If you’re a person involved in social media marketing, it would definitely be to your advantage to invest in tools which could help to maximize your reach and minimize your market spend. One great way of doing this is to take advantage of the many SEO tools which are available, many of which are free, and all of which can help you be much more productive in your marketing efforts.
One possibility for instance, might be to use a keyword discovery tool, which could help you to gain an understanding of those keywords used commonly throughout the social media, and which you could embed in your own content to improve your search rankings. There are a great many free SEO tools available for you to choose from, so before you go looking for any kind of expensive software to help improve your search rankings, consider using some of the free SEO tools described below.
SERP Rank Checker
This tool allows you to check on your keyword rankings, although you do have to look them up one at a time. If you’re looking up several keywords at a time, you can have them all exported to a CSV file for later evaluation. One of the downsides of using this tool is that each search is a one-time operation, which means you have to keep rerunning them manually if you want to check the results every week or every month.
Since your SEO team will usually be looking for specific keywords that they’re trying to rank for, this tool provides some useful insights into what’s popular and what’s not working so well. Typically, you would use SERP Rank Checker to find out how highly a keyword is ranked from one of your articles or posts. If it doesn’t rank within the top five in its class, you should give it some more attention, possibly using a paid Internet channel like Facebook Ads. Once you know how well a given keyword is performing, you take appropriate steps to boost its visibility and ranking.
FAQ Fox
This tool scrapes websites to find questions associated with keywords that you provide. The big benefit of using FAQ Fox is to generate content ideas, and the questions found by FAQ Fox can be used to produce YouTube videos, or possibly Facebook live streams which provide answers to those questions. It’s very simple to use this free tool, starting with the entry of a specific keyword and a site address where you want the tool to scrape for questions. The best sites for such usage are those which typically incorporate a great many questions, for instance forums. Without even troubling your brain, you’ll have a whole host of questions which you can use to generate social media content about.
SimilarWeb
Researching your competitors is a big part of your marketing strategy, or least it should be, since it’s extremely valuable to know what your competitors are up to at any point in time. SimilarWeb is an ideal tool for this purpose, and it can compare your competitors’ performance and rankings with your own. If you care to purchase the premium version of the tool, you can make use of a number of more advanced features, and some highly detailed metrics.
Some of the topics for comparison on your competitors’ sites would be volume of traffic and level of engagement, as well as the total number of visits, the time on-site, the bounce rate, and the number of page views for each visit. Using this tool should give you a pretty clear idea of how you stack up against your competitors, in terms of engaging your followers. On top of that, the tool also tells you which sources are producing the highest levels of traffic for your competitor and yourself, so that you can improve specific channels as needed, and refine your marketing strategy.
Google Keyword Planner
This tool will help you to discover what the top performing keywords are on the web, so that you can optimize your own website and content to include some of those same keywords. You can also conduct a search on a base keyword, and discover some of the most popular longtail keywords which relate to it, potentially for use in your own content. Google Keyword Planner provides statistics on the number of searches which have been conducted on each search term for any given month, and it also projects how difficult it will be for you to get your own content ranked highly using the same search term.
Buzz Sumo
This tool is one of those must-have inclusions for your SEO marketing toolkit, providing a suite of powerful analytics that can be a great aid for your SEO and social media marketing. The way the software works is by looking up the search you provide for content topics, so that it can return data on those posts which are the most shared, along with all of the articles and stories which are currently trending the hottest. This is priceless information that can be used by your marketing team for brainstorming ideas on new blogs, video productions, and possibly infographics.
It will be a big help in keeping your content current and of high value to users, hopefully with a high rate of sharing. The search that Buzz Sumo does can also be directed at your own domain, which means it would then provide information on your own content which is trending. As an example, videos or text content that are performing very well could be recycled into a strong infographic, which would extend its appeal to users and garner more web traffic for your site.
Yoast SEO Plugin
This plug-in makes it very easy to improve rankings for WordPress sites, by allowing you to add meta-titles, descriptions, indexes, and additional back-end settings considered to be crucial for SEO. There are several other settings in Yoast besides SEO for blog content, which facilitate the sharing of posts and pages on whatever social media platforms you choose to use.
Metadata can be set to optimize content shared on each of those platforms, for instance identifying the content type, image, and page URL. This will allow you to be sure that your content will have an appealing display, and a nicely formatted description in its social media form. These customization features will contribute significantly to improving engagement with your audience, and establishing a relationship of ongoing loyalty.
