Even simpler things like keyword research now need advanced tools that can dig deeper and help identify the long-tail keywords that can actually work. Head terms thrown out by most free tools are not really of much use anymore.

Link building is another area where SEO tools have always been prominent. There are loads of them, free and paid but the paid tools are miles ahead in terms of how they can help analyze your current backlinks, explore new link opportunities, identify toxic links, and several other functionalities.

Overall, a powerful paid SEO tool can make your life a lot easier if you are seriously into SEO.

A Trend in SEO Tools

Another recent trend that I have observed across various SEO tools is the way they are expanding their capability to become more of a suite of tools, rather than a specialized focus on a certain area. SEMRush is probably the biggest example of this, where a simple SEO tool has now expanded to be a one-point solution for all digital marketing needs. AHREF which was also initially launched as a tool specializing in backlink analysis and opportunity has now expanded with other tools like site analysis, content explorer etc. This is an encouraging trend as it takes away the need for investing in multiple tools and also gives an opportunity to have an integrated view of the site across various aspects.

Let’s look at some of the top SEO tools in 2022

SEMRush

SEMRush is much more than an SEO tool. It is a one-in-all suite of tools that caters not just to your SEO needs but across all aspects of your digital marketing needs.

As an SEO tool, SEMRush offers a comprehensive SEO Audit tool, keyword ranking tracker, backlink tracker. It also has a content analyzer tool that can analyze your content for SEO. The Keyword magic tool in SEMRush is particularly useful in identifying otherwise invisible keywords. The content recommendation tool helps identify new topics for creating content, the tool also helps uncover questions around your seed keywords, which could be very useful for content creation.

Besides the SEO tools, SEMRush also offers social media monitoring and posting tool within the same suite.

Also, SEMRush uncovers competitive intelligence about SEO as well as paid search. You can literally dig into competitors’ ad keywords, ad copies, landing pages. Comparing competitor data across various aspects of digital marketing helps you identify new opportunities and help you step up your game.

SEMRush gives you access to the world’s largest database of 20 billion keywords, 310 million ads and 17 billion URLs crawled per day.

SEMRush offers a completely free trial for 7 days, the packages start at $119/month.

Recommend Reading: Comparative review of SEMRush, SpyFu, KeyworSpy and Ispionage
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AHREFS

Ahrefs is another highly popular SEO toolset that provides comprehensive SEO intelligence. While the tool initially gained popularity for its prowess with backlink analysis, Ahrefs today offers extensive SEO analysis with granular data.

Ahrefs backlink index gets updated every 15 minutes and the crawler processes over 8 billion pages a day, which speaks volumes about the tech behind the tool.

Ahref also includes a Content Explorer that shows the most shared content on a particular topic, there is also a Keyword Explorer that helps identify new keywords with traffic volume.

The tool also provides some bit of competitive intelligence about competitor backlinks etc. however SEMRush does a far better job at that aspect.

Ahref package starts at $99, you can also pay $7 for a 7-day trial.

Majestic SEO

An out-and-out SEO tool specializing in link data, probably the most powerful one. Majestic takes pride in having the greatest link index database.

You can run a thorough audit of your backlinks including the usual indicators like anchor text, referring domains, IP, etc.

Where Majestic differentiates itself against other SEO tools that provide link data is in the Link Graph and Link Profile that it provides. Link Graph shows the network around your best links, and Link Profile maps the Trust Flow and Citation flow of direct links. It also provides a backlink history that shows the number of links discovered every day. Majestic also provides a very useful Topical trust flow that categorizes your links into topics and gives an indication of the trust flow to your domain for each topic.

Majestic SEO packages start at GBP 40.

Moz Pro

Another excellent and classical SEO tool – rather a toolset. If you are looking for a complete SEO tool, Moz Pro will fit the bill.

Moz Pro offers a solid keyword research tool that helps you uncover various keywords and keyword combinations that you can target. They have a detailed site audit tool built-in. Also, there are several other very useful SEO features like rank tracking and on-page optimization tools.

Moz Pro, like any other good SEO tool, also provides a backlink analysis tool that provides useful metrics about your existing backlinks, anchor text, etc.

MozPro packages start at $99/month

While the four tools mentioned above are clearly the most powerful ones there is no dearth of good quality SEO tools today and every SEO have their own favorite. As I work across SEO, Paid Search, and various other aspects of digital marketing, I find SEMRush to be the best value for money.

The post Top 4 SEO Tools You Should Consider in 2022 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I did a post on SEO jokes long back and the post still continues to get a lot of traffic. Most of them are classic timeless SEO jokes, but while reading them today, I felt I should do a new version with some updated, modern SEO Jokes. Jokes are best when they are relevant and new; when people can relate to them easily, hence this collection of modern funny SEO jokes.

To be honest it is very difficult to track back the actual source of the SEO jokes as many of them has been published across multiple websites. I have collected these funny SEO jokes from across multiple websites, but to add a drop to the ocean, I have also added one of my original SEO joke that you will not find anywhere else – till someone else copies it :p

I have also included some PPC jokes in this and collating some jokes on general marketing jokes but that’s for another post. For now, enjoy these SEO jokes.

The original SEO joke

How does an SEO get a divorce? They Disavow

New & Funny SEO Jokes

The local church emailed earlier… They wanted us to see if we can improve their Conversion Rates.

The England international football team got in touch. They need more goals set up… And don’t want penalties.

What did the victim say to the SEO stalker? Nofollow!

How does @Google decide who to hit hardest with Penguin updates? – Flipper Coin!

What do the Penguins @Google use to catch their fish? – Link Bait!

What do you get if you cross a Penguin and a Panda? A Ranking Problem!!

Why have all Penguins been left out of the Antarctic world cup team? Because they cause too many penalties!

Knock Knock SEO Jokes

Knock knock. Who’s there? No one because all of your rankings have gone!

Other Funny SEO Jokes

An SEO couple had twins – for the first time they were happy with duplicate content

Why do SEOs love the farmer’s market? .Lots of organic content.

Why did the SEO cross the road in a blindfold? – To get hit with traffic

What’s common between an SEO and Chiropractor? They both fix bad backlinks

What do you call an SEO Expert who sells vans? – Danny SellAVan

The hotel put me on room number 404. I searched and searched but could never find it.

Coffee.com was struggling with its SEO, we found they had a problem with the Caffeine update.

Received an urgent call from an online business – they wanted guaranteed search engine ranking for their new website in a month’s time. I said not a problem; in fact, I will also throw in a Unicorn for free.

What’s the difference between SEO and a Thesaurus?

