sales and marketing in one single dashboard, where the sales/marketing representative can easily view various data of the sales/marketing funnel such as:

• Contact information
• Website activity of the said contact
• Records of every company in your sales database (for B2B sales), you can view all engagement and transaction details in a single dashboard
• Storage, management, and analytics/reporting of data related to deals/opportunities
• Storage, management, and analytics/reporting of sales/marketing activities

Acquiring new customers is certainly not an easy task to fulfill, and will involve many different activities that might overlap with each other. Let’s take a look at all the different activities:

• Searching for leads/prospects
• Qualifying leads
• Keep track of all the different opportunities, prospects, and deals at all the different stages (lost opportunities, some that might need further nurturing, won deals, etc.)
• Keep track of internal activities (meetings, develop strategies, appointments with prospects, etc.)

The free Hubspot CRM can help in managing and organizing these activities in a single intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard. For being a free tool, the attention to details given by HubSpot CRM is simply amazing, tracking every single interaction with any prospect and/or customer, and present the information in an easy to follow interface.

Pricing: totally free, enhanced CRM included in HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub

It’s important to note that Hubspot Sales Hub is significantly more affordable than the Marketing Hub (which we will discuss below). Part of the reason is that HubSpot is indeed more well-known as a marketing brand, and arguably the Hubspot Marketing Hub does offer an overall richer set of features—as we’ll learn further below.

HubSpot Sales Hub essentially covers features and solutions to encourage sales conversions. The basic—Starter—plan offers features like deal pipeline and basic email tracking/scheduling for lead nurturing purposes.

However, it’s only with the Professional plan (starts from a whopping $800/month) that we’ll get sales automation features like lead rotation and sales tasks automation.

There are three main highlights of the HubSpot Sales Hub:

• The intuitive interface: all of HubSpot tools are very easy to use with its sleek interfaces

• Rich set of features: all controlled within a single dashboard so you can manage and monitor everything in one place

• Integration: HubSpot Sales can integrate seamlessly with various platforms like SalesForce, Google Calendar, Slack, LinkedIn Sales Navigation, and of course, HubSpot CRM.

All in all, HubSpot Sales Hub is a really nice solution with jam-packed features designed to improve sales conversions, especially when combined with HubSpot CRM.

Pricing:

• Free plan (similar to the free CRM tool discussed above)
• Starter, starts from $50/month
  • All features of the free CRM plan
  • Deal pipeline
  • Email tracking
  • Email scheduling
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Live chat
  • Ref productivity performance
• Professional, starts from $500/month
  • All features of the Starter plan
  • Automation for deal stage, task, and lead rotation
  • Workflow extensions
  • Personalized video creation
  • Personalized quotes
  • Data organization (products, teams, currencies, etc.)
• Enterprise, starts from $1,200 a month
  • All features of the Professional plan
  • Automation playbooks
  • Call transcriptions
  • Predictive lead scoring
  • Calculated properties
  • Quote-based workflows
  • Electronic signature
  • Recurring revenue tracking and analytics
  • Team management features

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is probably the most popular solution in HubSpot’s arsenal and is essentially a suite of many different marketing tools covering various marketing channels from content marketing to lead generation/lead capture to email marketing, among others.

An important thing to note: HubSpot Marketing Hub’s starter plan used to cost $200+/month, but HubSpot has since adjusted the price to $50/month, exactly the same price as the Sales Hub’s Starter Plan.

Meaning, there’s simply no better time to invest in HubSpot Marketing if you like the package offered by the Starter plan, that mainly includes lead capture/generation and lead management features, such as:

• Ad management
• Live Chat & Chat Bot
• Opt-in forms
• List segmentation
• Track your prospect’s website activity
• Email marketing features
• Ad retargeting

As with HubSpot’s Sales Hub, however, the marketing automation features are locked behind the paywall of the Professional plan, which starts from $800/month (as mentioned, more expensive than the Sales Hub). It’s worth noting, however, that the Professional Plan used to cost a whopping $12,000+/month, so again, there’s no better time to invest in HubSpot Marketing.

The Marketing Hub can also assess the current “health” of your website—including and especially SEO performance—, a crucial aspect of any online brand, monitor social engagements, and interactions across many different platforms, tracks customer interaction, and so on, all in a single dashboard.

As with HubSpot Sales Hub, one of the key highlights here is HubSpot’s excellent third-party integration with various tools and solutions. Arguably this is even more important than in Sales Hub since, with the (arguably) richer features of the Marketing Hub, we can build a powerful ecosystem of marketing solutions with HubSpot Marketing as the foundation.

Pricing:

• Starter Plan: Starts at $50/month
  • Ad management
  • Email marketing features
  • Lead capture features
  • Live chat and Chat Bot
• Professional Plan: Starts at $800/month
  • Marketing automation
  • Smart content creation tools
  • SEO tools
  • A/B testing
  • Landing page & CTA builders
  • Video hosting and management tools
• Enterprise Plan: Starts at $3,200/month
  • Hierarchical team management features
  • Single sign in
  • Customizable sales funnels
  • Filtered analytics and views

Reasons To Look For HubSpot Alternatives

Above, we have discussed the three different solutions offered by Hubspot, and as we can see, all three (even the free CRM tool) are very reliable and easy to use. Both the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub offer really good sets of features, among the best available in the market today.

So, why do people look for HubSpot alternatives, despite all the good things it offers?

The thing is, HubSpot does have a major downside: it’s (very) expensive and most small and even medium-sized businesses simply can’t afford HubSpot.

Yes, HubSpot does offer fairly decent free tools and very affordable Starter plans for both the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub—for just $50/month—, but the most important features (sales and marketing automation features), are locked between the Professional plans ($500/month for Sales Hub and $800/month for the Marketing Hub).

The thing is, if we only want automation there are plenty of alternatives that are significantly more affordable. In fact, there are more affordable solutions for any features offered by HubSpot.

What made HubSpot really good as a solution is the whole package, but not all of us need all those features. If, for example, we only need sales automation, then we can look elsewhere for a more affordable HubSpot alternative.

It is, however, worth noting that HubSpot apparently understood this issue and has since adjusted its price significantly. The Marketing Professional plan, as mentioned above, used to cost more than $12,000/month.

To summarize, in general, there are two main reasons in looking for HubSpot alternatives:

• You are looking for a more affordable alternative according to your marketing needs and available budget
• You are looking for a different set of features (or just one or two specific features)

When reviewing all the different solutions in search of the best HubSpot alternatives below, these two factors will be our main considerations.

Best HubSpot Alternatives

As we have discussed, HubSpot is a brand with various solutions/software in its product line, from CRM to Marketing Hub to Service Hub and CMS.

Thus, when looking for these HubSpot alternatives, we won’t (or rather, can’t) look for a single product that can replace all of those solutions, but instead, we’ll focus on five different categories with four different HubSpot alternatives:

• Best of HubSpot CRM Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Sales Hub Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot All-In-One Alternatives
• Best of HubSpot Alternatives on a Budget

Best of HubSpot CRM Alternatives

Winner: Salesforce Essentials

Salesforce Essentials is simply one of the most popular CRM platforms available today. In fact, on their website, Salesforce claimed that they are indeed the #1 CRM named by International Data Corporation (IDC).

First, we have to consider that HubSpot’s CRM is free, while Salesforce essentials will actually cost you $25/month. So the main question is whether the difference in price is justified as a HubSpot CRM alternative.

For instance, you get automation features with Salesforce Essentials, which you only get from HubSpot by spending at least $500/month. Another key highlight of why Salesforce’s solutions are so good is the mobile app (for both iOS and Android), that offers real-time data and custom reports. With Salesforce Essentials, you simply get everything offered by HubSpot CRM, and more.

With that being said, if you only need a CRM tool and don’t want to spend on marketing automation solutions or conversion optimization tools, Salesforce Essentials is probably your best possible investment.

As a side note, although we mainly recommend the Essentials plan, there are more premium plans offered by Salesforce CRM with extra sets of features. We listed them in the pricing section below.

Pricing:

• Essentials: $25/month/user (annual billing)
  • Emails and meetings tracking automation
  • Manage and track leads, accounts, and opportunities
  • Guided onboarding and setup
  • Support and integration across email, chat. Phone, and social channels
  • Customer self-service and automation to save time
• Professional: $75/month/user (annual billing)
  • Manage the entire sales cycle
  • Track sales leads, opportunities, and customer cases
  • Manage marketing campaigns, orders/opportunities, contracts
  • Real-time insights
  • Accurate sales forecasts
• Enterprise: $150/month/user (annual billing)
  • Automate business processes with workflow and automated approvals
  • Custom-tailored record type
  • Integrate with any system using Salesforce web services API
  • Manage complex sales territories
  • Check how sales deals have progressed with deal trending
• Unlimited: $300/month/user (annual billing)
  • Unlimited online training
  • Over 100 admin services
  • 24/7 toll-free support
  • Unlimited custom apps, custom objects, custom tabs
  • Sandboxes for development and testing

Runner-Up: PipeDrive Essential

PipeDrive is another popular CRM tool, and one of its key highlights is the fact that it’s more affordable than Salesforce, with the Essential plan only costs $12.50/month/user, half what Salesforce offers.

