3 SEO tips to boost mobile app downloads by RAHUL VARSHNEYA

When talking about search optimization for mobile apps, the first thing that comes up is App Store Optimization or ASO. But did you know that you can also use Search Engine Optimization or SEO to boost downloads of your mobile app?

Mobile app profile pages don’t show up in search engine listings the way Web pages do. So what can you do that gets your mobile app showing up in search engine listings?

Build a landing page or a microsite to start with.

Having a presence on the Web is the starting point in leveraging the traffic flowing to your app. The more details the microsite has, the better. If you’ve got a blog associated with your product and the landing page, even better.

The more visibility you build for your landing page, or the more it shows up in relevant search results pertaining to your app’s category or keywords, the more traffic and downloads your app would receive.

So here are some of the best actionable SEO tips from the most well known experts that can increase visibility for your mobile app on search engines and thus help boost downloads.

#1 – Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keyword strategy for the app’s landing page

On-page optimization with the relevant set of keywords of your landing page or the microsite is crucial for Google or other search engines to know what keywords to rank your webpage for.

While the norm is to use the Google Keyword Planner tool to discover the right set of keywords (those that constitute popular searches) that relate to your product, LSI keywords play a big role in smart detection of your landing page in Google’s search results.

LSI keywords are synonyms and closely related words and they help Google understand what your page is all about. When users are searching for the word ‘Cars’, Google should know whether your search is about the movie ‘Cars’ or the vehicle. And Google can tell from the webpage’s LSI keywords whether it relates to one or the other.

This strategy by Brian Dean will help you identify the relevant LSI keywords.

Search for your main keyword in Google. Let’s assume your app is a solution to people’s sleeping problems and your main keyword is ‘Sleep Problems’.  Now, there are three ways to detect LSI keywords.

1. When you enter the keyword in Google search window, the drop down of associated keywords are LSI keywords.
2. Google will highlight (bold) the text that is relevant in the search results. So if you scan the results, you will see words such as ‘sleep disorders’ that are LSI keywords.
3. Right at the bottom of the search results page, Google showcases additional keywords that are ‘searches related to your keyword’, such as ‘how to sleep better’, ‘narcolepsy’, insomnia, etc.

When incorporating keywords in your landing page or the microsite, ensure it’s not about the density or repetition of the main keyword, but that it also includes the LSI keywords. You can also write blog posts that target the LSI keywords.

#2 – Build backlinks by tracking your competitor’s links

Building backlinks to your landing page or the mobile app’s microsite is an essential SEO strategy to increase the search ranking. The more authoritative websites link to your app’s landing page, the higher it would rank in search listings.

This one strategy, by Neil Patel, would help you identify the relevant authority websites and blogs and also help you build those backlinks quickly for your app’s landing page.

The first step is to identify your competitors that have great amount of traction and are popular in the app store charts. Once you’ve identified those, use one of the backlinking tools such as ahrefs or Cognitive SEO to look for all the pages that link back to the competitor app.

Now, you have to sift through the relevant websites or blogs that list the competitor app and write to the author to consider including a link to your app. Of course, give them a reason why they should include your app in the list. Not all would respond or be convinced, but once they do, you will start to notice the results – traffic to your webpage, downloads of your app and a higher ranking for your keywords.

#3 – Increase time on page and reduce bounce rate

Google’s algorithm tracks one important aspect of every webpage that affects its ranking – bounce rate and the time spent by a visitor on the page.

The higher the time spent by people on a webpage, the better its chances of ranking higher in searches. Google’s sole aim is to help people land relevant information through their search. They don’t want people clicking on a webpage in their search result and then hitting the back button quickly to go back to another result.

This would happen if the results were not relevant to the user. So the tricky bit here is how do you increase a visitor’s time spent on your landing page when it’s a product information page?

Rather than talk about the app’s features, talk about the problem you’re solving. First, bait the user with the problem statement itself. For example, sleep problems, as discussed in the earlier point. Then, hook the user by describing the fact that it can be solved and showcase the numbers (benefit in days, percentage, or any other quantifiable metric) or at a high-level, how the problem can be solved.

Once you’ve established these two, then begin to talk about how your app solves the problem in detail.

This strategy helps to increase stickiness for your mobile app’s landing page or the microsite and Google sees it as a relevant result for the searches performed, thus placing it higher in ranking.

Image credit: Shutterstock

This article was earlier published at the next web.