Nothing, none, nada, squat, zip, zilch, diddly, zippo…

Your son tells you he wants to go play in the sandbox, you tell him it doesn’t exist.
And if he does play in it you’re afraid you won’t see him for the next 12 months

What is a black hat SEOs favourite food: SPAM

A SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, public house, tavern, Irish pub, pub, watering hole to drink alcohol, wine, beer, whisky, liquor…

You know you are desperate for an answer when – you look at the second page of Google

You are only as strong as your weakest link

Funny SEO Pick Up Lines

Hey girl, watch out for penguin, you are over-optimized for “Gorgeous”

Hey girl, you make my heart flutter like a hummingbird

Hey girl, I would like to be the authority in your niche

PPC Jokes / Paid Search Jokes

How do you get people to notice you online? You have to really make an impression.

What do religion and paid search advertisers have in common? They really want people to convert.

What do you call a landing page in a tropical island? A destination URL

What’s a pirates favourite PPC Metric? CTRrrrrrrrr

The local Chiropractor are using a few PPC ideas in their pricing structure. Cost per Click is one idea…

If you have other funny SEO jokes to share, leave them in the comments and don’t forget to check out the 30 SEO Jokes I posted earlier.

The post 33 Funny SEO Jokes – New and Original SEO Jokes in 2019 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I actually wrote a summarized version of this on Quora but then thought of doing a more detailed comparison of Spyfu vs SEMRush for SEO in this blog. Spyfu or SEMRush – it is a common question for many search marketing professionals, both are great tools, and choosing the right option isn’t easy. In this blog post, we are however considering the tool only from an SEO perspective and that makes the scope considerably easier. SEMRush is clearly the best when it comes to SEO, and I will explain why.

Spyfu offers some SEO features similar to SEMRush that are mostly linked to competitive intelligence. You would be able to –

• Keep track of your competitor’s SEO rankings
• Track your SEO Rankings
• Keep track of competitor’s SEO keywords
• Group keywords into groups for better planning your SEO campaign
• Check competitor’s SEO backlinks

However, the fact is SEMRush does all of these and a lot more that can really take your SEO to the next level.

Spyfu vs SEMRush for SEO Keyword Research & Intelligence

With SEMRush, one of the key proposition is the depth of keyword research that the tool offers. There are loads of keyword research tools in the market but SEMRush is really good at it. With SEMRush, you can

• Find your competitor’s keywords and their SEO rankings (similar to Spyfu)
• You can initiate a keyword research from a seed keyword
• Keyword magic tool: This is really cool. This not only shows you a list of keywords but the keywords are already grouped by seed words ( similar to Spyfu’s keyword grouping). Besides, there are a bunch of filters available for you to easily identify the right keywords you want to target from the long list it produces on your seed word. You can filter by word count, match type, keyword difficulty, SERP features and more. Also, another feature in the keyword magic tool is the “Questions” – where the tool identifies specific Questions that are being searched in Google for your keywords. And of course, you can export all these data to excel for further analysis and making decisions.
• Keyword Difficulty Tool: This helps you identify the relative difficulty of the keywords as well as provides details on the keyword trend as well as the SERP features available on that keyword.

Other articles on Spyfu vs SEMRush for Keyword Research

What Keywords are my competitors using

SEMRush Review Best Keyword Research Tool

Spyfu vs SEMRush for SEO Backlink Research

Besides keyword research, another important aspect of SEO are backlinks and SEMRush does an awesome job at Backlink research as well.

Backlink Analytics & Audit Tool: Just by entering the domain you can have a very detailed link audit and analytics report, which not only shows the number of links but also detailed analytics by domains, IPs, TLDs, backlink type (image, text, etc) follow-nofollow, by country, anchor text, etc

And remember this tool is not just for your domain but you can and should use it on your competitor domains to get all the relevant intelligence.

Link Building Tool: This is a complete tool that would help you identify the right link targets for your website. Once the targets are identified and selected the tool also helps to get detailed information about the website you’re viewing and the people affiliated with it. You can see contact information, social web information, links to your website, and initiate contact right from there.

Toxic Score: SEMRush has something called toxic score which basically identifies which of the links are toxic, harmful to your website. The higher the score the more toxic is the link. Once you have run a backlink audit on your site you can see the toxic links easily and there is a very easy workflow to add this toxic link to a disavow file and then submit to Google.

SEMRush for SEO Content Optimization

Besides keyword research and backlinks, the other key piece in any SEO strategy is content and content is even more crucial today as it becomes increasingly difficult to build links. SEMRush provides a lot of help in this whereas Spyfu does not provide any support on content.

SEO Content Template: The way this works is that you enter your keyword and the geography you want to target, you can also specify if you want to customize the content for specific device (e.g, desktop or mobile) and the tool analyses the top 10 content ranking for that keyword and gives recommendation on how your content should be. The recommendation they provide is pretty detailed including semantically related words, backlinks, readability, text length, use of heading tags as well as a detailed list of all the links so you can review the content manually if you would like.

SEO Writing Assistant: Not sure if they have launched this tool commercially yet but this is available on Product Hunt. I do a lot of my writing on Google doc and I love the fact that this is available as a plugin to Google doc.

The plugin connects to the SEO content template that you have created inside SEMRush and then as you write the content, it evaluates and provides recommendation based on the template. You will find a lot of helpful info using this SEO writing assistant plugin including Ease of reading, displayed as a readability score, word count, other recommended keywords that you should cover besides your core keyword and also an overall score on how your content stands against benchmarking. This definitely helps a lot with optimizing SEO content.

If you have already written a piece of content, you can still create an SEO Content Template in SEMRush and then use this SEO Writing assistant to evaluate and optimize it.

Topic Research Tool: One of the common problems faced by content marketers is to keep producing interesting content that is relevant to your business as well as interesting to your audience. SEMRush’s topic research tool is another great tool – you enter your target keyword and the tool will generate a wide range of content ideas around your keyword. The content ideas are basically content that has been published on the web about your keywords as well as a diversified range of topics on recommended keywords that can greatly improve your organic traffic. The tool provides Top ten headlines that have the most links on the topic as well as top 10 questions on the topic. And it also has a mindmap for topics that can be ideal to come up with new content ideas.

Other SEO Tools in SEMRush

Besides the above-mentioned tools, SEMRush has a bunch of other SEO tools that are equally helpful.

SEMRush On Page SEO Checker: This is a little more extensive than the typical on-page SEO tools. You will need to add the page you want to analyse, enter the keywords and go through a few other setup steps for the project. Once the project is set up and ready you will get a very detailed report comprising of technical SEO ideas, SERP feature ideas, Semantic Ideas, content ideas and a bunch of other info. You can also get some UX improvement ideas if you have connected your Google Analytics with SEMRush. It also provides an estimation of how much your traffic can improve if you implement all the recommended features.

