If you don’t invest in a link building tool like the ones mentioned above, you’ll still want to have a standalone rank checking tool so you can monitor your blog’s progress in search. This is essential if you want to make sure that your marketing efforts are leading to results. The following tools start at $49 per month with accounts for bloggers and small businesses.
Keyword Research
The foundation of any search marketing campaign is finding the right keywords. And for bloggers, this is especially important since keyword research can be the basis of a lot of great blog topics. Here are some tools you can use to start your keyword research with.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
The first tool of choice when it comes to keyword research is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Simply enter the main keyword phrase for your blog, and this tool will give you phrases related to that keyword along with their search volume. If you have a Google AdWords account, you can get up to 800 ideas – regardless of whether you have actually placed a Google AdWords ad in search.
On-Site Optimization
Once you have chosen your keywords for your main blog and your first blog topics, you will want to then optimize your blog for those keywords. The following tools will help you see how competitors optimize for search and allow you to add proper meta tags (i.e. content that Google reads to help index your blog) to your blog.
SEO Site Tools
SEO Site Tools is a Chrome extension that allows you to quickly see any website’s main SEO tags (elements that are essential if you want to rank well in Google) including the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, and image ALT tags.
Link Building
1. Links that competitors gain with their content. This will show you their best link worthy content pieces.
2. Links that competitors gain through guest blogging. This can direct you to guest blogging opportunities you can acquire as well.
3. Links that competitors gain through social bookmarking on sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Redd it.
4. Links that you can acquire without content such as directories, social profiles, forum profiles, etc.
CognitiveSEO
CognitiveSEO has a lot of great features starting at $19 per month. The best is the ability to view the link profile of your blog and your top four competitors using the Visual Link Explorer.
1. Do they have a lot of links from authority websites? Top links are represented by the largest dots furthest from the center of the main link clusters.
2. Are they getting links from social networks, press releases, forums, directories, and other blogs?
3. What types of sites are they getting links from? Business, fashion, health, recreation, etc. Are they acquiring mostly text links or image links (usually associated with banner ads)?
You can also see this information in chart format and click on the bars to see links that fall into specific groupings.
WebMeUp
WebMeUp offers simple organization of your links and your competitors’ starting at $99.95 per month. For example, you can quickly see backlinks organized by domain, Google’s authority metric PageRank, and by Alexa Rank (traffic).
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