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SMART TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET OF THINGS BY ANDREW GAZDECKI

The first time I got lost in San Francisco I stood on a street corner for 30 minutes throwing my hands up and talking wildly as bus after bus passed me by, heading the wrong direction. The next day I was still loudly fuming over the woes of public transportation when my roommate said those five little words: “There’s an app for that.” The second time I got lost in San Francisco I was ready. I whipped out my navigation app and found the closest line. It took me a record four minutes to figure out which side of the street to stand on, then I was on it, flying over the slopes of Nob Hill.

Fast-forward 6 months and I had mastered some routes, could navigate a few neighborhoods without relying on Google Maps, and no longer noticed the stench of MUNI, which had become like the familiar scent of a good friend. Everything was easier. “Thank you, app,” I said to myself on my way to the office, the park, the store. I couldn’t comprehend how San Franciscans lived before smartphones. “Are they wizards?” I wondered. (Spoiler: they’re probably not.)

Like many other daily routines, once transportation went mobile, most of us forgot how we did it before. This can be as troubling as it is exciting. Troubling because we wonder where technology is taking us and how it’s affecting our minds as it steadily becomes an extension of us. Exciting because you can do things faster, better, and while juggling several other things in a way that wasn’t possible just 10 years ago. It’s no mystery that big cities welcome new technology before the rest. Chaos begs creative solutions, and with “Internet of Things” becoming our new reality, we’re on the brink of technological advances unlike any in history.

Regardless of your opinions on the tech-ification of society, it’s already inescapable. Giants like Amazon and newer players like Withings are pioneering inventions that help you live smarter. By 2016, 19 billion “things” will be connected to the internet. You can buy in like me and the many other San Franciscans expressing gratitude to their apps each day, or you can take to the backstreets where there are no sensors (yet) detecting road weather conditions or monitoring traffic. Either way, here are some of the “things” that are already among us, and a few you can expect to see soon enough.
This article was earlier published at business2community website.

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7 Actionable Web Design Tips by Jessie-Lee Nichols. #WebDesign #WebDevelopment

With the growing popularity of content management systems (CMS) as marketing tools, web design skills are becoming a must have across the marketing industry. Now that you don’t need coding skills to edit the company website, employees from all different backgrounds have the ability to contribute to the company website. While this is great from a content perspective, it can leave designers cringing. Nothing is worse than delivering a perfectly designed website to a client just to see it go a little further downhill with each and every edit by a well-meaning layperson.

While the ability to have anyone edit a website is an added convenience for companies, most of these website editors don’t have an understanding of best practices. The good news is, you don’t need a degree in design to keep the company website up to a designer worthy standard. Keeping these seven tips in mind will not only save your designer a headache, but they will contribute to your thinking on any future design related project that crosses your desk.

1. Keep it Simple

Less is more, but less is often much harder to achieve than more. The biggest mistake I see non-designers make is to add elements (bold! underline! symbols and pictures!) to emphasize a point. Simplicity is the key to effectively getting your point across and making it easy for your website visitors to understand your message.

Visual Hierarchy

This key term is something I find myself repeating all too often in our office. Make sure that all elements on a webpage are relative in size to their importance. Every element on the page cannot carry the same importance so, it shouldn’t carry the same visual weight. More important elements can be easily distinguished with placement, size and color.

Contrast

Pick up where your designer left off. Your website’s color scheme has been taken into very careful consideration, so utilize it. Choose colors in your scheme that are on opposite ends of the spectrum, it will help viewers distinguish elements and take the appropriate action. Do NOT choose colors that are not in the website scheme simply because you think it will catch someone’s attention – too often, you WILL catch someone’s attention, but not for the right reasons.

Flow

Get rid of the excess. Keep your buyer’s journey as simple as possible. Your choices should keep the number of times a user needs to click to get to their destination to as few as possible.

2. Downplay Color

Yes, I will admit, color is generally the “fun” part to any design. With that said, it’s easy to go overboard really quickly. This is the biggest gripe I have with non-designers who get a hold of the websites I’ve designed. Color should be used sparingly (don’t forget tip one) and for emphasis, to really drive home a point – NOT as decoration. I know the gray your designer chose to implement for supporting elements seems boring, but I promise they had their reasons for using it. Neutral color choices for background elements put the one or two colors in your brand’s logo at the forefront. Your visitors will understand when they should take action because that button on your landing page is the boldest thing in front of them.