Position Tracking: You can enter the keywords that you would like to track for your domain and the SEMRush will keep the rank tracking for your domain. What I like about SEMRush’s rank tracking capabilities is that you can view your current rankings as well as previous ranking and the change in ranking. It also tells you the SERP feature available for the keyword and which URL in your website is ranking for that keyword.

SEMRush Sensor: This is a unique feature in SEMRush. This indicates the volatility in SERP and you can narrow this down by verticals, filter by geography or device. This could be useful to keep a track of which sites suffered/ gained the most during a Google Update as well as you can refer back to the volatility score if you see a sudden drop or surge in search engine traffic for your website.

Spyfu vs SEMRush Competitive Intelligence – SEO Competitive Analysis

SEMRush is obviously known for the competitive intelligence it provides and that is where the main competition is with Spyfu – whether SEMRush or Spyfu provides better SEO competitive intelligence. As explained above, in general, SEMRush is way more powerful for SEO compared to Spyfu. In terms of competitive intelligence both Spyfu and SEMRush provides some competitive intelligence and analysis of competitor’s keywords and backlinks though I found SEMRush to be relatively better.

Spyfu allows comparison of three domains whereas SEMRush allows comparison of up to 5 domains.

Keyword Gap: The keyword gap tool allows you to compare up to 5 domains based on their keywords ( organic keywords, paid keywords and even PLA keywords) and you can look at the data as either unique keywords for any of the domains or common keywords amongst the domains or even a full list of all keywords across your domains based on your needs. For each of the keywords, you will also get to see the domains rankings as well as a bunch of other related data for the keywords.

Backlink Gap: This allows you to compare backlinks up to 5 websites. The tool lists all the links across all the competing sites along with the Authority Score of the respective links. It also shows which link is for which website and also if a link is present across multiple websites.

SEMRush is a great tool for SEO and provides a host of other competitive intelligence and though this discussion is specifically about SEO, I must mention that SEMRush is a complete tool that can support you across paid search, social media and your complete digital marketing needs. Spyfu is a good tool but if you are asking me to make a choice between Spyfu vs SEMRush, I would any day pick SEMRush as a much better and complete SEO tool.

Also read: Comparison of Spyfu vs SEMRush vs KeywordSpy vs Ispionage

The post Spyfu vs SEMRush : Which is the Better Tool for SEO appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

SEOs have always tried to keep track of Google algorithm updates, one of the most common questions discussed in every SEO forum and blog is when did google change its search algorithm.

In the good old days Google algorithm updates would have once in a while and we would all sit with our eyes glued to the computers watching the Google Dance. For those of you not familiar with Google Dance – this was the process where all of Google’s data centers synced up to show uniform results.

However, things changed very quickly, algorithm changes became much more frequent, and eventually, we have come to today when there is a continuous change in algorithms. But the question still stands, how to track Google algorithm updates? How do I know when Google’s algorithm is changing?

It has obviously become much more difficult and while some of the major Google algorithm updates could be pointed at specific days and period, with the continuous algorithm updates and small changes the algorithm is pretty much in a state of flux. I thought I will list down a few awesome SEO resources and tools that can actually keep track of the Google algorithm updates .

History of Google Algorithm Updates

Google Algorithm Change History: This page by Moz is a great resource if you want to keep a track of all historical Google algorithm updates and they keep this updated regularly to include all the latest algorithm changes. It is nicely segmented by years and also gives a brief overview on what really changed in that specific update. It is updated till Fred, which was the last major Google algorithm update that happened in Mar 2017 ( unconfirmed by Google though).

Google Algorithm Updates History: This is done by TheHoth and is pretty similar to the content the Moz provides, though I feel Moz’s summary of the algorithm updates are much more detailed and useful. The page also provides links to few other pages that provides a lot more detailing on the major updates like Panda, Penguin etc

Infographic on Google Algorithm History – Done by RankWatch, this is a much more interactive nice depiction of Google algorithm updates history.

SERP Fluctuation & Volatility Analysis Tools

With the continuous changes in Google algorithm there is no way to keep a track of it other than looking at the changes in search engine rankings. Hence tracking of SERP fluctuation and volatility is one of the best indicator of how the Google algorithm is behaving. There are few very effective tools that are tracking and providing insights on this.

SEMRush Sensor Tool : SEMRush is one of my most favorite tools and I use them for both SEO and Paid Search ( Read the full SEMRush review covering all the features ). The tool has been tracking millions of keywords and domains and providing competitive intelligence to the search marketers, so it was just a natural extension, when they leveraged the continuous data flow to create the SENSOR tool. It provides an indicative score out of 10 to show the level of volatility in the search results. This can be customized based on country and also by desktop/mobile.

MozCast : MozCast is another most well known tool that keeps a track of the SERP volatility. They have set it up more like a weather report and literally describes the tool as “MozCast is a weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithm”. The best part is that they actually have a page explaining how exactly they calculate the score and the details of the methodology, however, I feel the data sample ( they handpick 1000 keywords) is relatively small.

While Google algorithm updates are an essential part of an SEO’s life, has always been and will always be there. With Google focussing heavily on machine learning for everything, Google algorithm will be continuously changing and updating itself as it keeps learning from more and more data and user behavior and we might not be far away from a time while we do not get any more major “announced” Google algorithm updates anymore and solely rely on SERP volatility to get a hint on the changes in Google algorithm.

The post How to Track Google Algorithm Updates appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I have been using SEMRush for years now and the tool has never failed to impress me. While I have thought about writing a SEMRush review multiple times, the myriad of features and functionalities covered by SEMRush made my lazy-self feel like too much work to do. But finally, now that I decided to write the review, this is going to be probably the most extensive review of SEMRush that you will ever read and to make it easier for my readers, I have broken down the review into specific sections covering each aspect of SEMRush and there are links for you to jump to those sections directly if you want to.

The best thing I like about SEMRush as a marketing professional is that while most of the features are centred around SEO & Adwords, it also covers various other aspects of digital marketing. Unlike most other tools that specialise in either SEO or Paid Search or Social media, SEMRush works like a swiss army knife and provides great value across all this.

While the review will provide a detailed understanding of the tool and how to use it best, nothing beats a first-hand experience. You can always get started with a free trial of SEMRush.