With its affordable price, PipeDrive offers a decent set of features, especially with its intuitive, easy to use interface. With PipeDrive, you can easily track your leads/prospects and monitor various metrics in one single interface, so you can have a clear overview of the sales funnel.

A really useful feature of PipeDrive is the fact that we can easily switch between modules, and turn these modules on and off according to your preferences and needs. With this, we can create a customized interface that can suit our exact needs.

Another reason to chose PipeDrive as your HubSpot CRM alternative is when your business serves international customers, as PipeDrive currently supports 13 currencies, so you can have an easier time analyzing revenue.

Pricing:

• Essential: $12.50/user/month (billed annually)
  • Customizable pipelines
  • Contact and org management
  • Deal management
  • Data import/export
  • Custom fields
  • Sales assist
  • Email inbox linked to contacts and deals
  • Sales and activity dashboard
• Advanced: $24.90/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Essential plan
  • Non-branded web forms
  • Contact Data enrichment
  • Real-time matching inboxes
  • Tracking Email Open rate and CTR
  • Custom user and admin permissions
  • Customizable email and task automation
• Professional: $49.90/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Advanced plan
  • One-click call and call tracking
  • Meeting scheduling (unlimited)
  • Email distribution list
  • Multiple customizable dashboards
  • Sales management app
  • Team management solutions
  • Revenue forecasting
• Enterprise: $99.00/user/month (billed annually)
  • All features of the Professional plan
  • Dedicated account manager and customer service
  • Extra custom-tailored features to suit your business’s needs
  • Enhanced security to protect data and business revenue
  • Flexibility in team management and user permissions

Best of HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives

Winner: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing solution that is more geared towards email marketing, and one of its key highlights is the (very) affordable Lite plan, that starts from just $9/month—significantly more affordable than HubSpot.

If you are solely looking for an email marketing automation solution—which is the most common function people look for in a marketing software/hub—, ActiveCampaign is a very good and cost-efficient choice.

If you want email automation (together with CRM and sales automation), you can get it from the relatively affordable ActiveCampaign Plus plan, which starts from a mere $49/month (remember that we only get automation from HubSpot with $800/month). We also get a nice set of advanced features like lead scoring tools and Deep Data integrations.

All in all, we’d really recommend the ActiveCampaign Plus plan as a cost-efficient alternative for HubSpot marketing.

Pricing:

• Lite: starts from $9/month for 500 contacts
  • Basic email marketing features only
• Plus: starts from $49/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Lite plan
  • CRM and sales automation
  • Lead scoring
  • Deep Data Integrations
  • SMS marketing
  • 1 on 1 training
  • Up to 25 users
  • Custom branding and user permissions
  • Conditional content
• Professional: starts from $129/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Plus plan
  • Site messaging
  • Marketing attribution tool
  • Predictive sending and win probability features
  • Split automation
  • Up to 50 users
• Enterprise: starts from $229/month for 500 contacts
  • Everything from the Professional plan
  • Advanced, custom reporting
  • Custom domain
  • In-depth onboarding
  • Free design services, free social data, phone support, dedicated account representative
  • Uptime SLA
  • Unlimited users

Runner-Up: Pardot

Pardot is a marketing software solution owned by Salesforce, which we have discussed above as our recommended alternative for HubSpot CRM. With the big name of Salesforce, we can obviously expect quality from Pardot, and indeed Pardot is a very powerful marketing suite and is a worthy alternative for HubSpot Marketing Hub.

The catch, however, is that Pardot is a very expensive solution—even more, expensive than HubSpot—, with its most ‘affordable’ plan starts from $1,250/month.

With the package of features offered, however, even the basic “Growth” plan of Pardot is a more powerful marketing suite than HubSpot Marketing’s Professional plan.

If you do have the budget, Pardot is definitely a worthy Hubspot marketing alternative, with a very intuitive interface/dashboard and advanced set of features.

Pricing:

• Growth: starts from $1,250/month for 10,000 contacts
  • Basic automation features
  • Basic lead capturing features
  • Basic lead scoring
  • Basic analytics for 100 SEO keywords and 10 competitors
  • Variable tags
  • Engagement features
  • 50 automation rules
  • Lead nurturing
  • Basic integrations
  • Basic data management
  • Basic marketing training and guides
  • Basic domain setup
• Plus: starts from $2,500/month for 10,000 contacts
  • All from the Growth plan
  • Multi-touch marketing attribution
  • Advanced automation with dynamic content and 100 automation rules
  • Advanced integrations
  • Advanced analytics for 250 SEO keywords and 25 competitors
  • Advanced lead scoring
  • Advanced marketing training and guides
• Advanced: starts from $4,0000/month for 10,000 contacts
  • All from the Plus plan
  • Advanced automation with 150 automation rules
  • AI-assisted analytics and lead scoring
  • Advanced analytics for 1,000 SEO keywords and 100 competitors
  • Advanced data management for 100K calls per day and 10GB file hosting

Best of HubSpot Sales Hub Alternatives

Winner: Ontraport

Ontraport is an all-in-one sales, marketing, and CRM suite that mainly focuses on email and drip marketing as a nurturing-conversion tool.

As a HubSpot sales alternative, Ontraport basically covers everything from email—as mentioned—, content creation (blog, video marketing, etc.), CRM database, landing page builder, social media scheduler, and of course, automation even with the basic plan.

One of the key highlights of Ontraport is its affordability—considering its rich features—, starting at ‘only’ $79/month for 1,000 contacts. With that price, you get several unique features not offered by HubSpot such as customizable metrics to suit your business completely.

Also, Ontraport offers a very flexible block-based visual editor, that you can easily navigate to build landing pages, opt-in forms, and email newsletter—so you don’t have to switch between different builders each time.

A very versatile, highly customizable alternative for HubSpot Sales Hub that is also cost-efficient.

Pricing:

• Basic: $79/month
  • 1,000 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 1 user
• Plus: $147/month
  • 2,500 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 2 users
• Pro: $297/month
  • Free account setup
  • 10,000 contacts
  • Unlimited emails
  • 3 users
• Enterprise: $498/month
  • Free account setup
  • Dedicated account manager
  • 20,000+ contacts
  • 200,000 emails/months
  • 5 users

Runner-Up: Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)

Infusionsoft is known as one of the oldest marketing automation platform available, and back in the mid-2010s or so was highly regarded as the best solution available—much like HubSpot today—. Infusionsoft has since changed rebranded itself into Keap, but the name Infusionsoft is still retained as its premium plan’s name (see at the pricing section below).

With that being said, one of Keap’s key highlights is its very reliable, integrated CMS system, and while being (slightly) more expensive than Ontraport, still very affordable compared to HubSpot marketing. You get access to marketing automation features and the ability to track recurring revenue— a rare feature in this price range—, for just $149/month (as of today, November 2019, there’s an ongoing special offer by Keap so this Pro plan will only cost you $44/month. Affiliate )

Very intuitive, easy-to-use (although a little obsolete) interface, but quite robust in functionalities with different sections in its interface (CRM, eCommerce Marketing, Admin, Pipeline, etc.)

Pipeline is Keap’s lead management tool that helps users manage deals and opportunities in a single dashboard, much like what HubSpot offers, and there’s also a lead scoring/lead management tool called Lead Scores that is highly customizable according to your needs.

A well-rounded platform, slightly more expensive than Ontraport but well-worth the price.

Pricing: (all plans for 500 contacts and 1 user)

• Grow: $49/month
  • CRM
  • Segmentation
  • Tracking and managing appointments
  • Phone line and text messaging for US iPhone
  • Manage quotes, invoices, and payments
  • Data migration
• Pro: $149/month
  • All features from the Grow plan
  • Marketing Automation
  • Recurring payment tracking
  • Landing page builder
  • Sales Pipeline automation
  • Smart forms, internal forms
• Infusionsoft: $199/month
  • All features from the Pro plan
  • Lead scoring tool
  • Company records storing and tracking
  • Analytics and reporting

Best of HubSpot All-In-One Alternatives

Winner: Aritic PinPoint

Aritic PinPoint is a really well-rounded marketing solution offering features that are on par with what’s offered by HubSpot Marketing Hub but with a significantly more affordable price tag.

For instance, with the most affordable Lite plan starting at ‘just’ $59/month, we already get marketing automation—which will cost you at least $800/month from HubSpot Marketing—. Aritic PinPoint offers automation tools not only for email marketing, but also for social media posts, SMS, and push notifications, among others. All of them are useful in the different stages of marketing and sales funnels.

In the analytics and lead scoring aspects, Aritic PinPoint is also pretty decent, and can effectively track your lead profiling and lead behavior—paired with multi-channel, cross-channel, and omnichannel campaign— to nurture these leads.

PinPoint also offers unique features not offered by HubSpot like in-app messaging, double opt-in customization, live workflow view, video campaign manager, helpdesk, native integration for SMS campaign, and so on.

It doesn’t offer as many third-party integrations as HubSpot, but is more cost-efficient across all plans. A worthy contender, and one of the best HubSpot alternatives available today.