If you do decide to go against these tips and use extra color, please do so responsibly. Request the hex codes for the main colors of your site so that any and all color you do use is accurate according to your brand guidelines.

3. Limit Font Selections

Typography is a tricky thing to master, and most designers will admit they are in a constant state of learning about this element. Always use caution with typography. The “less is more” rule applies here with absolutely no exceptions. Too many typefaces will make your site feel chaotic.

Don’t put your user in a panic (and please don’t remind them of a bake sale poster their seven year old created in Word!) – pick one typeface for your headers and another for your body text. Stick to these choices and don’t incorporate any more unless you plan on replacing a typeface entirely. Before making typography choices on your own, make sure your brand guidelines don’t have strict rules already planned out. Chances are someone has already made this decision for you.

4. Keep it Readable

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know how we feel about content. Content is King if you are using inbound marketing to attract prospects and convert them to leads. At the root of things, what makes content possible? Typography. Make sure it is formatted for the best user experience possible.

Contrast

Your copy should be significantly darker than your background, or significantly lighter than your background so that it is easy to read.

Line-height

Your website is not a dictionary, don’t treat it as such. Set your line-height from 1.5 to 1.75 to ensure that lines have enough room to breathe. In most cases, this will be set up for you in your website’s CMS, but it is still something you should keep in mind.

Font Size

Who is the target audience for your website? Is it an older demographic? If so, you may want to make your font larger so that folks with reading glasses aren’t straining to read all that content you’ve created.

Hierarchy

We touched on this in tip one, but it is worth mentioning again. Users scan copy, so make it incredibly easy for them to absorb what you are trying to say. Make use of headlines, sub-headlines and list structures. In doing so, you will also benefit from an improved search engine ranking because search engines LOVE keyword-rich headings.

5. Responsive, Responsive, Responsive

I cannot say it enough, responsive websites should now be considered a requirement. If you aren’t optimized for mobile, you will be penalized. Always have mobile users in mind.

If you take tip one into consideration, things should work out fairly easily for you on mobile. To create a great mobile site, you will want to eliminate any clutter (utilizing whitespace), maintain a visual hierarchy and make it super easy for visitors to take action. Forms should be large enough so that big fingers can easily complete them and call to action buttons should be large enough to be easily tapped and difficult to miss.

6. Imagery

Not only should you have amazing website copy, but you should always be thinking about stunning imagery. Take some pride in your image choices. You don’t have to have a design background to know something looks good. My advice is that you take a few extra minutes on your stock photo search and don’t just use a relevant photo – use one that pushes the envelope a little bit.

Images should spark emotion. If your image is large, clear and relevant it should do just that.

I cannot stress this point enough. The right image can make or break a design. Despite how beautiful a website layout may be, a generic image can divert the user’s attention. This tip could arguably be more important than our advice about copy. Remember that users scan pages before really diving into the copy. Make them want to read your copy, don’t just add an image because you think you should, make it your showcase.

7. Make It Obvious

It’s all about the conversions. Creating an enticing call to action (CTA) takes into account every single one of the aforementioned tips.

Be as obvious as possible. If you want your user to sign up for something, say so! Tell the user exactly what you want them to do using action-oriented words like “click here” or “download it now.”

Make it big. Make it colorful.

Your call to action button shouldn’t look like a billboard on your homepage, but it should carry enough visual weight to immediately attract the user’s attention. Employ visual hierarchy here and make sure that your CTA button takes second place only to your headline.

Be exclusive.

Incentivize your call to action. Always make the CTA about the user, not about what you want from them. Even if you just want them to sign up for an email newsletter, make sure they are receiving a valuable incentive for the type of information they are providing you with.

These seven tips are fail-proof for every piece of content related to your inbound marketing. The tips discussed here can be utilized throughout print, web and ebook creation. Just remember, conversions are always the end goal and the more transparent you make a user’s choices, the easier it will be for them to do what you want them to.

This article was earlier published at business2community.

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9 SEO Tactics That Just Don’t Work Anymore, Written by Nicole Rende

It's 2015 and SEO hasn't gotten any easier for digital marketers. With Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates that have happened in the past few years, it's no surprise that the search engine optimization aspect of digital marketing is constantly changing.

This volatility requires digital marketers to be agile with their tactics, frequently adapting to the latest guidelines that search engines implement into their algorithms. Throughout this post, I will help you understand which tactics you should not be using, because, let's face it-- they just don't work anymore!