The Most Extensive SEMRush Review – And What It Contains

• SEMRush Features Overview
• SEMRush Keywords Research Tool (All keyword research Features)
• How to Find Competitors Keywords Using SEMRush
• Review of SEMRush SEO features
• Backlinks Audit and Finding Competitor Backlinks
• SEMRush Sensor
• Review of Adwords Competitor Research Features in SEMRush
• Using SEMRush for PLA Research
• Review of SEMRush Video Ad Research feature
• SEMRush Display Advertising Features Review
• Social Media Features Review
• SEMRush Brand Monitoring Features
• SEMRush Alternative
• SEMRush vs AHREF
• SEMRush vs Moz

SEMrush database currently has competitive information on 130 million domains, with 800+ million keywords across 100+ geo-databases. While we will cover each of the SEMRush features in details later in this review, given below are few pointers that need a mention –

• Unlike most other competitive research tools, SEMRush provides intelligence both for SEO and Adwords / Paid search users
• The tool is built to scale and can be used by individual users and agencies alike. The system can allow up to 10000 reports/ day.
• What makes SEMRush an even better tool for agencies is the ability to white label all SEMRush reports and brand them with your logo and details
• SEMRush can seamlessly integrate with Google Webmasters and Google Analytics, making the data even more contextual, relevant and useful
• SEMRush is constantly adding new features and improving the toolset. Most new features are released in Beta and you can have free access to those tools irrespective of your subscription level
• They have one of the best and friendly customer support team – I am saying this from my personal experience.
• SEMRush also has a lot of training material – much more than you will ever need that can help you make the best use of the tool

Understanding SEMRush Features

Once you login to SEMRush the first thing you see is the dashboard. The dashboard will show you a snapshot of your domains and campaigns and also have links to your left-hand side to navigate into all the different tools. While this navigation undergoes minor changes continuously as they keep adding new features, the top level tools include –

• Advanced Keyword Research
• Competitor Analysis
• Site Audit
• Organic Research
• PPC Insight
• Ad History
• Social Media Marketing
• Brand Monitoring

This SEMRush review will cover all of the above features in details and will also provide enough guidance so you can use this tools effectively for your SEO or PPC campaigns.

SEMRush Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Research is one of the fundamental activities that is crucial to the success of any SEO or Adwords campaign. While there are numerous tools in the market for keyword research they all have their pros and cons. Earlier I wrote about why Google Keyword tool / keyword planner is no longer the best tool for keyword research. SEMRush with the various options for keyword research and options to dig into your competitor’s details makes for one of the best keyword research tools. You can try the tools first hand with the 7-Day Free Trial.

Keyword Analytics Overview

To begin with keyword research you would make a basic list of broad terms that your customers are most likely to search for when looking for a business similar to yours. Now go to the Keywords Analytics Section, click on the Overview tab and search for one of those seed keywords.

For instance, in this case, I have entered “printer cartridges” as my general keyword and selected the targeted geography as the US. On running the search you get a lot of useful stats related to the keyword.

This would include the Monthly Organic Search Volume and estimated CPC of your keyword. Based on this, you will get an idea about the competitive level of your general keyword.

Scrolling further down would also show you the top organic results and the ads ranking in the Google.com (as we selected the location as the US) for the keyword “printer cartridges”.

Phrase Match & Related Keywords

While you have come up with a list of seed keywords, there are probably plenty more to target and also most of the time the seed keywords are really broad head terms that are fiercely competitive and difficult to get visibility with. The Phrase Match and Related Keywords tools will help you expand your list of keywords.

Phrase Match: This report enlists all the possible keyword variations of your seed keywords. For example, for “Printer cartridges” as a seed keyword, Phrase Match, shows me options for “canon printer ink cartridges” – which could be easier to rank for.

Related Keywords: This report will give you the list of all related keywords related to your main keywords and thus work as a source of great new ideas. For example, the same seed keyword showed me related terms like “buy printer ink online” and “toner ink cartridge”. This is also very useful if you are trying to optimize your content as it helps identify keywords that would increase topical relevancy for your seed keyword.

As shown in this snapshot, SEMrush has presented nearly 4,658 keyword ideas relating to the seed keyword.

You can also download all these keywords via the Export button on the top right and they will be downloaded in your system in the form of an Excel / CSV file. This really helps to easily analyze and sort keywords and helps to play around with the data.

Both the Phrase Match and Related Keywords section can be accessed either from the left navigation panel or from the tabs next to the Overview section on the main screen.

Keyword Difficulty Tool

This report is particularly helpful for SEO. The Keyword Difficulty tool helps you to analyze the difficulty in ranking for a particular keyword in organic search.

The search difficulty index ranges from 1-100%. The higher the percentage, the tougher it will be to rank for that keyword. The results table also shows you the average monthly searches for the keyword and the number of results displayed in the SERP for that particular keyword.

While everyone would like to choose the keywords with the highest search volume, striking a balance between competition and volume is critical for a viable SEO campaign and Keyword Difficulty Level provides the same.

SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool

The SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool is one stop Keyword Research tool that supplies you with each and every piece of needed information for your keyword research. You will find this option under the Keyword Analysis option in the navigation panel.

This tool is currently in Beta and is thus available for FREE until the testing period ends.

To use this, you can add your seed keyword as shown in the above snapshot and click on “Search”. SEMrush will give you a complete list of broad matched keywords to your seed keyword. You will also see that these keywords are all categorized under broad groups.

This will help you in filtering the keywords related to any group you choose. For instance, if I click on “hp” I will get the list of all the keywords containing the word “hp”(See screenshot below).

In addition, you can also filter your search results on the basis of:

• Volume
• Keyword Difficulty Percentage
• Cost Per Click
• Level of Competition
• SERP Features

Not just this, clicking on the little blue icon under the SERP column gives you a snapshot of the search engine results for that particular keyword (e.g. clicking on “hp printer cartridges” would give you the below SERP result).

This gives a clear idea of your competitors who are ranking at top positions in the Google Search results, thus helping you evaluate better and choose your keywords and ranking strategies carefully.

All the different keyword reports are available to be exported as Excel files, which gives you even more flexibility to slice and dice the data.

While there are these many options for keyword research in SEMRush which clearly makes it one of the best options, there is much more to what we just discussed. Using SEMRush’ competitive intelligence you can actually find what keywords your competitors are using and uncover a lot of hidden keywords that are working for your competitors.

How to Find Competitors Keywords Using SEMRush

SEMRush offers some serious kickass intelligence in finding competitor keywords and I have covered it in details in What Keywords are my Competitor’s using. I would recommend you read that but here is another feature in SEMRush that can help you identify more SEMRush keyword.

To do this, you will have to navigate to the Domain vs. Domain section under Domain Analytics which lets you compare 5 domains with your domain.

After you enter the domains, you have an option to compare the organic keywords, paid keywords or PLAs. Once you enter the “Go” button, you will get the list of the keywords you and your competitor are ranking for along with their site position in the search results.

For example, I compared two domains as shown below and got the list of keywords for which both my domain and my competitor’s domains are ranking along with their respective positions. It also shows other stats like its monthly search volume, CPC, keyword difficulty percentage, etc.