Pricing:

• Lite: $59/month
  • Marketing automation
  • Deal-based CRM
  • Sales Pipeline
  • 10x Free emails per contact
  • Push Notification Campaign
  • Lead Capture Forms
  • List Segmentation
  • Lead Scoring
  • Manage Email Campaigns
  • Send Newsletter
  • On-page Widgets
  • Responsive Landing Pages
  • Website tracking
  • Integrations
  • 1 Free User
• Starter: $219/month
  • All features from Lite
  • Multi-channel Drips
  • SMS campaigns (Powered by Twilio)d
  • Engagement scoring
  • 1 on 1 SMS (Powered by Twilio)
  • Social Monitoring
  • Contact Marketing Stages
  • Marketing Messages
  • Read Mailbox
  • Lead source Analytics
  • Advanced Email Analytics
  • Facebook Custom Audience Sync
  • Lead Enrichment Integration
  • Marketing Asset Management
  • 2 Users Free
• Professional: $249/month
  • Marketing Messages
  • Progressive Profiling
  • Dynamic Content
  • Tasks & reminders
  • Dynamic Email Campaigns
  • Facebook Lead Ads Integration
  • Twitter Lead Ads Integration
  • Advance Campaign Analytics
  • Team Management
  • Kiosk Mode
  • Account-Based Marketing
  • Custom dashboard
  • Custom reports
  • Chat support during office hour
  • 5 Users Free
• Enterprise: custom-tailored plan, call for pricing

Best of HubSpot Affordable Alternatives

Winner: SendinBlue

SendinBlue is more popularly known as an affordable but powerful email marketing tool, but in recent years has expanded its software as not only a full-fledged marketing automation solution but also a proper CRM and sales software.

One of the key highlights of SendinBlue is—quite obviously—, its affordability, with the automation features and all of its advanced features like chatbot functionalities and landing page builder tools are available for just $66/month. Keep in mind, that with HubSpot we only get automation with its Professional plan, starting from a whopping $800/month or $500/month for the HubSpot Sales.

Sendinblue—as mentioned—, originated from a conversion-focused email marketing tool, so you will find a lot of useful features geared towards transaction-based emails like various autoresponders and eCommerce email templates.

Overall, very easy to use although the interface looks a little bit outdated by today’s standard. There are also various third-party integrations and plugins that can enable Sendinblue to work with popular platforms like WordPress or Optinmonster

Pricing:

• Free: 300 emails/day, unlimited contacts
• Lite: $25/month
  • 40,000 emails/month
  • No daily sending limit
• Essential: $39/month
  • All features from Lite
  • 60,000 emails/month
  • Remove Sendinblue logo/brand
  • Advanced statistics
• Premium: $66/month
  • All features from Essential
  • 120,000 emails/month ($173/month for 350,000 emails/month)
  • Facebook ads management
  • Landing page builder
  • Management automation
  • Chatbot
  • Multi-user access
• Enterprise: Contact for price, custom-tailored according to your needs

How We Made Our Choices

Above, we have discussed how we reviewed and test HubSpot alternatives based on 5 different categories:

• 1. Alternatives for HubSpot CRM
  2. Alternatives for HubSpot Marketing Hub
  3. Alternatives for HubSpot Sales Hub
  4. Best all-around HubSpot alternative (that covers CRM, sales and marketing features)
  5. Best HubSpot alternative in a budget

For each category, we’ve reviewed all the different tools, solutions, and software using different criteria according to the purpose/function of the category. Below, we will discuss them one by one.

Choosing HubSpot CRM alternatives

There are several key considerations in choosing the best CRM tools to replace the free HubSpot CRM tool:

• Affordability: Since HubSpot CRM is already a free tool, we only consider alternatives that are also free, or at least very affordable—affordable being less than $50 per month.
• Value: For paid but affordable solutions, the tools must provide at least a slightly better set of features than the free HubSpot CRM. If it’s a free tool, then the offered features must be comparable to HubSpot.
• Unique Proposition: Whether the software/solution offers a unique feature not offered by HubSpot CRM.

Choosing HubSpot Marketing Hub alternatives

HubSpot Marketing Hub is certainly one of the best marketing automation software available in the market today. It doesn’t really offer truly unique functions or features not available anywhere else, but there are three main highlights of HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• The intuitive interface that is very easy to use
• Reliable and easy to setup marketing automation features
• Well-designed analytics and reports that you can monitor in one single dashboard

With those point being said, here are our main criteria in choosing the best alternatives for HubSpot Marketing Hub:

• Marketing Automation: one of the major downsides of Hubspot Marketing Hub is that the marketing automation solutions are only available on the Professional plan or above. Meaning, it’s locked behind a $800/month paywall. We’re looking for alternatives that can provide a comparable automation features at a lower price.
• Affordability vs Price: Hubspot Marketing is certainly one of the easiest to use marketing hubs available in the market with its intuitive dashboard where we can see everything in one place, but it’s also one of the most expensive. We’re looking for solutions that can fight toe to toe—feature-wise— while being more affordable, or tools that are simply better in terms of functionality.
• Unique Features: Even with all the good things surrounding HubSpot marketing, it’s certainly not a perfect product with rooms for improvement. We are looking for solutions that simply provide unique value propositions outside what HubSpot currently offers.

Choosing HubSpot Sales Hub alternatives

While arguably HubSpot Sales Hub isn’t as popular as the Marketing Hub or the free CRM tool, it’s still a popular conversion-optimization tool especially due to its intuitive interface, great third-party integrations with popular software—as expected from HubSpot ecosystem—, and its rich set of features and analytics reporting we can access from just one, intuitive dashboard.

With that being said, here are our main concerns in looking for the best alternative for HubSpot Sales Hub:

• Affordability VS Value:  although the HubSpot Sales Hub is (significantly) more affordable than the Marketing Hub, it’s still quite expensive compared to many similar solutions. We are looking for tools that can provide similar features as HubSpot Sales Hub while offering ing a more affordable plan.
• Integration: a sales conversion tool typically can’t perform on its own and will need to integrate at least with a CRM and a marketing platform. Third-party integrations will be one of our main considerations here.
• Unique Features: arguably the Sales Hub is the least unique compared to HubSpot Marketing Hub. We are looking for solutions that provide a more complete set of features, or really unique and valuable conversion optimization tool.

For the last two categories: Best All-In-One Hubspot Alternative, and Best Affordable HubSpot Alternative, our criteria are fairly straightforward:

For All-In-One HubSpot Alternative, we are looking for a solution that can be a direct replacement to the whole HubSpot ecosystem (CRM+Marketing+Sales Hubs) feature/function-wise— while considering cost-efficiency.

For the Affordable HubSpot Alternative, our main concern is obviously affordability, but the solution(s) must also provide a valuable set of features, at least comparable to HubSpot’s starter plans.

End Words

Let’s be honest, all of the HubSpot alternatives we have discussed above—and even HubSpot itself, are all really good platforms offering their own unique values and amazing sets of features.

In most cases, the best approach to look for marketing, CRM, or sales solution (or all of them in a single agency management software like Function Point) is to first figure out the needs of your organization, speak to a digital marketing consultant or SEO expert and pick the most cost-efficient option that provides the features you currently need.

The post 8 Best Hubspot Alternatives You Should Switch To appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Ian shared impressive SEO and content marketing results that they were able to achieve since they launched in 2015.

BuildFire Revenue, Customers and Marketing Numbers

• Revenue: Seven Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Publishing 2 blog posts/week
• Content team: 5 writers
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

You can listen to the full interview where Ian Blair reveals the numbers and discusses how content marketing and SEO helped with initial exposure and became their #1 customer acquisition channel.

Ian: I think first it starts off with just finding effective channels to grow. It’s always a daunting task when you’re first starting your company because no one knows about you. You have zero revenue in the door and it’s just like a behemoth task. Like how on earth am I going to get there? It just first starts off with like bite size chunks and you’ve got to let the world know that you’re out there. For us, we chose content marketing as our initial growth channel and it’s been phenomenal for us. It’s really propelled us to where we’re at today. We also started off with a little bit of PR in the beginning. I’d say every company gets a bit lucky when you first get started and that was definitely the case for us. We did a PR release I think with like business like News Wire, one of those. We actually got featured on Business News Daily and what was awesome was there was people would search for like best mobile app builders out there. Since obviously you know Business News Daily has been around for a long time, they have great domain authority and we were at the top of the article. Basically we were pretty much dominating the search results because anyone would click on that, we’d be right at the top and we’d be just driving so much traffic to our site. That was just huge for our initial growth and initial traction and that was able, we were able to catch up with our own organic rate things and building our own domain authority so sometimes you get lucky and that was definitely the case for us in the beginning a little bit. But it’s just a lot of hard work and determination trying to figure out what are the most efficient levers for you.

 

Eric: Yeah so PR, obviously PR can be a huge spike kind of a boom or bust type of thing and I think what I want to focus on a little more is the content marketing aspect because that’s what a lot of people are talking about and obviously we know it’s the consistency that gets you there. When you’re starting from, I guess I should start first by asking, what’s working well for you in terms of content marketing right now and how are you promoting the content?