1) Get more links to rank higher

In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked. By doing this, your website was sure to rank higher. Building links is still a very important part of ranking factors. According to Search Metrics, it is still top 5 mostimportant rankings factors, but you must build links in a much different manor than you used to.

Around Penguin 2.0, which was released in May of 2013, all of this changed. Nowadays, it is important to focus on the quality of links you are obtaining, rather than the quantity. Sometimes less can be more if you know how exactly to build links the proper way.

2) Write keyword rich content for better ranking

It used to be important that you write your content with the keyword incorporated exact match, but now Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI), which was conceived around February of 2004 and became more and more prominent within search through every update.

With this type of indexing, the contents of a webpage are crawled by the search engine and the most common words or phrases are combined and identified as the keywords of that page. LSI also looks for synonyms that related to your target keywords.

Today, it's important to optimize your page for the user experience; this means that you do not have to place your keywords word-for-word in the content. Write the content for the user. By using synonyms and related terms, the search engines will still understand what your goal is.

3) Only focus on links and content

About 5 years ago, SEO used to be all about getting tons of links, good code, and okay content. These days, most of the websites that are ranking really well have a large social following. People argue whether it directly or indirectly affects rankings, but either way it does have an impact.

Think of it this way, the more popular your website is socially, the more eyeballs you will draw to it. The more people see it, the more backlinks and traffic you will receive. Additionally, social media is a great way to send out content and get the traction you are looking for.

4) Build more pages to get more traffic

Some people have the notion that if you have more pages, you will get more traffic to your website. Just like link building, creating content just to have more pages will not help you. Make sure you are focusing your content on quality, not quantity. If you do not have good content, you will not rank well and all of those pages you created will not help your cause.

Introduced February, 2011, Google’s Panda algorithm updates have been getting better and better at detecting bad content. Nowadays, if you have poor content it is possible you may face a Google penalty, so make sure you are created great content that users want to read.

5) Rank higher to get more traffic

There is a big misconception that higher rankings mean more search traffic. It is true that people will see your listing, but it does not mean you will get more click-throughs. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. You do not have the correct keyword strategy because you are trying to rank for keywords that are unrelated to your field.
2. Your meta descriptions are not appealing and inviting for the user.

To solve these problems, try using Google Adwords to create a great keyword strategy relating to your business, and be sure to use enticing meta descriptions to get people to the site. It is a good rule of thumb to think about what would entice you to click through.

6) Guest blog at a large scale to build SEO authority

Before Penguin 2.0, in 2013, people used to write content, whether bad or good, to anybody that would listen, with a link back to their site. A lot of the time, it was content that had nothing to do with their actual industry; they were just trying to get a backlink.

Guest blogging has changed immensely since then. Now it is important that if you do end up getting one or two guest posts here and there, that they are high authoritative, relevant websites. Guest posting on a smaller scale can be beneficial if you do it the correct, ethical way.

7) Fill the title tag with keywords to increase ranking

Keyword stuffing is the act of shoving as many keywords onto the page as possible. Google’s own, Matt Cutts, warned us in 2007 against stuffing your page with keywords to rank higher in the search results. Some webmasters did not take this to heart, until Google continuously came out with new algorithm updates, like Panda, every year that were meant to target bad content.

Keyword stuffing is 100% against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and is a dangerous game. Because of Google’s algorithm getting more advanced each year, you are likely to get your website penalized.

8) Don't waste time on including images in your content

For a long time, it was okay to neglect the images on your site and still rank without using alt text and image file names to boost your page relevance. On-page SEO is more important than ever, so excluding images will prevent your website's SEO from being the best it can be.

Search engines cannot see images on websites, so it is important to give the image an alt text and relevant file name to ensure Google knows what the image is about. By not creating this text, you lose a huge opportunity to be as visible as possible online.

9) Get listed in lots of directories to fill your backlinks profile

On April 24, 2012, Google released the first Penguin algorithm update, which targeted websites with unnatural links and has since gotten more sophisticated. It is important that webmasters and marketing ensure they are not just getting a ton of links from low-quality spammy directory website.

Instead focus on niche related directories that have strict standards and high authority that will benefit your personas by getting quality information about your company’s mission and website. It is pretty easy to decided which directories are natural and which are unnatural, and if you cannot decide do not risk it!

If you are using any of these worthless tactics, it is time for you to clean up your SEO and create a better strategy. Go out there are create great content and create high authoritative, relevant backlinks to your website.