Now you should click on “Enable Charts” and get a Venn diagram presenting the common and unique keywords for both the domains. The Venn diagram here shows that the two domains share less number of common keywords. Now if you click on the part of the Venn diagram representing your competitor domain name, you can see the keywords they are ranking for, many of which you might not be targeting.

Overall, the Domain vs. Domain tool greatly reveals you significant keyword opportunities to rank yourself ahead of your competitors.

How to Use SEMRush for SEO – Useful SEO Features

Finding & Fixing On-site Issues Using Site Audit Feature

While backlinks are important for SEO, it is highly critical to have your on-page SEO perfect. The SEO Audit tool in SEMRush comes in extremely handy in identifying the gaps in your website and using this as a guide to improve your on-page SEO.

The SEO Audit Tool in SEMrush performs a complete onsite audit of your website in no time. Here’s how you can use it:

• Go to SEMrush Dashboard.
• Click on the Site Audit section.

• Choose your project from the dropdown list that appears ( You need to add your domain as a “project” under the “Projects” menu in the left nav).
• Click on Site Audit set up and fill in all the necessary settings and wait for a few minutes for your report.

When your report is generated you can save it as a PDF file for future analysis too. Let us check out a sample report generated.

It shows all the critical issues related to the site entered like missing Meta tags, missing Image ALT tags, duplicate content, no-follow links, etc. Other than this, you will get a list of general warnings in yellow.

You can certainly improve all these issues to make your website more SEO-friendly.

Keyword Tracking Feature

The keyword tracking feature in SEMRush allows you to find all the keywords for which your site might be ranking and in which position it is ranking in the SERP. To check the organic ranking of your site, you can go to Sidebar > Organic Research > Positions. Now enter your domain name in the main search field and enter. This will give you a detailed list of all the keywords that your site is ranking for along with your site’s position in the SERP for respective keywords.

You will also see that SEMrush lists the website’s URL that is ranking for that particular keyword, so you know which page is ranking for which keyword.

You will notice that the position column displays a bracketed number along with the position number. This bracketed number tells the previous position of your domain for that specific keyword. This is great for understanding if your SEO activities are helping in improving the site’s rankings.

This is actually much better to many of the other stand-alone keyword tracking tools where you will need to manually add the keywords and/or find the keywords that your site might be ranking for before tracking them. In this case, SEMRush finds the keywords that your site is ranking for, which position in SERP its ranking, and also the respective page in your site that is ranking for the keyword.

Backlink Audit with SEMRush

SEMRush offers two distinct options for Backlink related information and both are equally useful. The first one is a Backlink Audit Tool to audit your existing backlinks and the second one is more useful to uncover your competitor’s backlinks and identify opportunities.

Once you have set up your domain as a project, under the project dashboard you will get access to the Backlink Audit tool. Though this information is similar to that you can get with Google Search Console, but SEMrush gives you all this in an easy to read and understandable format. The greatest benefit of this tool, however, is that it gives a toxicity score to your backlinks and overall link profile. It lists all the backlinks that might have a negative impact on your site with a red sign. This way you know which links to edit/remove to clean your backlink profile and build up your site’s domain authority. It also shows
– anchor text analysis
– Follow vs. no follow
– an ongoing update of your new links vs. lost links and
– a Trust Score Vs Domain Score graphical plotting of your entire link profile.
This is very effective in understanding where your site stands overall in terms of its backlink profile.

The other feature that is very handy in this backlink audit tool in SEMRush is that you can directly add bad backlinks to a disavow list, which can later be exported and submitted to Google as your disavow list. This makes cleaning up a nasty backlink profile much easier.

How to Find Competitor Backlinks with SEMRush

I often talk of SEMRush as one of the best competitive intelligence tools both for SEO and Adwords and their competitor backlink analysis feature actually validates the claim. To access any competitors backlink information follows the steps…
Type your competitor’s URL in the search bar and hit “Search”.
Click on Domain Analytics > Backlinks

You will find all the relevant information about your competitor’s backlinks.

While the Overview section of this report provides a summarized dashboard type view, the Backlinks and other tabs will have more granular details about the links. You can find all the relevant information including –

• Backlinks of your competitor
• Anchor text profile
• Image Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Referring IPs
• Indexed Pages
• Age of Backlinks
• Do Follow vs. No Follow
• And even….Subdomain Backlinks

The goodness doesn’t just end here. If you are hyper-competitive, you can actually compare your domain vs. your competitor’s domain ( or maximum up to 6 domains simultaneously) to understand who is doing better in terms of link building and dig into what exactly your competitors are doing that you might not be doing yet.

SEMRush Sensor

SEMRush just launched a new feature called SENSOR, which would keep a tab on how Google rankings are changing day by day overall. As they are tracking millions of keywords and their rankings, they are using some of this data to indicate when there is a major shakeup in the Google algorithm. Google at this point is continuously making changes to its algorithm which results in some changes in the ranking all the time but when there are some major changes, the rankings often shake up big time and as SEO it is very important to keep track of such changes and ensure that your site is not affected by such changes. I am in touch with the product owner for SEMRush Sensor and would soon post a separate more detailed review of this feature.

A detailed comparison of Spyfu vs SEMRush SEO Tools and Features

SEMRush for Adwords Competitor Research

Finding your competitors is the first step to successful competitor research. SEMRush helps identify your competitors both for SEO and Adwords in a simple one-click method. For finding your SEO competitors in SEMRush go to Domain Analytics > Organic Research > Competitors and you will find a full list of your main competitors in SEO along with the number of common keywords that you rank for, a number of unique keywords for your competitors, level of competition etc. If you are spending money on Adwords, SEMRush is a must-have – you can get started with the free 7-Day trial.

How to Find your Adwords Competitors

If you are trying to find your Adwords competitor go to Domain Analytics > Advertising Research > Competitors in SEMRush. This would display your main competitors , common keywords between you and the competitor, total keywords that your competitor is advertising for and an estimate of their ad traffic. Most of these metrics like number of keywords etc are clickable – you can click on them to see the actual keywords your competitors are running their Adwords on.

How to Find Your Adwords Competitors Keywords

I wrote a very detailed post on What Keywords Are My Competitors Using earlier which you will find helpful but here is a shorter version of the same.

In the previous section I explained how to find your Adwords Competitors in SEMRush, once you have that list, you can click on the number that shows under “Ads Keywords” column for any of the competitor and that would directly take you to a page that lists all their Ads keywords. It will also provide a summarized view of their estimated ad spend and traffic from ads and a graphical presentation of how their traffic, keyword and budget has changed over time.

Now if you want to find keywords for a competitor who is not already listed when you look for your competitor list, you can directly type the domain in the search box and hit enter. Navigate to Domain Analytics > Advertising Research > Position and you will find the same details with all their keywords.