 

Ian: I think content marketing really starts off with having efficient and smart keyword research. You want to know what you want to go after and where is it realistic for you to rank. There’s so many tools out there for doing keyword research. You know Moz just came out with a great new keyword tool where you can see what the opportunity is, what the relevancy is. For us, it really just started off as what are great terms that we might able to rank for that are relevant to our audience? One of our highest performing articles has been a free app promotion so I think we have like … I don’t know, at this point we’ve just been growing and growing. It’s probably like over fifty creative ways to promote your app and that’s like we rank number one for app promotion, that’s been like an example of like an article that early on there wasn’t much competition for. We saw that we could rank for it and we just wrote an amazing piece of content and it’s been a consistent driver of traffic for us. We have lots of those examples where we find and it’s almost kind of like Brian Dean’s method of building skyscraper content. You go out there, you find the keyword you want and then what’s ranking at the top and then just absolutely crush that piece of content and you know, you’re bringing a lot of value to people, that’s going to rank. It’s just kind of like a methodical, if you kind of take like the approach of like paid advertising for example. Where you get data really quick and you iterate, kind of take that same methodology and bring it to content marketing. I think a lot of people, they just put stuff out and they’re like okay maybe like what’s the actual results on it. I think having like a methodology to be able to track progress and success is hugely important. For content marketing, that’s been one of our main approaches to it.

 

Eric: What are the main I guess KPI’s for your content marketing efforts?

 

Ian: Really we’re looking at, I mean at the end of the day, we want people to sign up for free trials for app builder so we’re tracking how many people are coming into our site, how many of those are converting to free trials and also like how many people are signing up for our email list because we want to have an audience. As you get bigger and having an audience it’s really helpful for putting out a lot more content. It’s really like just a matter of building your audience and how many free trials are we signing up.

 

Eric: Right. I think something, you know I think those metrics are perfect. Right? A lot of people are like oh you know let’s get more visitors, let’s get more page views but I think going with emails on free trials, that ties a lot closer to the bottom line at the end of the day.

 

Ian: Yeah.

 

Eric: But just rewinding a second I should say, I think a lot of people, you talk about people producing content just for the sake of producing content because everybody is talking about content marketing right? But a lot of people tend to forget about the research portion. Like you actually have to do the keyword research, you have to actually look at what the market is doing at the same time, maybe even look at Google Trends. I think that’s a forgotten piece of the puzzle and I think the fact that you guys are covering that aspect and you guys are succeeding just adds more validation to that.

 

Ian: Yeah. The whole keyword research process isn’t easy. It takes time and it takes a lot of brainstorming but I think with the wealth of information and tools out there, it’s been made easier. I think everything in business requires planning, right? If you want to be successful, you’ve got to have a plan, a strategy and like the ability to measure if it’s working or not working. I think if you just take those fundamental principles, like it can be massively successful. If there’s any information gap, like okay I don’t know how to plan content really well or I don’t know how to write great content or where ever you have a deficiency, there’s other people who have you know closed that knowledge gap. I think it’s really important in the whole online marketing space just to like stay super relevant, see what you know people who are really successful, like what are they doing, how can we take some of their methodologies and bring them into our own company? Right? Yeah I mean everything just fundamentally starts from that initial planning phase.

 

Eric: Right. You mentioned Brian Dean. You talked about the skyscraper technique. I think that’s something everyone can pick up from, right? You just look at what’s already preforming out there and then you just kind of ten x it.
Ian: Yeah.

 

Eric: Yeah I mean there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and it certainly works. But I guess another question for you would be, since content marketing is working well for you, why aren’t you driving or are you driving I should ask, are you driving paid advertising to that content if it’s converting well?

 

Ian: Yeah that’s a good question. We’ve experimented a little bit with paid advertising on some of our posts. You know doing like promoted posts on Facebook. I’d say as a start up we have limited bandwidth and I think as we grow more and I think like just have the ability to focus on more channels, we’ll probably look into something like that and I know some people have been super super successful with that. Like the whole paid Facebook advertising, you know posts might do well or you could be attracting people through a lead magnet. I’ve seen some other companies doing like really really well with that and I think that’s exciting to see the potential of Facebook. I’d say the difference between Facebook advertising and Google Ad Words is that Google Ad Words is fulfillment. Right? People are going if you’re going to try and rank for something or you know have ads for something, people are already searching for it. People already kind of know what they’re looking for where like Facebook is really unique because there’s demand generation. Right? Products you might not have ever heard about and you know we can target people who might be interested in it. I think the mobile app building space is a very early market and not too many know that you can actually go online and build a sweet app for your business or if you have an idea, turn that into app right? I think it’s going to be really cool once we start to fire on all cylinders in that space but we just haven’t gotten to the point where we’re like all right, let’s go full bored and have a huge effort towards that.

 

Eric: Right. Okay. Now, I think you know a question people might have also, because content marketing is such a big channel for you guys right now, how is your content marketing team organized first of all?

 

Ian: Yeah so we actually started using a really cool tool lately and I think it’s helped a lot with our organization. We use CoSchedule and basically it allows us to have our whole content marketing calendar, right? Basically the way we start is we have like okay, what’s the keyword we’re going to go after. Right so kind of back to that initial finding like what’s the opportunity for it and how are we going to measure success for that and we plan those out on the calendar and it makes it pretty easy to get like a big picture, a quick picture of like you know what’s the next month going to look like in terms of content. We basically manage and schedule all of our content marketing efforts through there, with the research and planning. Then we have a whole team of writers that we hired that will work on the particular piece that they’re most qualified to write about.

 

Eric: Got it. How many writers did you say you had again?

 

Ian: We have about five right now but we worked with probably fifteen writers. I think you’ve got to test along the way. You can see like past results and what they’ve done. They might be a good fit for your organization but you might want to test them out for three to five articles and see how it performs and one thing we’ve always tried to do is just weed out the lowest common denominator and work with just writers who have been really successful with us.

 

Eric: Great. These are contractors?
Ian: They’re all contractors correct.

Learn What SEO and Content Marketing Strategies BuildFire Use to Drive Traffic and Revenue

To complete the overview of BuildFire content marketing and SEO I recorded a short video with a deep dive in their rankings, traffic, blog posts and Conversion Rate Optimization. Watch it to learn more about their content marketing and SEO strategy that helped them grow to a seven-figure company. You can apply the same strategies to your brand and accelerate your traffic growth, leads, sales and revenue.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• BuildFire started link-building mid-2014 and their backlink profile has been steadily growing over time.
• Organic traffic chart has the same trajectory as backlinks charts. That proves that backlinks are an important ranking factor and BuildFire has been focusing on quality, not quantity.
• Over the course of the last 5 years, they created backlinks from 3,200 new domains and published over 300 blog posts.
• That helped them to rank for 90,000 new keywords (an increase from 1.6K to 92K ranked keywords). The number of keywords that rank on the first page of Google had increased from 220 to 15000.
• Over the last 5 years, organic traffic from Google increased from 2,300 to 140,000 visitors per month. An average traffic increase is 100% year over year.
• Since they offer 30-day trial with no credit card required we can assume they have a pretty high conversion rate of around 8%.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog post includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve written over 300 blog posts and some of the best performing posts have backlinks from over 100 domains.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a client. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in the top 4 worldwide for the keyword “how to make an app” with 27,000 searches per month just in the US as well as other 1532 similar keywords and driving 19,000 monthly visitors. To achieve that they’ve built links to that post from 113 domains. With an average conversion rate of 8% (they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 1520 trials/month from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 3 worldwide for keyword “mobile app development” with 7700 searches per month in the US only as well as 238 similar keywords and driving 2300 monthly visitors to that page. To achieve that they’ve created links to that post on 54 sites. With an average conversion rate of 8% (since they don’t ask for a credit card) that’s 184 trails/month from that single blog post.
• Overall they have first-page ranking for almost everything related to app development, app statistics, mobile trends and mobile marketing

Takeaways and Next Step

SEO and content marketing worked well for BuildFire and helped them to grow to a seven-figure company. Their marketing team executed a well-planned content strategy that helped them attract 140,000 monthly targeted visitors and convert them into trials and clients with effective conversion rate optimization techniques. You can use their strategy and my teardown as an example to build your own SEO campaign as SEO works the same way for any industry, keywords, type of product whenever it’s B2B, B2C or SaaS.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 4 step process:

1. Perform keyword analysis to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and marketing consultant who helps SaaS, Technology and B2B companies like BuildFire to grow traffic, leads and revenue with SEO, content marketing, CRO and other marketing techniques and channels.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website to learn how you should use SEO to grow leads and revenue? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about my approach to SEO for SaaS and learn what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program. You can also book a call to review your website and project 1 on 1 and see if we might be a good fit working together.

The post How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Tim emphasized the importance of SEO and content marketing in their customer acquisition strategy and shared some numbers they were able to achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• Number #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%
• Content team: Cheif Editor and 10 – 12 external writers
• Cost to produce one blog post: $400 – $600

Here is the part of the interview when Tim and Eric discuss content marketing SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization and what role they play in the overall strategy.

Tim: Part of our problem is that we sell to everybody, which maybe sounds good to people when they’re given their investment pitches, but it poses a real go-to-market problem. How do you service such different buyers as a free blogger versus a big Fortune 50 company, multi-national? The way we do it is we have a premium-free plan, like I mentioned. Then we have the pro and business plans, which are self-service trials where you pay with a credit card, so there’s very little to no sales interaction with those customers unless they have issues getting set up. Then we have a sales team that services the enterprise plans, which could be mid-size companies with a lot of online Tim Matthews Page 3 of 9 traffic, or those very large companies that I mentioned before. We’ve got those 4 distinct pricing plans with very different feature capabilities, and also a different way we acquire the customers.

Eric: Great. Talk about customer acquisition right here, it’s a great segue. What’s working for you? What’s super effective in terms of customer acquisition for you guys?