This article was earlier published at Hubspot blog.

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Facebook only hired seven black people in latest diversity count

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ponders the meaning of diversity. Photograph: Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters

Facebook is still dominated by white men despite Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated promise to get serious about building a workforce that better reflects the diversity of its 1.4 billion global users.

In its diversity report released on Thursday the social network company revealed that more than half of its US staff are white, with the proportion dropping slightly from 57% to 55%. The proportion of Asian employees increased by 2% to 36%, but the shares of hispanic and black people or those of “two or more races” remained flat at 4%, 2% and 3% respectively.

Facebook’s senior leadership is even more homogenous, with 73% of the most important positions filled by white people.

The company did not provide a breakdown of the exact numbers of people of different ethnicities in different ranks at the firm. It is required to do so by US law, but a spokeswoman said there is a lag in filling the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) report.

The most recent EEO filing available shows Facebook hired an additional seven black people out of an overall headcount increase of 1,231 in 2013. At that time Facebook employed just 45 black staff out of a total US workforce of 4,263. Facebook’s black female headcount increased by just one person over 2013 to 11, and the number of black men increased by six to 34. There were no black people in any executive or senior management positions.

Over the same period the company’s white employee headcount increased by 695. There were 125 white people holding executive and senior management positions at the firm.

The spokeswoman was unable to say when it would file its 2014 EEO report.

Facebook also made little progress increasing the proportion of female employees, 68% of its global employees are male – a decrease of 1%. Among its employees working on its core technology 84% are male, down from 85% last year.

The slow progress on improving diversity comes despite Zuckerberg repeatedly promising to make the company’s employees better reflect the identities of its users. When Facebook released its first diversity report Maxine Williams, its global head of diversity, said: “At Facebook, diversity is essential to achieving our mission.

“We need a team that understands and reflects many different communities, backgrounds and cultures. Research also shows that diverse teams are better at solving complex problems and enjoy more dynamic workplaces. So at Facebook we’re serious about building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics.”

In the latest diversity report Williams admitted that “it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be”.

“There’s more work to do. We remain deeply committed to building a workplace that reflects a broad range of experience, thought, geography, age, background, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture and many other characteristics,” she said. It’s a big task, one that will take time to achieve, but our whole company continues to embrace this challenge.”

In May Zuckerberg said: “We have the same talent bar for everyone. But we want to find a disproportionate number of candidates who are women and minorities.”

He has also said that there is “just so much research that shows that diverse teams perform better at anything you’re trying to do”.

“It’s this problem because it’s not even clear where you would start attacking it. You need to start earlier in the funnel so that girls don’t self-select out of doing computer science education, but at the same time, one of the big reasons why today we have this issue is that there aren’t a lot of women in the field today.”

Source: The Guardian

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Why Local SEO Is About to Become Even More Important by JAYSON DEMERS

Local search engine optimization isn’t just about local mom-and-pop shops anymore. Practically any business can take advantage of local SEO’s benefits. Since Google’s fan-named “Pigeon” update in 2014, the importance of local SEO has grown, leading many entrepreneurs to focus on their strategy despite going years without considering a local tangent to their inbound marketing campaign. Others, who already practiced regular local optimization strategies, saw the update as an opportunity to increase their efforts even further.

These moves are savvy, because local SEO has risen in importance, but the ride isn’t over yet. Over the next few years, I anticipate that local SEO will become even more impactful and more useful for businesses. Here’s why.

Google loves local businesses.

Over the years, Google has shown slight favoritism toward newer, smaller, more agile companies. While most of its ranking biases have to do with a brand’s history and authority, Google also wants to give the people what they want -- and that often means showcasing nimbler, more popular brands.It also has to do with enabling small-business owners, who have limited access to resources, more potential in breaking new ground. Google has a long history of providing free tools -- such as Analytics, Webmaster Tools and so on -- to business owners for the sole purpose of helping them increase their online visibility. Because Google cares about (dare I say “loves”) local businesses, you can expect Pigeon to be only the beginning of its locally-focused updates.

There will be more individualized results.

Google also loves giving people individualized results. While its predictive and customized search features are relatively limited for the time being, already the search engine is able to generate specific results based on the person who is searching. As long as you’re logged into a Google account, your search history and your geographic location both play into the type of results you see.

As Google grows more sophisticated and users start demanding even more individualized results, the importance of local optimization will only grow.