How to Find Your Competitor’s Landing Pages & Ads

Similar to above just search for your competitor domain in SEMRush and then navigate to Domain Analytics > Advertising Research > Ad Copies and you can view all the ads they are currently running. This section not only shows the ads but clicking the small down arrow on the bottom-left of each ad copy will also reveal for which keywords that ad is triggered.

This is really helpful in understanding what sort of messaging your competitor is using and you will have a better feel of what might work for you.

What is more interesting is that if you click on the ad headlines, it will actually take you to your competitors landing page. This is a great feature because in certain industries where competition is fierce, competitors would often have specialized landing pages that is generally hidden from the public eye and is not a part of the main website – those can only be found by clicking through their ads. Now you can find them all together in SEMRush Ad Copies feature.

Ad History

Yet another distinctive feature of SEMrush is the “Ad History”. Click on Advertising Research> Ad History as shown below to access this section.

This shows how long and what ads were run by your competitor for specific keywords. If you click on any date for any keyword, you can see what ads were running for that keyword in that specific month.

If you are wondering how this is useful think of it this way – if your competitor has not been advertising some of the keywords consistently and stopped them after a month or two , it indicates that they might not be very useful/ profitable. Similarly if you see your competitor using few ad copies consistently across multiple keywords, that’s an indication that similar messaging is working well for your target audience.

USE SEMRUSH FOR ADWORDS COMPETITOR RESEARCH
(FREE 7-DAY TRIAL)

Competitive Research for PLA or Product Listing Ads

If you are an e-commerce company you are most likely using PLA already. They are extremely effective as they help users to see and compare your products with your competitors’ products pricing from Google result pages.

The image below shows the PLAs when the query “black shoes”is types in Google. It enlists the highest bided results for black shoes with their little description and pricing (as shown in the highlighted area below).

SEMRush offers competitive research for PLA Ads also and helps you identify your PLA competitors, get the complete list of your competitors PLA Keywords. It will also provide an estimate of their traffic from PLA Ads and their budget for PLA.

Competitor Research for Video Advertising

With the increasing prominence of YouTube ( YouTube is the second most popular search engine, in case you don’t know that yet), Video advertising is becoming extremely popular among advertiser. So far we have not come across many tools that provide competitive intelligence on video advertising other than SEMRush, though this is a beta feature and they are still enhancing this.

If you are planning to launch your video campaign and learn from your competitor, what are the key metrics you will need ?
– You want to view your competitors ads and see how they are presenting
– You want to know where your competitor’s video ads are being shown – which YouTube Channels ?
– You would likely want to see your competitors landing page too

SEMRush Video Ad research provides all this information, plus a little more.
Once you enter the domain of your competitor, SEMrush gives you the advertising summary of your competitor mentioning the number of video ads posted by it, number of channels at which it posted and the landing pages of the ads.

You will also see the graphical representation of the video trend by your competitor on the right of the advertising summary.

Scrolling down the screen, you will notice the list of all the latest videos which feature the video campaigns of your competitors both pre-rolls and post-rolls and the channels they are posted at. You will also get a list of the landing pages where all these videos lead to. The Video research section have multiple tabs that showcase all your competitors video ads, the channels, the landing pages as well as the videos that have their ads.

SEMRush is an amazing research tool if you are considering video ads.

Display Advertising Competition Research

There are some competitive intelligence tools for display advertising that helps you view your competitor’s display ads and also might provide you with some basic information as to where a particular ad was last seen. While tools like those are useful, the information is often in bits and pieces and doesn’t provide the complete picture to get any usable competitive knowledge. And if you are looking for a premium subscription where you can get some useful data the cost is really forbidding, unless you have a really big advertising budget to justify the spend.

SEMRush Display research data provides all the necessary information that you need to do a thorough research on your competitor’s display ads. When you enter a domain, e.g. http://www.amazon.com (see screenshot below), you see some useful stats displaying the total number of publishers who have published the ad on their websites for http://www.amazon.com.

Just below this, you see a list of publishers and the total number of ads, each publisher has published.You can also see a breakup of the different types of ads they are using – Media, HTML, Text.You can actually see all their ads, classified by devices, number of times it was seen, when was it seen ( first & last time). The Display advertising research also provides the list of landing pages for the display ads.

In summary, the SEMRush display ad research provides information on –

• Where your competitor’s ads are shown
• When the ads were shown
• What are the landing pages for your display ads
• It also shows the actual ads and their relevant info
• It also gives a device based grouping for the display ads

What more can you ask for ? Well, there is still something. If you are interested in the Publishing side, as to know which competitors are publishing their ads on your competitors website, SEMRush provides a hell lot of information on that too.

Other SEMRush Features

Social Media Audit with SEMRush

The Social Media Tool is yet another awesome feature of SEMrush. It lets you analyze the performance of the social profile of your projects.

For this, you will first have to add your project under the “My Projects” section and then set up all the social accounts for your domain as shown below:

This tool lets you timely check the audience stats at your different social profiles like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and YouTube audience. Above that, you will also see a “Top Content” section that highlights the most engaging post at all the social networks over a given time period.

Not just this, you can also compare your social media stats against your competitor’s in the “Competitor Comparison” section. The below screenshot shows the different competitors for our domain like cnn.com, NY Times, Huffington Post, etc. and their respective audience at different social media platforms. But for this to effectively work, you need to add the list of your competitors when you set up your projects.

SEMRush as a Brand Monitoring Tool

Monitoring your brand is critical to every business and in the digital space, your brand mentions can affect your business in more ways than one. Whether it is a brand citation or a brand link, where is it placed, what are the other links and citations on the same page etc can not only affect your brand reputation but also your SEO.

SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring Tools tracks all your brand, product or service mentions on the web and social media. You can also set up the same for your competitor to identify where your competitor brand is mentioned and use that as an opportunity to increase your digital brand footprint.

To use this tool, you can go to the SEMrush Dashboard> Brand Monitoring. Or you can go to the “My projects” section and choose your project leading to your project’s dashboard and then select Brand Monitoring as shown below.

SEMRush Alternative

While SEMRush is a great tool for competitor intelligence and keyword research, there are a lot of tools that are positioned as SEMRush alternative. It’s true that there are some brilliant tools in the market that provides some great data and insight on some of the marketing aspects but where SEMRush beats them all is in its breadth of features – unlike others, it is a suite of tools that are useful for SEO, Adwords, Social Media, Video Ads, PLA and more. Also, none of the tools covers as many geographies as SEMRush.

Earlier I wrote a detailed point by point comparison of some of the closest alternatives to SEMRush and you can read the post – SEMRush Vs Spyfu vs KeywordSpy vs Ispionage.