Tim: Number 1 for us is the combination of SEO and quality content. If you think about what we do, there’s a lot of information that people want to know about how sites get attacked, how they can prevent attacks or how they can make their sites faster, and people are searching for this every day. We spend probably the most money and manpower combined on really quality content and making sure that we’re constantly showing up on that number 1, the first Google results page. That’s probably a really big area for us. We also spend a lot of money on CRO, so conversion rate optimization. It dawned on us that we’ve got a very large number of people coming to our site every day and we were leaky. People were not converting or they were bouncing very quickly, and so I am a real big fan of optimizing, and we do probably 5 experiments a week to try and really keep people on the site and convert. I can give you a couple of examples of successful tests that were really simple, but very effective.

Eric: Yeah.

Tim: My favorite is … Like a lot of SaaS companies, our call to action on the buttons was start free trial. We thought everyone else does that, it seems like a reasonable call to action. We actually changed that for our enterprise plan only to get quotes, because it turns out a lot of enterprise customers don’t want a trial. In some cases they can’t run a trial. On IBM.com for example, you can’t just run a trial for a big site like that. They actually want to talk to a sales person and get a quote. Changing those start trial to get quote, changing those 2 words resulted in a 280% increase in conversions, a huge, huge impact. I think a lot of people make the mistake of not focusing on optimization to website. You’re never done, but it can yield great results.

Eric: Just to give a little context to that INC, you guys are running 5 tests per week. How much traffic do you need to be running at that level?

Tim: You typically need … I’m not a CR expert, but you need probably 50,000 uniques a week to be really able to see some good quality results, or you run a small number of tests and you just wait longer to get the significance you need to prove out the results.

Eric: Right. I think one thing a lot of companies forget about is not only just testing, but having that testing framework where you’re constantly tracking these over time, or else these tests just kind of get lost in translation. Is that something you guys do?

Tim: We do. We actually work with an agency because it’s a lot of work and we don’t have somebody in house who’s dedicated. We have a methodology where we meet every week, we have a series of tests, and we have in some cases brain dead obvious results, not a case of any judgment calls, and we are constantly yanking out one that didn’t work or accepting one that did. Then of course you have to remember to actually hard code it on your site. Some people forget to actually take the test and actually code it into their website. I think it’s a regular cadence. We have some metrics that we want to see more conversions to free trials or form fills to talk to sales people. Right now we’re working on keeping people on our micro-sites longer, so reducing the bounce rate to keep them around. You have to have the goals in mind. You have to have the cadence. You have to have the team, because if you don’t have the team to really manage CRO, it can get very complicated very quickly, and if you’re not watching your results you can spend a lot of money and get nothing for it.

Eric: Okay. Backing up a second, you just talked about quality content. What exactly does quality content look like to you?

Tim: Quality content is something that our buyer would actually want to read. It sounds really obvious to say, but many people make the mistake of not talking to their perspective buyers and asking them questions like what do you read? What do you search for? What kind of content would you like to see from us? I like to think of quality content as something you can write that somebody can learn something from and apply to their job that day. Data sheets wouldn’t cut it, or high-level overviews that are available elsewhere wouldn’t cut it. Something unique to you that somebody can read and learn something from … I read a lot of great marketing blogs and I’ve never bought some of those products, but I’m thinking about them and I think I probably learned a lot about AB testing from optimizing the quality content. I think people make the mistake of just dashing stuff out and they get caught up in that fallacy or maybe misnomer about you’ve got to post every day, every day, every day. I’d rather think about creating a quality piece that can be longstanding. We have blog posts from 5 years ago that are still in our top 10 because they’re so useful and they’re of course highly linked to. That’s what I mean by quality content.

Incapsula’s SEO and Content Marketing Review

With this high-level overview, we can move into the detailed analysis of their content marketing and SEO strategy to get a better understanding of how they achieved those amazing results and growth. I recorded a short video where I analyzed their content marketing efforts, traffic growth, link building activities, CRO tactics and provided few actionable tips that you can apply to your business and sites.

Notes and highlights from the video:

• Incapsula.com merged with Impreva.com in 2019 and done a good job at mapping old domain to new domain and setting up 301 redirects. All Incapsula.com blog posts, content pages, traffic and rankings have moved to Impreva.com
• They started link-building mid-2013 and their backlink profile has been growing over time.
• There are few spikes in the number of referred domains and that usually happens when you acquire or buy links from PBN (private blog networks) that belong to one owner and webmaster. Overtime those domains and sites go offline at the same time and it causing the number of referred domains to go up and down significantly. Those tactics were working back in 2013 but can get you a penalty now.
• Since Sept 2016 they’ve been working on building quality links and the chart was steadily growing without spikes or declines.
• Over the course of 3 years they created backlinks from 2,500 new domains and published a large number of 500 blog posts which they later migrated to Impreva.com in 2019.
• Before the migration, they ranked for 69,000 keywords (11,000 keywords ranking on the first page).
• Over the last 5 years, organic traffic from Google increased from 20,000 to 151,000 visitors per month. An average traffic increase of 100% year over year.
• Incapsula and now Imperva offer a wide range of IT and security services and use live chat and book a demo form as a lead capturing tool. They should have an average 2%-4% conversion rate from organic traffic.
• Their content marketing strategy for the blog posts includes keyword research and writing long-form blog posts. They’ve moved over 500 posts from Incapsula and keep writing new ones. Blog posts and some of the best performing posts have backlinks from over 100 domains.
• Each post targets specific keywords that their prospects would search online and most likely to convert to a client. Here are a few examples:
• They rank in the top 7 worldwide for the keyword “phishing” with 74,000 searches per month just in the US as well as other 1102 similar keywords and driving 3,973 monthly visitors. To achieve that they’ve built links to that post from 169 domains. With an average conversion rate of 2-4%, that’s 80-100 leads/month from that single blog post.
• They also rank top 3 worldwide for keyword “DDOS” with 75,000 searches per month in the US only as well as 438 similar keywords and driving 2,572 monthly visitors to that page. To achieve that they’ve created backlinks to that post on 222 sites. With an average conversion rate of 2-4%, that’s 50-100 leads/month from that single blog post.
• Overall they have first-page ranking for almost everything related to IT security, phishing, servers, firewalls, disaster recovery and other 3000 IT related topics and keywords.

Takeaways and Next Step

SEO and content marketing were #1 customer acquisition channels for Incapusla and helped them reach $1.5 billion market capitalization. Tim and his content team executed a well-planned content strategy that helped them drive 151,000 monthly targeted visitors to incapsula.com and 188,000 monthly visitors to imperva.com and convert them into clients with effective conversion rate optimization techniques. You can use their content strategy and my teardown to build your SEO campaign as SEO works the same way for any industry, keywords and product whenever it’s B2B, B2C or SaaS.

To make SEO work for your business and reach your revenue targets make sure you follow the 5 step process Tim used for Incapsula:

1. Perform keyword analysis to find what your prospects are searching for on Google.
2. Create SEO optimized pages (home page, internal service/product pages, blog posts, case studies) targeting those keywords.
3. Build quality, relevant contextual links to your home, internal and blog post pages.
4. Track your rankings, metrics, conversion rate and continuously optimize performance and CRO
5. Be consistent and persistent. You need to build links and optimize your website for a few years until SEO will deliver real value and make your thought leader in the industry. 30 backlinks per month and the weekly blog posts on your site would be a good start.

My 60-second commercial

I’m an SEO expert and marketing consultant who helps SaaS, Technology and B2B companies like Incapsula and Imperva to grow traffic, leads and revenue with SEO, content marketing, CRO and other marketing techniques and channels.

Do you want me to review your or your competitors’ business and website to learn how you should use SEO to grow leads and revenue? Drop me an email at hi@mikekhorev.com

To discover more about my approach to SEO and growing organic traffic and what it’s like working with me, check my SEO Growth Program. You can also book a call to review your website and project 1 on 1 and see if we might be a good fit working together.

The post How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

• Optimizing your content for SEO to provide more value to the human audience.
• Optimizing the technical SEO of your site so Google and the other search engines can properly index it.

Thus, in performing an SEO audit, we actually only need to focus on these two areas. It’s a very common mistake to perform a too technical SEO audit, that can take weeks to complete—and even by then, due to its very broad approach, we end up with a confusing result—.

Here, we will show you that an SEO audit is actually very simple, and you won’t really need to understand all the technicalities to understand—and even perform— this SEO audit.

Let us start from the very beginning: the concept of SEO audit.

What Actually Is an SEO Audit?

Simply put, an SEO audit is a process to evaluate how well Google and the search engines can index and recognize your site, and on the other hand how optimized your content is according to the search engine’s standard.

In reality, however, these two factors will involve many different technical and non-technical factors, and a proper SEO audit will provide you with a better insight into your website, your content, and organic traffic, among other aspects.

Typically, an SEO audit must be performed at the beginning of a new SEO campaign, and then regularly every quarter or at least every six months.

Common Insights Gained From an SEO Audit

Below are some of the most common issues and information that are revealed by a proper SEO audit:

1. Keyword optimizations

Both the home page and internal landing pages (content-rich pages) must include keywords that are specifically targeted to capture our ideal audience. Include 3-6 mentions (in an average 1,000-word content) of highly relevant keywords with decent search volume.