The growth of mobile and wearable devices.

Each year, the percentage of online searches performed on mobile devices has grown definitively, and as you might imagine, the majority of mobile searches are performed while on the go. With the dawn of wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch, users will start using on-the-go searches even more frequently, with even more immediate needs.

As a result, proximity-based searches will likely start to become popular, and local searches will be based on hyper-specific locations, rather than just on a regional or neighborhood-specific basis. In effect, wearable devices will drive a much more geographically relevant network of information and eliminate even more barriers between the digital and physical worlds.

Competition is increasing.

Every year, millions of new sites are created and thousands of new businesses stabilize as formidable enterprises. In response, potential search visibility is actively dropping in many areas, with features such as the Knowledge Graph taking over search engine results pages and long-standing blue chip brands dominating the national search landscape.

Competition is increasing, so business owners will be forced to find smaller target niches in order to achieve relevant visibility. One of the most efficient ways to do this is to optimize locally, so local SEO will only grow in importance as competition continues to increase.

How to get started with a local SEO campaign.

If you’re intimidated by the notion of starting a local SEO campaign, don’t be. It’s actually a pretty straightforward process, though it will take you some time and effort.

Local citation correction. Your first job is to make sure your business is listed accurately and appropriately throughout the web. Claim your local business profile on local directory and review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, as well as any other directories that are relevant for your business.

Ensure that your most important business information -- especially your name, address and phone number -- are accurate and formatted consistently across all of these platforms. If Google notices even a small discrepancy between two different sources, your local authority could drop.

Local content and relationship building. Once all your local information is in place and verified for accuracy, you can start the process of optimizing your content and external links for local relevance. For articles, this is relatively easy -- just be sure to include the name of your city, region or neighborhood in your blog titles and make sure the content is relevant to your location.

Local events and local information articles are perfect opportunities for this. Be sure to guest post on local external blogs, and try to get published on local news outlets with your latest press releases.

Local reviews and ongoing management. Finally, try to encourage your customers to post reviews about your business on Yelp and other review sites. You can’t buy these reviews, nor can you solicit them from your customers in any way, but you can let your customers know that you’re on these sites and indirectly persuade them to leave their feedback. Do everything you can to increase the number of positive reviews you receive, and don’t forget to log in so you can check and respond to these reviews regularly.

There you have it. Unless you already have a dominant, nationally established presence on major search engines that newcomers can’t touch, or you don’t have a single physical location, local SEO is going to become a necessity if you want to achieve search engine visibility over the course of the next few years.

Take measures now to implement a consistent ongoing strategy, and stay committed to seeing it through. With the effects of your efforts compounding, you’ll start seeing results within weeks to months, and as further changes favor locally optimized businesses, you’ll only stand to benefit more.

Note: This article was earlier published at entrepreneur. The writer is Jayson Demers.

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7 Key SEO Activities That Can Now Be Automated by Aleyda Solis

Columnist Aleyda Solis shares some of her favorite tools for automating various aspects of search engine optimization.

Although it’s hard to keep up with the growing number of SEO tools that have been launched in the last few years (along with the new functionalities of the existing tools), it’s necessary to test them in order to identify how their features can support and help advance our SEO activities more efficiently.

This is especially true when it comes to tasks that are critical or highly beneficial to the SEO process but are complex and/or time-consuming to execute.

That’s why I want to share with you seven such SEO tasks that now can be partially or completely automated with the support of some tools.

1. Assessing Your Industry Traffic Potential

One of the first activities when launching a new website or SEO campaign is to assess traffic potential (ideally per channel) and identify the potential competitors in the market. Estimating this can be challenging, especially when starting to work in a new market that you don’t know anything about.

Nonetheless, SimilarWeb “Industry Analysis” reports can greatly help by allowing you to easily obtain the most important traffic data for any industry in many countries; it also shows the traffic per sources, most popular sites per channel, and trends.

However, remember to take these numbers as references, not absolutes; and whenever you can, validate with other data sources.

2. Identifying Keyword Opportunities For Your Sites

Finding new keywords opportunities is important when focusing your SEO process and establishing profitable yet still feasible goals.

In the past, doing this type of analysis was time-consuming, but now it can be completely automated with Sistrix‘s “Opportunities” feature. With this feature, you can include up to three competitors, and it will show which keywords you’re still not targeting for which these competitors are already ranking and the level of traffic opportunity and competition.