I have been asked multiple times as to how SEMRush compares to Ahrefs or Moz Pro and while both Ahrefs and Moz Pro are amazing tools and highly useful, comparing them with SEMRush would be more like comparing apples to oranges. I will tell you why…

SEMRush vs Ahrefs

Ahref is primarily a backlink checker and a keyword research tool though it has added a lot of additional features to the tool as well. What Ahref is probably one of the best with is to find your links as well as find your competitors backlinks, also identify the link quality which could be great both in terms of identifying backlink opportunities as well as to clean up any bad backlinks that you might have pointing to your website.

Ahref does have a keyword research tool and also has a SEO rank tracking feature. In addition, it provides some content analysis on social media.

Now if you look at SEMRush vs AHREFS comparison – all the above features are also available in SEMRush. In fact, when it comes to features like keyword research, I feel SEMRush is way more sophisticated. Also, most importantly, AHREF does not provide any intelligence for your advertising – Adwords, Display PLA or anything else. Hence at an almost similar price point ( AHREF is a tad bit more expensive), you will need to buy another tool for that, thereby increasing your cost drastically.

If I had an ample budget for buying every tool I like, I would definitely buy both but if I am a price conscious marketeer working across the digital channels, SEMRush is definitely my choice.

SEMRush Vs MOZ

I think the oranges and apples analogy applies perfectly to SEmrush vs Moz comparison. Moz is primarily an SEO tool and a great one at that. Moz offers features like keyword rank tracking, backlink checker and even an on page grader and a site audit. If you would want to do a really objective comparison of SEMRush vs Moz, consider this, Moz offers rank tracking for 300 keywords for $99/month whereas SEMRush offers rank tracking for 500 keywords at the same price point. Of course, there are a lot of other features and that should not be the only point of comparison. Moz also acquired Followerwonk to provide some intelligence around Twitter too.

Now looking at SEMRush, it has almost all the features that MOZ provides except for the Moz Local which allows you to manage your local listings. On top of that, it provides a lot more competitive intelligence around paid search and Adwords, display ads, video ad and PLA. The social media reporting and keyword research functions in SEMRush are also much better compared to Moz.

I don’t see a compelling reason why someone should choose MozPro over SEMRush, unless your bread and butter is totally reliant on your local listings. Moz evolved from, SEO Moz which was arguably one of the best SEO services company and most of all a great community of SEOs due to which it might have some loyal followers but comparing features, SEMRush would be a hands-on winner in Moz vs SEMRush comparison.

Final Words

I have been a long time user of SEMRush myself and have recommended this tool to several of my colleagues and clients. I have used several other tools and I have not come across a similar tool that offers so many features at a price point affordable even by individual advertisers. And not just me, SEMRush is being used by almost all the major SEO & Adwords agencies across the world as well as several marketing savvy brands like Amazon, eBay, Booking.com, Paypal, GE, Hyatt, Wells Fargo, Forbes and others.

This is probably the longest post on my blog so far and also probably one of the most extensive SEMRush reviews you will ever read. The idea was to give a complete picture of the tool and help you understand what SEMRush can add value to your marketing campaign but nothing beats a hands-on experience. If you haven’t had a subscription to SEMRush yet, you can always sign up for a Free Trial.

The post SEMrush Review : The Best Keyword Research Tool & More appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

The latest update to the keyword planner they announced a month back, took that a level further where Google clearly discriminated against advertisers with low spend, providing them with only limited data in the keyword planner. Not just that, even for other advertisers, this “limited data” update can get triggered if you hit a certain threshold of daily searches for search volume data. Thought conveniently, Google has not specified what is the threshold number. Presumably, you can be a large spender and yet end up with limited search volume data.

And to top this up, the Google post ends with, “These changes will ensure that AdWords advertisers are able to get the data they need to optimize their accounts” . Honestly, I have been doing Adwords for more than 10 years now and I have no clue, how providing limited search volume data can help better optimize a campaign, if anything it will prompt wrong estimates and mis-prioritization of keyword bids.

The main change that is happening is on the Average Search Volume column. If you are on the limited data mode on the Adwords Keyword Planner, all you will see are ranges and ranges as wide as,..
0
1-100
100-1K
1K – 10K
10K- 100K
100K – 1M
1M+

Organic Search / SEO is becoming more and more difficult with every passing day and there is not much option for the businesses but to put money into Paid search and now they are trying to make that difficult as well. Of course these update will also help kill some of the smaller keyword tools that were using bots to fetch data from the Adwords Keyword Planner. Thank Google, they have confirmed that the Adwords Keyword Tool API will continue to return full data.

Alternatives to Google Adwords Keyword Tool

I am sure advertisers and SEOs will still continue to use the Google Adwords Keyword tool but what are the other alternatives to Google Keyword Planner for finding good quality keyword data ? I have been toying with several keyword research tools for a long time now and while some of them are more commonly used for competitor keyword research, most of them are very effective keyword research tools with loads of data that both advertisers and SEOs would love. I have listed a few alternative to Google Adwords Keyword planner tool that I personally find extremely helpful – granted they are not free but most of them offer some trial period and the nominal fee is well worth the data they provide.

SEMRush
One of the most well-known and user friendly tool providing highly detailed keyword and competitor data for both organic / SEO as well as for Adwords. Also, the data is available for 27 different countries, which serves well for search marketers that are working with clients other than in US. You can not only find new keywords but you can actually find what keywords your competitors are using, the bid price, volume, ad copies and a host of other data. Besides the regular keyword research bit it actually allows you to take a sneak pic into your competitor’s Adwords account.

If SEMRush is of your interest you can also read this SEMRush review and ultimate guide to all its features.

Spyfu
A very similar tool to SEMRush and does almost everything that SEMRush does but a little more expensive.

You can read this comparative review of SEMRush vs. Spyfu for making an informed decision.

KeywordTool.io
If you are looking for pure play alternative to Google Adwords keyword tool and don’t want to pick into competitor data, this could be one of the best keyword research tools. Also, besides Google and Bing ( SEMRush and Spyfu covers both), this also provides search volume data for YouTube ( More on YouTube optimization), Amazon and App Store ( helpful for App Store Optimization). For every search they also have a “Questions” tab, which basically shows what are the questions people are asking with the same keywords. However, in this the free version ( or even the basic paid version) do not provide any volume data and only the keywords. To get the search volume data you need to get the ProBasic package that starts at $88/month ( $20 more than the SEMRush base subscription that gives you both volume as well as CPC data).

The post Why Google Adwords Keyword Planner is Not The Best Anymore ? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

If you have searched in Google for “What keywords are my competitors using”, you definitely believe that there is a way to get that info, other than your competitor divulging the same voluntarily, (which is no less than a utopian dream). I am going to show you exactly how to find your competitors keywords for Adwords and or SEO.