On the other hand, a landing page and/or product-service description page might be optimized for more than one keywords. For example, a single page might be optimized for “data extraction software”, “data migration tools”, and “data analytics solutions” almost equally between each other. This practice will prevent the page from ranking optimally (on the first page of the SERP) for any of these keywords.

Ideally, a separate page must be created and optimized for each keyword (or each set of keywords for one topic) with at least 800 words of content.

2. Technical issues on the site, including but not limited to:

• 404 and 500 errors
• non-secure site due to the absence of SSL certificate (the site is still using http:// instead of https://)
• broken external and inbound links,
• Non-optimized robots.txt file
• improper structured-data markup 
• Existence of .htaccess files, can block Google crawlers and cause indexation errors

3. User interface issues including but not limited to:

• Slow loading speed, leading to a high bounce rate. There can be various causes for this, including:
  • Unused and resource-heavy plugins/extensions
  • Non-optimized images and vides
  • Slow hosting service (slow server response time)
  • Non-optimized site structure (XML sitemap)
• The site is not (fully) mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive:
  • Test your site using Google’s mobile-friendly test tool
  • Switching to a mobile-responsive template
  • Simplify your site’s navigation and menus

Step-by-Step SEO Audit

1. Check The Canonicity of Your Site

The first, and also the most important thing to do is to check whether only one URL for your site is currently browseable—and thus, indexable by Google—.

Due to the nature of a web address, there can be various ways to type your website’s address into the internet browser, for example:

• http://thisexample.com
• https://thisexample.com
• Http://www.thisexample.com
• Https://www.thisexample.com
• Thisexample.com

Decide one “default” URL for your website. Typically you should choose a URL that already uses https. Https is a confirmed ranking factor today. So, if you have migrated your site to HTTPS and already got an SSL certificate, you might as well make full use of it.

Use 301 redirects to redirect all other URLs to the chosen canonical URL.

2. Check For Basic Crawl and Indexation Issues

Here, ideally, we’ll need a tool of software capable of crawling your site. That is, this tool can “crawl” or “spider” your site similar to how Google would. This will give us an important insight into how Google actually sees and perceives your site.

You can use tools like BeamUsUp (free), Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs, among others to do this. Then, analyze the resulting crawl errors (if any). Fixing these errors should be one of your main priorities.

Next, use Google Search Console to check whether your site is properly indexed. Remember that if your site is not indexed, you won’t get ranked, ever.

Alternatively, you can search in google using the site: search operator, for example:

Site: nameofyoursite.com

Using this search operator will also tell you how many pages of your site have been properly indexed. In general, however, using Google Search Console will provide better accuracy.

Keep in mind, however, if your site is brand new, it might take some time before Google can properly index your site. There are ways to speed up this process, but in general, patience is usually enough.

3. Check Your Site’s Performance for Branded Keywords

Search for your brand name in Google.

Your site should be the top result. There are only two exceptions here: First, if your site is brand new. Second, if your brand name is too generic (in such cases, we’d advise of rebranding your business).

There are, however, possible solutions when you rank further down the SERP for the branded keywords:

• Link building services can help you more branded backlinks
• Optimizing your brand presence on all major social media platforms (and make sure all of your social media profiles properly link to your site’s URL).
• Build citations on online business directories depending on your niche/industry and location
• Claim your Google My Business listing
• Implement a PR campaign to get media coverage from authoritative websites, and media

Do these steps consistently, and you should climb up the ranks, little by little.

If, however, your site is nowhere on the first page of the SERP, or nowhere at all, it’s a strong indication of being penalized (assuming your site is “old” enough).

4. Manual SEO Audit for On-Page Optimizations

Here, we will manually assess several key areas of on-page SEO.

We mainly start with your site’s homepage, unless there’s another page that’s generating more organic search traffic than your homepage.

Below are some of the important areas to assess in this page:

• How optimized the title tag is, and whether the title tag is already clickable
  • Use this tool to simulate how the title will look on Google SERP, so you can assess whether it’s too long or too short
  • Check whether the title already include the target keyword(s) naturally
  • Check the search volume(s) of the included keyword(s), if there are any related keywords with higher search volume, consider re-optimizing the title.
• How optimized the Meta Description is.
  • It’s important to note that meta description won’t affect your search ranking directly, so your main focus in optimizing the meta description is to improve CTR (click-through-rate)
  • CTR, on the other hand, is a direct ranking factor. So, focus on writing a meta description that can appeal to the human audience
  • In general, communicate your product/service’s unique value proposition within the meta description to encourage CTR. If you are selling a cheaper product than your competitors, say something like “guaranteed cheapest price!”
• There must be only one instance of the H1 tag, and it must be thoroughly optimized
  • H1 tag is a direct ranking factor, but not critical, if it’s appropriate to include a H1 tag, do so and make sure it’s well-optimized, but don’t force it.
  • As mentioned, make sure that there’s only a single unique H1 tag
  • The H1 tag must provide value for your human audience, so make sure it’s comprehensive
  • Include relevant target keywords if possible, but make sure they are naturally included
• Check the structure of H2, H3, etc. usages
  • The main purpose of subheadings is to break up the page’s content in a logical way, to enhance the reading experience (improve the content’s readability)
  • Again, include your target keywords and semantically-related keywords when possible, but make sure they are natural
  • Make sure your subheadings are interesting and engaging, they are often a strong factor in keeping your audience’s engagement

You can also use various tools (i.e. SEMRush or Ahrefs) to generate a crawl report for these pages, which will automatically detect errors like when the title is too long, multiple H1 tags, and so on.

5. Check for Content-Related Issues

It’s fairly obvious that we should avoid duplicate content in most cases. Ever since Google implemented the Panda algorithm update in 2011, you can get penalized when you use duplicate content, especially in fraudulent ways (i.e., when you steal other people’s content and use it in your site).

However, there can be cases where it’s your content that gets stolen. In most cases, it shouldn’t bring any problem to your site, but you can always report the site to be safe (and so this thief won’t steal your traffic).

You can use tools like Copyscape to help find this duplicate content.

Important: even if you are 100% sure you always use original content, there’s always the possibility of duplicate content like—as mentioned— when your content is stolen by others, or when you are using a stock/template-based section in your content (i.e. when you use a stock disclaimer for your contact us).

Make sure to use rel=”canonical” in your original content, and always make sure duplicate or syndicated content links back to this canonical content.

Also, check for pages with thin content. While thin content typically won’t cause a Google penalty, it’s still a waste of resources (and site space). In general, consider updating or deleting pages with fewer than 200 words of content.

6. Check Your Site’s Load Speed

Your website’s (and individual pages’) load speed is both direct and indirect ranking factors.

Simply put, more than half of site visitors will leave the site if the site loads more than 3 seconds (in a standard 3g connection). In turn, a high bounce rate will affect your site’s ranking.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your site’s current performance. However, admittedly PageSpeed Insights is a little difficult to use (not very intuitive interface), so you can use additional tools like Pingdom (and others) to analyze your site’s current speed and possible issues.

While optimizing your site’s speed is a pretty deep and complex subject on its own (and you might want to check here to get a better picture), there are five important areas to focus on:

1. A good hosting service

One of the most common causes of slow site speed is the slow server response time, which is the amount of time required to load a website’s files from the server—so the client’s computer can begin rendering the page—.

The most common cause of the slow server response time, in turn, is a bad hosting service or a bad server. So, it’s important to choose a fast, reliable hosting service that also provides an included SSL certificate.

2. Caching your website

Caching—in a nutshell—, is putting your website’s data in a temporary storage area so the client can load it faster. There are various caching plugins available if your website is WordPress-based.

Also, you might want to check Google’s guidelines on leveraging browser caching here.

3. Optimize image sizes

Pretty self-explanatory, images and videos can eat a lot of storage space—and thus it will take a longer time to load these images—.

In general, however, here are some important things to remember:

• First, always crop the image to its appearance. If, for example, an image should appear as 768px in width, then resize the image to that width to avoid any unused space
• There are various compression tools and even plugins that can help reduce image sizes without a significant reduction in quality.
• In most cases, a JPEG format is your best bet. PNG typically uses a slightly larger file size, but is still manageable. Avoid TIFF and BMP formats.
• GIFs tend to be very heavy in size, so avoid them unless they are absolutely necessary, and use them in small sizes.

4. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Simply put, a CDN is a network of servers that can store and publish your content, thus reducing the strain of your main server that hosts your site. A CDN will typically deliver your site’s static files from a network of servers that is closer to the user’s physical location, and so can significantly improve load speed.

Check your hosting service whether they also provide CDN packages (some, like Bluehost, include CDN in their hosting plan).

5. Minify your codes

“Minifying” codes generally refers to eliminating extra spaces, line breaks, comments, and various unnecessary elements of your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML codes. This can significantly reduce the size of your codes, and speed up your site’s loading time.

Again, there are various tools and WordPress plugins that can help you in this aspect, for example, WP Super Minify.

6. Analyze Structured Data Implementation

Assess the site’s current implementation of structured data markup (if any) and check any pages that should have structured data but aren’t.

In general, structured data markups will allow the pages to be eligible for featured snippets, and should be implemented in as many pages as possible. Here are the common elements of a web page that often have structured data markups:

• Embedded objects (audio, image, video)
• Any event
• Organization
• Any person mentioned in a website
• Creative entities: books, movies, music, recipes, TV series, etc.
• Products and service offers
• Review
• Health and medical

Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to check your site’s existing structured data markup, and take notes of any errors.

