I recently had a customer ask me about driving traffic to their website. My response was that there are 3 basic ways to do this:
1. Advertise. This can be through Google, Facebook, AdRoll, etc. Of course we all know that marketing is an experiment and not all ads are effective. Some are search ads, some are contextual ads, some are retargeting ads. It takes experience and money to create an effective advertising campaign.
2. Drive Traffic Yourself. This is actually a really good way to get people to your site. Using social media posts, blog posts, and email, you can send consumers to your website. This requires patience to build a following, but self-driven traffic tends to be the most highly engaged users on your site.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the holy grail of internet marketing, and everyone wants to be listed on page 1. The trouble is, while it’s nice to get “free” traffic from Google, SEO can actually be very expensive. The time involved for agencies to get you listed on page 1 and the tools involved for improving your search results can run into thousands of dollars.
So the question becomes, are there any tools out there that allow a small business to perform SEO themselves? Enter SEO Powersuite.
SEO Powersuite is actually a set of 4 programs, that are all run independently. They include:
- Website Auditor – Analyze your website for issues and areas for improvement, so you can fix them and boost your organic rankings.
- Rank Tracker – Lets you monitor your SERP rankings to help you better understand your SEO performance. It also gives you access to a variety of research methods to find low-hanging fruit keywords to optimize on your site.
- SEO Spyglass (Backlink checker)– Review your link building campaign and see the strength of your link profile. It also lets you spy on your competitors’ link building strategy and campaign that you can emulate on your site.
- Link Assistant – Find prospects and their respective email addresses to reach out to for your link building outreach campaign.
If you are looking to see how well your website is performing and get recommendations on how to improve your SEO, this tool will give you lots of valuable. Let’s take a closer look. SEO Powersuite is not free, but they do give you a 7-day free trial. After that is costs $299 per year, but they also allow you to continue to use the free version.
- Saving projects
- Dedicated query processing system for captcha-free checks
- Scheduled SEO tasks
- Printing reports
- Automatic scheduled report delivery
- Exporting data in .txt, .html, .csv, .sql
This is an example of the backlink checker. Notice that webstoresltd.com has 158,522 links pointing back to our website. This is one of the key factors in getting found with Google – the more backlinks you have, the higher the probability that you will rank on page 1. Your goal should be to try and get as many “dofollow” links to your website as possible. This might be through blog posts, guest posts on other people’s sites, media mentions, YouTube links, etc. When running this tool, you can enter a competitors website as well, so you can see how they are doing compared to your site. Download the tool now and see how many backlinks your site has, then make a plan to improve this number.
The website auditor module shows you how your internal links look visually. Unfortunately, they do not give your this visual representation of external links, but the internal links can be very informative.
The website auditor module will also show you all of your page errors, your domain strength, alexa ranking, and how many pages on your site have been indexed by google.
As I’ve discussed previously, your goal is to not just get your homepage ranked by Google, but to get every single page of your website ranked. I find the tools provided by SEO Powersuite to be extremely valuable for search engine optimization. I recommend downloading the software at https://www.link-assistant.com/ and checking both your website and your competitor’s websites every month or so to see how you are doing.
Greg Jameson has been writing blog articles on ecommerce and internet marketing for over 10 years. Learn more about Greg at https://webstoresltd.com/about/