A review of Majestic SEO Site Explorer
In a previous post I compared what I think are the 5 best tools to review backlinks. These show the strength of your all important backlinks against competitors. In this review we took a brief look at the Majestic SEO Backlink history which we find useful for comparing clients against competitors at a top-level. But since this time Majestic now have a new tool - the Majestic Site Explorer.
Now into its 4th month of public Beta, for me, Majestic Site Explorer is a really useful tool to use when completing top level reviews of competitors. I'd also recommend it can be use d for regulary monthly or quarterly health checks for your own business and the SEO efforts of the agency. It's often compared to the similar and I think, better known tool available from SEOmoz (www.opensitexplorer.com). So I thought it…
Our interview with Brent Coker, creator of Webreep
I love finding out about new tools to help improve marketing, particularly when they help understand customer feedback and drive change. It's one of the reasons I got into web analytics and it's our main focus at SmartInsights.com.
Of course, most web analytics tools like Google Analytics are great at telling you what customers are doing, but not so great at telling you why they are doing it and what their motivations and feelings are. Thats's why I've always been keen to share the different types of online customer feedback service available.
I was recently alerted to a new tool by Brent Coker which I think adds to tools which help the "Not What, but Why?" question. It's an interesting tool for me since it's based on academic research dating back to 2004, yet is a practical real world tool with benchmarking capabilities.…
Google has updated two of it's main sources. I thought I'd alert readers to them since I often find that people reach for their pens to make a note of these on training courses.
Google Agency Toolkit
Many readers will know the many great tools Google provide to encourage marketers to spend more with advertisers. The ones we've written about before and recommend are most useful are:
The Google Keyword Tool - for seeing the number of searches on a topic
Google Keyword Planner - a new tool supplementing the keyword tool
Google Ad Preview tool - shows marketplace players in different countries
Google Trends - for spotting search trends by country
Google Ad Planner - for finding site popularity and audience composition for media sites/publishers
But I find many don't know about the Google Agency Toolkit which groups these together and provides many others - check it out!
…
We're big fans of using the web for qualitative feedback using the many types of website visitor feedback software. These tools really enable you to find out what web users think and feel about your site and your brand online, while the web analytics are more about the how and when web users interact with your brand.
Around a year ago we did an interview with Kampyle where I asked Eran Savir, their co-founder about how their online customer feedback tool could be used for feedback. We've been using Kampyle since we launched Smart Insights and have found it really useful for feedback. We get around 30-40 pieces of feedback each week and average around 4 out of 5 which we're pleased with - thank you for telling us what you think. What we find most useful though are the occasional negative comment which really make us sit…
How can I see my rankings in Google? 5 tools to consider.
This is the question we often hear as I'm sure you do! Our answer is that rankings aren't where you should start when reviewing how well your SEO is working. We have showed how it's best to start with your analytics which will show you actual traffic, leads and sales generated through your SEO efforts. But at the end of the day, marketers still want to know their rankings and rightly so - they do provide a benchmark even in these days of personalised, real-time search. These software or web services report on your position in different search engines, in different countries, for different search terms. The five tools we recommend considering include some of the best known, most widely used ranking tools and a…
Our interview with Dr. Andrew Starkey of Brand Aura
As you may have noticed, at Smart Insights we're keen followers of the latest tools that marketers can use to improve their online marketing. One of the most popular categories of technologies in are social media analysis tools. We had great interest in our review of social media analysis tools, so when I got the opportunity to talk to Andrew Starkey of Brand Aura I was keen to pose some questions to help marketers to select the best system for their needs.
Andrew is an expert in data mining and developed the Brand Aura system. You can get an idea of how Brand Aura works from this analysis of the recent X-Factor final.
Where should you start when selecting a social media analysis tool
Q1. There are a bewildering…
A tool to compare marketing automation systems
Value: [rating=3]
A marketing automation research tool, courtesy of Software Advice.
Our commentary : If you're selecting a provider for a marketing automation, CRM or other Ebusiness system then you may find these Software Advice sites useful for an overview of the options.
They have a series of usable step-by-step guides and this widget which is shareable to other sites - a nice example of viral marketing.
Marketing implications : Take care with using this widget though since it has a strong US focus and some of the well-known marketing suppliers such as Eloqua or Marketo are missing. They do have a slightly broader list of Marketing Automation suppliers but again a US focus.
Remember that many email service provider solutions can now provide marketing automation or integration with existing customer management systems and they'll often be more capable as email broadcast platforms. To see a…
Our guide to benchmarking competitors for effectivness in customer acquisition, conversion and retention
In this guide, we take a look at the what, why, how and when of competitor benchmarking for digital marketing and provide a step-by-step guide showing the tools and KPIs you can use.
You can download the guide or read our introduction below.
Competitor Benchmarking Guide - Smart Insights
What is online competitor benchmarking?
…
Using Google Analytics to Audit and Improve SEO
Here is a post explaining a simple way to add some extra info to your Google Analytics data to help improve your natural search traffic. In this post I hope to show you...
An explanation of what's missing from Google Analytics in terms of actionable SEO data.
How to fix it.
A free excel template so that you can play about with it yourself.
A tutorial to accompany the excel spreadsheet.
The actions to take as a result of the data.
Some suggestions for extending this further.
(more…)…
Social Content Management System Tools Reviewed
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: Since many marketers have rushed to embrace Facebook, Twitter, blogs, customer ratings and reviews, and other social media platforms"€”inviting consumers to comment on their products and services across the Web"€”they are facing an unexpected consequence: content overload.
The posts, comments, tweets, videos, and other content your customers are creating about your product and services may feel like a tsunami. The lay on all the user generated content that should come as a result.
So what do you do? The good news is that several social media content-management systems (CMSes) to hand that allow marketers to not only manage the distribution and placement of the online content about their brands but also analyze and leverage that content to build their businesses. Marketing Profs have created a handy reference of the best 8 that they can find.
Marketing implications: Now that you've invested the time to…