Implementing structured data markup should be an important aspect of your SEO strategy, especially if you plan to aim for featured/rich snippet spots.

7. Analyze Ranking Performance

Here we will analyze how our site’s rankings are progressing.

We will need a tool or software that can display our site’s ranking history here. For example, SpyFu, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and many more. There are also free alternatives available—although they might not be as accurate—.

There are several things to consider in this aspect:

1. Check whether the site’s ranking is rising—albeit slowly—. If the site’s ranking is declining, there can be various reasons to cause this (penalty, outdated content, missing backlinks, etc.)
2. Analyze various pages according to the various target keywords, and take notes of pages that are currently decreasing in rankings.
3. Check whether there are pages that are already performing quite well—that is, ranking in positions 5 and above, or at least already in the first page of SERP—. These pages should be your main priority in the near future, since you can get to the top spots with just a little boost, in most cases.

How can we boost these high-performing pages into the top? There are a few approaches we can try:

1. Update the content with newer, more relevant information and relaunch the content
2. Get more backlinks/inbound links to the page
3. Improve the page’s internal linking structure, and add more internal links
4. Check the page’s overall keyword optimization.

If possible, analyze all of your pages’ keyword optimizations. You can check this section on what to assess on your pages regarding keyword optimizations. The main principles, however, are that:

1. Include 3-6 mentions of the target keywords every 1,000 words
2. Make sure the keywords are included naturally. Focus on maintaining readability and comprehension for human readers
3. Make sure the target keywords have a high enough search volume, relevant to your business, and manageable (in terms of competitions).

8. Assess Your Backlinks Profile

The quality and quantity of your backlinks are some of the most important factors in determining your site’s ranking.

Again, here you’ll need a software or solution that can analyze your backlinks profile. You might want to check our previous guide on link building here, but here are some important areas to consider:

1. Check the total number of your inbound links, but also your internal links and outbound links.
2. The quality of your inbound links, based on the E-A-T principle
3. Relevance and diversity of anchor texts for the incoming inbound links
4. The frequency and consistency of how you get these backlinks
5. Overall history and integrity of your inbound links

9. Assess Inbound and Outbound Broken Links (404 and 500 Errors)

Simply put, broken pages and links on and to your site are wasted opportunities, so you’d want to find and fix these links as soon as possible.

These broken links commonly come in the form of 404 and/or 500 errors:

• 404 error: 404 Not Found mainly means the page you are trying to reach (or in this case, linking to your site), cannot be found on their server for one reason or another
• 500 error: is a more obscure server-side error that generally means something has gone wrong on the site’s server, but it can’t identify the actual error

Various tools (i.e. SEMRush or Ahrefs Site Explorer) can generate reports for broken links and broken pages (your own).

For broken pages on your own, prioritize pages with the highest SERP rankings and pages with the most inbound links. However, you should decide either to fix all of these broken pages or to eliminate non-performing ones altogether.

For these broken pages, you’d need to:

• Replace and/or update the content
• Redirect the broken page to a live one
• For pages with no backlinks, you might want to delete it.

For broken links, since you can’t directly control the source sites, there are various different approaches you’d need to take on a case-by-case basis. You might want to check out this guide on link reclamation for a more in-depth discussion of the topic.

10. Find Content and Keyword Gaps

Our main focus here is to check for keywords that your competitors currently rank for, but you haven’t yet.

Several tools, most notably Ahrefs, can automatically generate reports for content gaps by analyzing competing sites.

The main idea here is to find sites with a lot of overlaps on keyword rankings with your current site, and thus we can find these keyword gaps.

If you find any content gaps during this SEO audit, analyze these keywords whether they are really good fits for your brand. If yes, they should be your main priority.

11. Content Performance Audit

Underperforming—or even, nonperforming content pages— can significantly slow down your site in the long run, and can also affect your site’s structure and overall user experience.

If, for example, a user that is currently interested in your brand stumbled upon your older, low-quality article, it can be a major turnoff and might affect their purchase decision.

In general, in this step you should:

• Check for non-performing pages with very little organic traffic and very little inbound links
• Look for ways to improve them if possible:
  • Update the content with more relevant information
  • Leverage the content in another form (i.e. non-performing textual content can work better as a video)
  • Improve the content’s structure, add more images, etc
  • Optimize the keywords and get more inbound links to generate traffic
• Otherwise, you might want to permanently delete these pages and use 301 redirects for the URL to a live, relevant page

By default, you should always try to fix, update, and relaunch the content to perform better in the future.

End Words

By following the essential steps of SEO audit above, you should have gained various useful insights into your website’s performance and should provide you enough information on how to plan your B2B SEO strategy.

Keep in mind that these steps are not exhaustive, and certainly, you can commit to hiring an SEO expert that will analyze more aspects of your site and your content and even conduct a full-blown SEO forensic which can take days or even weeks to complete. However, this basic SEO audit we’ve discussed should provide you a great way to assess your site’s current condition and plan a new SEO campaign.

If possible, you should work with a B2B SEO agency to conduct this SEO audit regularly every quarter or at least every six months to analyze your progress and gain insights that might be useful in adjusting your strategy whenever necessary.

The post How to Do SEO Audit to Boost Your Google Rankings and Traffic appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The lives we lead are driven by data. And our mobile devices are the primary conduit through which data is gathered. They are what allow advertisers and businesses to gain insight on our interests, buying habits, and even our behavior. The fact that almost everyone who lives in the modern world has a smartphone adds to the potency of using intent data to drive sales. But, before we delve into how to best use intent data, you first have to ask:

What Is Intent Data?

Intent data is defined as the information on a user’s online behavior. This includes website visits, product reviews, a user’s attendance at webinars, downloads, and even when the user consumes online content on a given topic. This is built upon the assumption that if you’re searching for something, there’s a very high chance that you have an interest in that field and that you’re more likely to buy a product or service, whether it’s out of curiosity or if you really do have a need for it.

For example: A person who collects sneakers is bound to watch YouTube videos on the latest releases and will also most likely search eCommerce websites for a specific model that they intend to buy. This information is then used to tailor the ads that the individual is shown. He is now more likely to get ads that are shoe-related because the prospective buyer has shown an interest in these products.

There are also three types of user intent:

Informational – applies to a search that a user makes in order to learn about something or to solve a problem. Informational searches tend to favor guides, boards, and forums.

A good example of this are searches like: “what is the meaning of xxxxxx?” or “how to spend a one-day vacation in Hawaii” or even “What is intent data?”.

Commercial – these are searches that are made with the intent of making a purchase that is not immediate. This can be indicative of a prospective buyer’s interest or curiosity in a certain item but is not yet completely ready at the moment to make a purchase.

For example, when a user searches for “Best Nike Running Shoes” you already have an idea that the buyer is looking for running shoes from Nike and will most likely be interested in shoes that are either from Nike or at least if those non-Nike shoes are built for running.

Transactional – these are searches that are made with the intention of making a purchase immediately. Whether it’s because the buyer has had sufficient time to decide whether or not to buy a product or if it’s because of an emergency from which the need for a particular product arises, the core concept to consider here is that the buyer has every intention of buying a particular product.

With that thought in mind, when a prospective buyer searches for a specific product, like for example, “Nike Pegasus 36 for sale”, you can already assume that this buyer has an idea of what type of Nike running shoe he wants and is going to make a purchase when the price and conditions of the transaction match his preference.

Where Can You Get Intent Data?

Now, before you’re even able to make use of intent data to your advantage, you first need to be able to figure out where you can acquire it. There are many sources from which you can acquire user intent data and you don’t always have to pay for it either.

One source you can get intent data is your Google Search Console, which will give you an insight into what keywords users are searching for as well as the frequency that those keywords are used.

This is based on the fact that when prospective buyers consider making a purchase they almost always do some online research on the product in order for them to make an informed decision.

As you may have already be expecting, the higher the frequency that a keyword was searched is indicative of the fact that there are more people that have shown an interest in that keyword or product.

While this data may not exactly be used to target specific individuals, as far as user intent is concerned, this source and the data gathered from it are sufficient to help you direct your marketing efforts. When search inquiries for a particular product are high,  you can then adjust your campaign to focus on that particular product in your catalog, or you can even offer a better alternative provided that you have brand reputation to do so.

If you’ve used GSC in the past and you’ve gotten dissuaded by its limited records (it was only able to track the past 3 months), the latest version should at least sway your mind enough to cause you to give it another try. The latest version is now able to track the past 16 months of activity.

Another source where you can get your intent data from is through your analytic tools. Whether it’s Google Analytics or any other on-site web analytics tool, you’re going to be able to see what the visitors on your website are searching for. An internal site search is a very potent tool because there’s a big chance that the people visiting your site are already interested in your brand and they are looking for a product within your inventory.

If visitors are already interested in your brand, and you know what product they are looking for, you can focus your ads on that product type or an equivalent product that you have in your inventory. However, it’s important to note that on-site tracking is not enabled by default and you’re going to have to manually enable it for it to be useful for gathering intent data.

