POSTED January 25, 2021
About our guest
Kyle Freeman is the Head of SEO at Assurance.
He spoke with Tim Yeadon, Principal & Creative Director of Clyde Golden.
In This Episode
The three essential SEO tools every digital marketer needs in 2021:
Keyword Research Tools
are designed to help SEO Managers find the keywords to target and create content around.
Rank Tracking Tools
allow you to track your website’s ranking for your target keywords by showing you where your page ranking is in Google’s top 100 results.
A Website Crawler
is a program that systematically searches through content within a website. They can catch technical issues on your website that may be negatively impacting a search engine’s ability to crawl and index your website.
Suggestions
Podcast Transcript
Tim 0:12
Hi everybody, this is Tim, I'm here with Kyle Freeman. He's the head of SEO at Assurance. We're gonna try something new today here on Input Doc. It's basically a short attention span episode. You know, I was thinking, what if we just took 10 minutes and focused on a skill or a method?
Today, we're going to focus on "The Three SEO Tools Every Digital Marketer Needs". Kyle, you think we can do this in 10 minutes?
Kyle 0:33
Yeah, I absolutely think so. There is a lot of great info for people to take away from this. SEO can sometimes be a lot of information. So we'll serve it up in some bite-sized pieces.
Tim 0:42
Wonderful. So real quick, before we get into them. What are the three tools we're going to review?
Kyle 0:48
The three essential tools for performing any sort of SEO is keyword research tools, rank tracking, and a website crawler.
Tim 0:59
So why don't we go ahead. What's the first tool? Keyword research tools.
Kyle 1:02
Yeah, keyword research tools. These are designed to help SEOs find the keywords that they want to target and create content around. You're not going to be performing well, or driving any sort of valuable, organic traffic if you aren't performing keyword research first. These keyword research tools will show you what people are searching for through search engines, you can then optimize your landing pages or blog content or give you new content topic ideas around what people are searching for, find related keywords, and so much more. Then you can go ahead and optimize for those keywords.
You can also see how competitive they are. So if you're a new, up and coming company, as Assurance is, it can be really hard to take on a lot of those more competitive keywords. So then you can find something that's a little bit more realistic for you to achieve. And you can get a lot of information from these keyword research tools. They all vary in the kind of details that they provide. But there's a lot of great stuff in there to really help set you up for success.
Tim 2:08
If you're a small to medium sized business, are there a couple we should take a look at first?
Kyle 2:13
Yes, absolutely. When you are doing research to find a keyword research tool, you'll hear a lot about options like using the Google Keyword Planner or Uber Suggests these are either free or highly affordable tools. But I recommend investing in something really good. You can't underestimate the value that keyword research tools can provide. I do use different ones at different times, and you'll get different numbers in return. I have found some to be on the more cheaper end, not as accurate. As opposed to the ones such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. Those are the three that I highly recommend you look into. Start there and see how that fits your budget. But oftentimes these tools also will cover some of the other features that we'll be talking about.
Tim 3:05
Let's take a look at the second tool.
Kyle 3:06
Yeah, keyword rank tracking tools. So rank trackers allow you to track your website's ranking for your target keywords by showing you where your page ranks in Google's top 100 results for your target keyword. So you found the keywords that you want to optimize for, you added them to your pages, your landing pages, created content around them. Now you want to track those keywords to see how you are performing for them.
You don't just get to throw keywords onto a page and hope for the best. You really want to keep an eye on how you're performing for those keywords, where you're moving, are you breaking that threshold onto the first page, the top 10 results? Or are you falling down, falling off of the first page? You want to be able to track these so that you can find opportunities, and also catch problems such as declining ranking and keywords. And catch those early so that you can kind of maintain those or improve upon those and kind of keep your rankings and your organic traffic coming in.
And the tools that I mentioned earlier, Semrush Ahrefs and Moz, all also have keyword tracking built in. These tools can often be the more expensive ones, because they can only offer so many free keywords for you to track and then at some point you're paying per keyword. Oftentimes I'm seeing around five cents a keyword. And then you also have to take into consideration that you want to track desktop and the mobile version because those rankings are different. So it can get a little bit frustrating.
But keep in mind you don't need to track every keyword that you're going for you will have many pages that rank for 100 different keywords, you don't need to track all those track your target keywords that you really want to take care of, that you do not want to lose. And leave the rest of those keywords that are good to keep an eye on to Google Search Console, which is a free tool to everyone with a website. You can then kind of keep track of your rankings in there. But I do not recommend using Google Search Console for tracking your target keywords due to quality, accuracy, and just a few other things. It's just going to take you a lot longer to kind of keep a close eye on those keywords that are important to you through Google Search Console.
Tim 5:20
On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? How often are you checking?
Kyle 5:25
Yeah, really good question. And it really depends on your industry, and how often keywords can be changing. So some keywords, very few will you track daily. And if you do get an option with your keyword tracker to set your preferences to daily, you'll probably be paying more money for that daily check. I just recommend simply weekly, I like to come in Monday morning and take a look at how everything is going, how did everything go to the weekend. Check up on where we're currently sitting so that we can then make adjustments throughout the week if needed. And also sometimes maybe towards the end of the week too, to kind of see how things are going.
Monthly is not going to show you often enough where you are going. Things can change so much in the timespan of one month. So you went into the month, you were ranking in the top five, you come out of the month, you're all the way down at position 30 where no one's going to find you. So keep a close eye on that stuff. Weekly is highly recommended.
Tim 6:26
Tell me about the third tool, website crawlers.
Kyle 6:29
Yeah, website crawlers are really focused around technical SEO, and technical SEO is really around the crawlability and indexability and rendering of your website from search engines. If they can't do those three things, you will not rank, you will not get indexed, and you will have a hard time performing. It's something that people often overlook.
When I was working at a digital marketing agency, I would often have potential new clients come to us and be like, we aren't ranking anymore, we made some new changes to our website and now our rankings are all gone, or our organic traffic is gone. That's because one of those three problems probably happened to them. And search engines weren't able to get through a lot of their new features, or they left something on their website that was blocking crawlers while they were building this new site. There's so many different possibilities. But these website crawlers often overwhelm people. They intimidate them because it's technical. It's talking about JavaScript, it's talking about coding of the page, and all these other details. It's kind of a lot to take in. And again, can kind of scare people away from even wanting to do it at all.
Tim 7:41
I think we did pretty good. What do you think?
Kyle 7:44
Yeah, I think that's great. A lot of good information. Really good just kind of, step forward point there to kind of get some people focused on these essential things that I feel often get overlooked for digital marketers, and part-time SEO's in a way.
Tim 8:00
Well, thank you so much for coming on today.
You can find the transcript and links to all the tools Kyle mentioned. They'll be on the website. If you go to clydegolden.com, you'll find up in the top nav Input Doc podcast and you can find everything there.
Anywhere they should look for you, Kyle?
Kyle 8:15
Yeah, I'm on Twitter, chatting about SEO all the time. My handle is KyleJFreeman. If you want to chat about SEO, have any questions, feel free to message me or just follow me on there. I'm sharing a lot of good articles and SEO meetups here in Seattle.
Tim 8:29
Cool. Well, thanks again. Have a great day, Kyle.
Kyle 8:31
Perfect. Thanks a lot, Tim.
Tim 8:33
Thank you.