You have finally gotten around to making a website, now the trickier part is to get it out there and get people to notice it. Fortunately, there are many tools and software you can use to ensure that your website won’t be neglected and forgotten. One of the materials you can use is an SEO software. These are tools created so that your search engine optimization efforts are easier and more efficiently handled.
Unfortunately, there are so many available software out in the market. You have so many to choose from and if you do not know what you are looking for you might be fooled into getting the most expensive one without the features and functions that you really need. Here is something to give you an idea about the top features that you should look for when choosing your SEO software. To further help you with your search of the most suitable search engine optimization software, here are questions that you should ask your service provider before getting their product.
Can the Software Track Your On and Off Site Content?
One of the differences between a mediocre software and the top SEO tools is the ability of the latter to track your website’s on and offsite content. Onsite SEO is any optimization effort that you do within your site to ensure that it will appear in the search engine results page. This would include your domain name, your meta description, your internal links, your contents, the bounce rate of your site and your loading speed.
On the other hand, offsite SEO are the efforts you do that is done outside of your website. This includes link building, social media and reputation management. There is much less that goes into offsite SEO but this is just as important as your onsite SEO. That is why you should ask your service provider if there are able to track your offsite SEO efforts and contents.
Is There Customized Reporting Available?
Search engine optimization is not a one man effort. It requires a team of people with various expertise. This is especially true for manual SEO, where a horde of people is needed to accomplish the whole SEO process. When you use an SEO tool, you would require less people but you will still need product managers, content writers and your in-house team.
Because there are people involved in the creation of your search engine marketing, you need a reliable and customizable reporting available in the software. This includes the dashboard that is easy to use and will let the people in your team see the progress of the SEO campaign. This will make it easy for the people to see immediately what needs to be done. The SEO platform will also make it possible for the team to prioritize the tasks. What needs to be now versus what can be done in a later period of time.
Does the Vendor Seek Input From Clients?
One of the questions that you should ask your service provider are if they are seeking inputs from client. That would soon be you, if you decide to take their product. This might seem like an insignificant question but it is important that vendors also ask for the opinions of their client. This will help with new innovations and things that they can improve in their product. Here are some fundamental practices and future trends that should be followed by SEO firms. If your vendor seeks input from the clients, it means they are open to improvements and changes and shows good faith in their clients. On the one hand, if they don’t like inputs from anyone then they are likely to stagnant and be left behind by other SEO management software who are not afraid of improvements.
Vendors and buyers alike, can check reviews of SEO tools to know what others are saying about their product. There are times that the review writer will leave a suggestion and a recommendation about what could be done to make the product even better.
What Will Happen After You Have Bought the Software?
When we buy things, the seller’s job is done after we have paid for our purchase and gotten our receipt. This shouldn’t be when you buy the best SEO software. The vendor’s job doesn’t end with the exchange of money, it would be just starting actually. It is the seller’s job to build up the competency of the internal team to do keyword search, social media engagement and content writing. Many service provider might not agree with this, but if you want to get ahead with the competition, you should offer these services to your client. You can charge extra for training or you could give it at a discount. But the thing is, it is the SEO tool vendor that knows how their software and the SEO process works. They are the best people to give education and training on the best practices for an effective SEO campaign.
Can the Software Audit the Website?
Simply put, site audit is when you check your site to know how well it is performing. You can learn more about site audit here. There are many site audit tools, both free and paid, that are available in the app market. But it would be better if the top SEO tools that you will get has an integrated site audit tool to its system. This will make auditing quicker and more proficient. The reports that the tool sends can also cite the audit results. This is why one important question to ask the service provider is if the software an audit the website. Adding this feature to the software may incur additional fees to the monthly subscription fee, but if the tool is great then it will be worth it.
Can the Content Be Reviewed After it has Been Published?
The gist of search engine optimization is its written content. Although, there are many aspects that are to be considered, the content is what is mostly optimized. Which makes reviewing the content after it is published important. Reviewing the content is so that you could look for optimization insights. You could look for ways to make the content better next time. You could also see if your keywords are working with content review. Keywords are a vital ingredient to SEO and reviewing them is just as important. Keyword insights should be available in your software. Before you pick a software, read SEO software reviews to know if your desired features and functions are available.
How is Visibility and Competition Scored?
Here are some ways you can maximize your visibility with an SEO provider. But how is visibility scored by your software? This is another question that you should ask your vendor. It might seem too technical but knowing how the scoring is done will help you with your SEO campaign. Another thing you need to know is if competitive intelligence and analysis is available. Competitive intelligence is the process of gathering data about your competition, their products, marketing techniques and customers to help you make strategic decisions for your own products.
SEO platforms should offer competition intelligence to know which keywords are being used by the competition and how effective they are. You could also know how you compare to your competitor with this feature.
Will Third Party Data Be Easily Assimilated?
Business intelligence is the term used for tools or applications that analyzes raw data. This includes mining of data, processing of information and reporting. Ask if your software offers extendibility to business intelligence tools because this will ensure that data from third party tools are easily integrated to your system.
You would probably need to use other tools to help with your SEO campaign, and it is important that all your tools can put their data into a centralized location. The SEO software is a good place to store all data, but that won’t be possible if easy assimilation is not available.
What Other Metrics are Provided?
Keyword insight is one of the most common metric that SEO tools measure. But this is not the only metric that matters and should not be the only thing tracked by your software. Ask your service provider what other metrics they offer and track. Some of the most important metrics that they should answer are backlinks health, traffic from organic search, time on page, bounce rate, pages visited by each visitor, returning visitors, load speed and quality of SEO traffic. There are more but those mentioned above are what you should look for.
Is International Data Accurately Tracked?
Search engine optimization can work for both local and international businesses. But you should ask your vendor if their international data are accurately tracked. This might be trickier and more complex since it is a bigger market but there are software that can keep up. Check out reviews of SEO tools to know which tools are offering accurate tracking of international data.
After looking at the questions above, you might have come up with your own. You should ask those too from your vendor. It is better to get answers to your most important queries to ensure that you will get a quality product from them and that you will be satisfied with your SEO experience.
Have you accurately assessed your SEO software service provider? Reviews and rankings from CrowdReviews.com will help you evaluate your prospects more.
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