3. Identifying Related Relevant Terms To Use In Your Content By Doing A TF-IDF Analysis Of The Top Ranked Pages For Any Query

TF-IDF stands for “term frequency” and “inverse document frequency.” According to the OnPageWiki:

With the TF*IDF formula, you can identify in which proportion certain words within a text document or website are weighted compared to all potentially possible documents. Apart from the keyword density, this formula can be used for OnPage optimisation in order to increase a website’s relevance in search engines.

Although it’s known that TF-IDF has been used to index pages, there hasn’t been a popular tool offering it to identify relevant term variances of our topics that we should be using. This information can be used to improve our site relevance for other terms our audience uses.

OnPage.org includes a handy TF-IDF tool in their on-page analysis and monitoring platform, which can be used to identify more term variances or combinations that our competitors are already using, but we still aren’t (by analyzing both the top 15 page results and our own desired page to rank with). By focusing on terms related to our main keywords, we can increase our site content’s relevance for the desired topic.

4. Visualizing Your Site’s Internal Linking

I have written in the past about visualizing a site’s pages and links as a graph to facilitate the analysis of a website’s internal linking, which was doable but took a lot of effort. The process required exporting the URLs crawled, then processing them with visualization tools.

This has now been made easy by the “Visualizer” functionality of OnPage.org. It not only allows you to automatically generate the internal link graph of any site, but it provides functionalities to browse, filter the number, show the relationship of links, and show only the nodes (or pages) that follow certain pattern.

This can be extremely helpful to better understand how a site is internally linked, the cardinality of the links, if there are any “orphan pages” or areas of the sites that are not connected with the rest, etc.

5. Getting All Key Optimization, Link Popularity, Social & Organic Traffic Data For Your Top Site Pages In A Single Place

Gathering the data when doing an SEO audit can be time-consuming. This data includes a website’s technical optimization, content, link popularity, current organic search traffic, and search engine rankings, which we used to obtain from different, non-connected data sources that were a challenge to integrate later.

This data gathering can now be largely automated thanks to URLProfiler, which directly retrieves much of the required data while combining many other tools’ data. For example, in order to get all the key SEO metrics for the highest visibility pages of your site, you can download the “top pages” CSV from the “Search Console” Search Analytics report, import them to Screaming Frog SEO crawler in the “list mode,” and crawl them.

Once crawled, you can import them directly to URLProfiler with the “Import from Screaming Frog SEO Spider” option. Then, you should select the additional metrics you want to obtain for these pages: Mozscape link popularity and social shares metrics, Google Analytics organic search traffic data (you’ll be able to select the segment you want), and Google PageSpeed and Mobile validation (these will require that you get and add a free API key from Moz and Google).

Now, you can run URLProfiler and get the results in a few minutes in one spreadsheet: All the data from Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, MozScape link and social shares, Google PageSpeed and mobile validation for your top pages with the highest visibility in Google’s Search Console. It will look like this (and I can’t imagine the time I would have needed to put this all together manually):

There’s no excuse to not develop a quick SEO audit for your most important pages, taking all the key metrics into consideration.

6. Getting Relevant Link Prospects With The Desired Requirements And Direct Contact Information

Obtaining a list of sites that are highly relevant to your business might be not that difficult — doing so when looking only for highly authoritative sites, from a specific country, with visible contact information (among other criteria) is a bit more complex.

All this can be easily done now with the LinkRisk Peek tool, which provides many advanced filters to only get the sites that will be relevant and feasible to use for outreach.

7. Tracking Daily Rankings Of Full SERPs For Your Relevant Keywords

There was a time when we tracked the rankings for our most important keywords, for both our own sites and our top competitors. Due to ongoing ranking fluctuations, sometimes we have new competitors that we were not tracking, and it is hard then to identify the correlations of gains and losses vs. them.

Additionally, once we got the ranking information, we had to analyze the pages to identify the potential reasons for the ranking shifts. We did this using tools to obtain the domain/page link popularity, among other factors.

This is now easier to do with tools like SERPWoo. Rather than tracking specified URLs (yours and your competitors’), SERPWoo tracks the top 20 results for your keywords by default. It also includes useful metrics such as page and domain link popularity, social shares, etc., to help marketers more easily analyze the potential causes of a rankings fluctuation.

I hope that these functionalities help you as much as they have helped me! Which other SEO activities are you now automating that used to take you a lot of time? Please, feel free to share in the comments!

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Wikisol.