Another way that you can gather user intent is through surveys on your site. While analytics tools will be able to help you determine external and internal search term frequencies, surveys are going to give you an opportunity to determine the reason behind a user’s visit upon your site. You can ask questions like: “what are you looking for? Are you open to using its alternatives?” Or even simply asking “Did you find what you needed?” While it’s true that surveys will tend to have many more questions than shown above, these are the questions you need in order to determine visitor intent.

For best results, consider putting all of these methods to use and combining the data that you gather from them. While you can indeed buy user data online, it’s a waste of money, especially when you’re able to make use of free tools to infer the data from.

So, How Do You Utilize Intent Data?

The most effective way to use intent data is to personalize your website to cater to anonymous visitors. It’s been proven time and again that personalized content is more likely to cause a visitor to perform a particular action, whether that’s in purchasing a product or donating to a cause, or signing up.

Intent data can also be used to build your email list and to allow your brand to connect with potential buyers. This allows you to extend your reach and to fill your inbound traffic with people who have shown an interest in what you have to offer. As we all know, quality leads mean that there’s a higher chance of conversion.

This will also allow you to play to your strengths and to determine which products or services you need to gear your campaign towards. This will even determine what products are trending and what exactly prospective buyers want from a particular item.

This is an important detail because this is also an opportunity to differentiate your brand from that of your competitors when you’re able to introduce a product that’s not only at par with what’s trending, but may even be a much better alternative.

There are many strategies that help drive sales and using intent data is one of them. The very core of marketing lies in the profound understanding of these strategies in order for you to make full use of them. Tailor your strategies to your campaign needs and test their effectiveness. It is important to stay up-to-date on the latest trends to ensure that you’re able to use every advantage you have over your competitors.

The post What Is Intent Data And What Are The Most Effective Ways To Use It To Drive Sales appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, BuzzSumo is certainly not a perfect-for-all tool, and it’s certainly not cheap. This is why many people are looking for BuzzSumo alternatives, either to get a cheaper option or to get different features where BuzzSumo is lacking.

Here, we will discuss five of the best BuzzSumo alternatives available, but let us begin with a brief discussion about BuzzSumo itself.

Brief Overview on BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a very popular tool among content marketers, and not without its reasons. As a content analytics tool, it has a well-rounded set of features including:

• Brand monitoring: monitoring mentions about your brand across various social media.
• Analytics on your content, especially engagement metrics, and comparison with your competitors’
• Checking trending content and topics
• Backlinks analytics
• Find and analyze influencers

However, BuzzSumo offers two standout core features:

1. Content analytics: BuzzSumo is often considered the best in this aspect with various useful features discussed above. It is especially useful to monitor trending content across the internet and various social media platforms, giving you various insights to help you develop the best possible, high-performing content
2. Influencers outreach: allowing you to get insights about various influencers in any niche/industry. This is especially useful if you are looking to build an influencer marketing campaign, as well as to get guest posting opportunities.

Pricing: limited free plan available, premium plan starts from $79/month, and the most expensive package is $499+/month

Top 5 Best BuzzSumo Alternatives

There are generally two reasons in looking for BuzzSumo alternatives: you want something cheaper (or, you want to get more value of what you spend). The second common reason is that you are looking for a different set of features to fulfill your needs.

Taking account of those two reasons (and others), here we have compiled five of the best alternatives to BuzzSumo, and why we think they might be a decent pick.

1. Social Animal

Social Animal is often considered the best “cheap” alternative for BuzzSumo. We say “cheap” because the starting plan is only $49/month compared to BuzzSumo’s $79/month, while offering the same core features of BuzzSumo, and slightly more. In fact, SocialAnimal has their own comparison page with BuzzSumo, which you can check here.

It actually offers some useful unique features like headline analytics, the ability to search within articles, advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP),and the feature to compare two keywords in real-time, among others.

Feature Highlights:

• Content analytics: check article keywords, compare top articles, analyze headlines, and check various engagement metrics.
• Content marketing suggestions: optimal content length, optimal headlines and title, suggestion about when to publish, etc. InsipireMe is Social Animal’s unique feature that can suggest any topics that might connect to any keyword, very useful in content development process
• Influencer analytics: similar features to BuzzSumo, suggesting trending influences across various niches and their key metrics

Pricing: 14-day free-trial for all plans, plan starts from $49/month and the most expensive plan is $499/month. In most cases, the cheapest plan is sufficient for 1-user.

Conclusion: more affordable with slightly more features than BuzzSumo, probably the best alternative out there.

2. Ahrefs Content Explorer

Ahrefs is a prominent keyword research tool, among the best of its class. However, Ahrefs also offers a content analytics tool in the form of Ahrefs Content Explorer. You will, however, need to subscribe to Ahrefs’ full package that starts with $99/month, and cannot subscribe only to Content Explorer. However, Ahrefs also offers many useful tools especially about SEO—which is closely related to content marketing anyways—. You can try it for a week for $7.

As a content analytics tool, Ahrefs is very powerful tool that can find thousands of trending topics and millions of pages in real-time, the largest compared to other tools. However, it is fairly limited in its content analytics features, which only focus on backlinks and domain referrals.

Feature Highlights:

• Powerful SEO tools: among the best keyword research tools available today,regarded as the absolute best in the backlinks analytics department. Offer various features that can help you get more backlinks.
• Competitor Insights: similar to BuzzSumo’s feature in finding trending topics and analyze the top competitors on the topic.
• Advanced Searches: various filters to help you in content curation process from the ability to filter posts by traffic, word count, number of social shares, etc.

Pricing: 7-day trial for $7, Lite package with $99/month and Standard package for $179/month

Conclusion: more expensive, but more advanced set features for technical and power users. Best choice if you are going to focus on SEO. Limited influencer analytics features.

3. NinjaOutreach

If Ahrefs is a more advanced alternative for BuzzSumo regarding technical content analytics. NinjaOutreach is the tool to get if you want more influencer outreach features. It’s also important to note that NinjaOutreach is cheaper than BuzzSumo, with the most affordable plan only costs $49/month.

NinjaOutreach offers some content analytic features, like the ability to analyze current trending topics. However, it’s more focused on influencer outreach features, some are unique among other tools on this list.

Feature Highlights:

• Automatic email outreach: automatically send outreach emails to your target influencers. A great, time-saving feature if you are serious about influencer marketing. There are also various email templates to choose from, and all messages are personalized.
• Influencer analytics: over 6.5 million influencers in NinjaOutreach’s database, and simply by entering a keyword, you can find various influencers from bloggers to authoritative companies to press.
• Influencer outreach tracking: track open rate of your email outreach, see which templates are generating the best results, and check reply-rate. You can continuously improve your influencer outreach campaign with these insights.

Pricing: free-trial available for all plans, the basic package is $49/month and the premium package is $149/month

Conclusion: focused on influencer analytics and influencer outreach features, while a little lackluster in the content insights department. An affordable option if you are especially looking for an influencer outreach tool.

4. ShareIt

ShareIt is a content curation-influencer insights tool by SocialPilot, offering the core functions of BuzzSumo for absolutely free.

The free price tag is arguably its best “selling” point, but as expected, it’s not as powerful as BuzzSumo or other tools we have shared above. It is, however, very simple and easy to use: simply enter your keyword or topic, and ShareIt will show you two tabs: one for trending articles on the topic, and another one for the top influencers.

Feature Highlights:

• Free: arguably its best feature, as you can use this tool alongside BuzzSumo or other alternatives to compare insights. Also, obviously it’s a great option for content marketers on a tight budget.
• Simplicity: very simple to use with clean interface.
• Trending content: although it’s free, ShareIt can show various trending content according to your target keyword. Combined with its ease of use, it’s one of the best BuzzSumo alternatives when you are in a hurry.

Pricing: free

Conclusion: a great free option for those looking just for some basic insights on trending content and influencers.

5. ContentStudio

As the name suggests, ContentStudio is another alternatives for BuzzSumo especially in the content curation department. However, ContentStudio also offers some social media management features making it a good option for those looking to get help in the social media marketing aspect.

A unique feature of Content Studio is how it analyzes social engagement data to predict whether a content will go viral. You can easily setup various automations and filtering options

Also, it’s another affordable option starting at just $49/month.

Feature Highlights:

• Content strategy planner: view your overall content strategy in just a single dashboard, either in a list view or calendar view. Powerful filters to find trending content according to keywords/topics, and great analytics features.
• Automation: can automatically schedule your posts, complete with recycling features, hashtag suggestions, and mention suggestions (which influencer to mention, author mentions, tc.). You can automate content posting according to your preferences.
• SEO optimizer: various suggestions and insights to optimize your content and social media posts.
• Analytics: detailed metrics for any website and social media profiles, including performance analytics of our own content.

Pricing: Starting from $49/month, the most expensive package is $299/month

Conclusion: a relatively affordable option for those who wanted a focused tool on content curation and content development. Not very powerful regarding influencer outreach.

End Words

So which of these BuzzSumo alternatives should you choose? As you can see, no two tools are exactly the same: some are cheaper than others (and even free), some offer better features in one area but lacking on the others. The best approach is to choose the right tool according to your budget and your current needs, and we’ll let you be the judge.

However, in our opinion the best well-rounded tools we have on this list is Ahrefs, while NinjaOutreach is the best regarding influencer outreach. For a free alternative, you might want to try ShareIt.

The post Top 5 BuzzSumo Alternatives For Better Content Marketing Insights appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.