Tools to Find Your Competitor’s Keywords

Finding your competitor’s keywords whether for Adwords or SEO isn’t really that difficult if you have the right tools and know how to use them right. There are only a handful of such competitor analysis tools and I particularly prefer SEMRush or Spyfu. (You can read my comparison review of Spyfu vs. SEMRush vs. Keywordspy vs. Ispionage if you want). However, for the purpose of this post, we will use SEMRush to show you how to find your competitor’s keywords.

Find Your Competitors Adwords Keywords

There are three approaches to finding your competitors Adwords keywords :

1. Start with specific keywords – identify competitors and then dig for their other keywords. This approach is suitable when you are looking to identify missed opportunities, increase your keyword basket
2. Start with specific Competitor – When you know who your major competitor is and want to do a deep dive into his keywords. This also offers similar insights as above
3. Start with your domain – I prefer this as it also helps you identify new competitors at times that you might have missed otherwise and also opens up a largest set of keyword opportunities

Let’s take SEMRush.com as an example and try to identify their competitor keywords

• Log into your SEMRush account ( you can get a Free Trial here)
• To your left you will see the navigation bar, Click on Domain Analytics > Advertising Research
• In the top search field type your domain (semrush.com) and hit enter
• Ensure that you have selected the right Geography from the tabs just below the search bar
• This should give you a comprehensive review of the domains Adwords presence – not just keywords, but also traffic and budget estimation, keywords, landing pages etc

You can use this process to dig individually into each of your Adwords competitors in deeper details. The other information about budget, traffic, ads etc could be extremely helpful in improving your Adwords campaign.

Assuming you are SEMRush, you already know your keywords, so now click on the “Competitors” link under “Advertising Research” in the left navigation.

This will show you an extensive list of Adwords competitors and summarised information for their keywords and traffic as shown below.

The competitiveness against each of them is indicated by the blue bar.

Common Keywords: These are the keywords for which both your domain (SEMRush.com) and the competitor domain are ranking for in Google’s paid search results.

Ads Keywords: Keywords the website is buying in Google AdWords for ads that appear in paid search results.

Ads Traffic: Estimated traffic brought to the website via Google AdWords paid search results.
Ads Traffic Price: Estimated budget spent buying keywords in Google AdWords for ads that appear in paid search results (monthly estimation).

SE Keywords: Keywords bringing users to the website via Google’s top 100 organic search results. While this is not exactly what we started looking out for, at times this provide great information about new keywords that can be included in your Adwords campaign.

If you have noticed the above screenshot, you will notice the numbers under Common Keywords and Ads Keywords are hyperlinked.

Now all you have to do is identify the competitors for whom you want to know the keywords and right click on the Ads Keywords number against the competitor name > open in new window / tab.

This should give you the Advertising overview of your competitor’s domain. Scroll down a bit and you can see the list of all their ads keywords.

Notice the “Export“ button on the top right of the table? Click on that and you can export the entire list of your competitor’s keywords into Excel or CSV format. And not just the keywords but you also get all the other relevant information like what is your competitor’s estimated bid for the keyword, which landing page is the keyword mapped to, the competition and volume for the keywords and more. Isn’t it sweet?

But you may ask, I can directly input the competitor’s domain name and get these results, why did we start with our own domain name?

Remember I mentioned to right click and open the competitor’s keywords in a new window? The reason being, now that you have started with your own domain, in one of your browser windows you have the complete list of all your paid search competitors. So all you have to do is, go back to that window,

• • Click on Ads Keywords for all of them ( or as many as you want) and open them in a new window
  • Export their respective keyword list into Excel
  • Club all the Excel files into one and check for which keywords have been most commonly used (on a related note you might find this helpful : How Excel Pivot Tables Can Help in Adwords Campaigns )For example, if you have the data from 5 competitors, one keywords might be used by all 5 of them, 3 keywords might have been used by 4 of them, 2 keywords might have been used by 3 of them, rest of the keywords have been used only by any one competitor.

The keywords that are used by all or the majority of your competitors are obviously the most important ones and you need to counter check if you are missing any of them.

In fact other than the subjective evaluation of keyword intent and quality, ideally each keyword that appears on the list should be looked at as an opportunity and you should compare all those competitor’s keywords against your keyword list to see if there are any missing opportunities.

You also might want to read : 3 Adwords Competitor Research Metrics to Improve your Campaigns

How to Find My Competitor’s SEO Keywords

This is relatively simple. You have to start at the left navigation, Domain Analytics > Organic Research. You can continue the same way as we did for the paid search but as it is typically more difficult to work with too many organic keywords ( good if you can manage to do that), an easier approach would be

• Identify your top targeted keywords
• Search for those keywords to identify the top 5 competitors for each one of them
• Now in SEMrush, under “Domain Analytics > Organic Research, search for the competitor domain names
• This should give you a list of keywords that they are ranking for and also an indication of what percentage of their traffic is driven by each of those keywords
• Go through the list / Export and check if there are any major keywords that you are missing

This would also show you the specific page URL that ranks for the keyword – go ahead and check that page to identify what type of content is working for them and what would you need to do better than your competitor.

On a related note, SEMRush also works as a great keyword research tool by itself. You can find the options under “Keyword Analytics”.

While I tried to be detailed in explaining the process to identify the competitor’s keywords, I understand some of it could be a little confusing unless you are using the tool while reading this. Feel free to sign up for the free trial which will allow you to find your competitor keywords, though they will show only partial data even that is pretty decent. Also, there are tons of tutorial videos that you can have access to which shows you exactly how to use this tool to find competitor’s data.

The post What Keywords Are My Competitors Using – This is How You Can Find appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Small Pop up box asking feedback on search results quality.

This urge for continuous improvement is probably what separates the best from the rest.

The post Google Asking Feedback on Search Result Quality appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

By the time I completed the posts and redid the search that result is gone.. in fact it does not show any entity search results at all but shows the official site of Indian Govt. Not sure what triggered such a ridiculous results for the short while but it would be interesting to know how that happened.

The post Google Screws Up with President of India appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

1. Social Influence on Search Ranking: The influence of social media on search rankings has been proven beyond doubt. While we are yet to get more clarity on the extent of influence, the mass consensus is that social votes (likes, shares, tweets, plus ones etc.) across platforms and may be some platforms like Google Plus in more specific is going to be the next big currency to influence your search rankings. Social media being a manually curated environment doesn’t really favor keyword rich content that is specifically created to feed the search bots. We human beings don’t need keywords to make sense of content, we care for content that adds value to our life, something that we care to share irrespective of the fact whether they have keywords in them or not. So if you want your content to gain traction in social media, you will probably like to go easy on the keywords.
2. Intelligent Search Engines:  One of the main reasons keywords were included in content was to help the search engines identify the topic and establish the content’s relevance to the user’s search query. However, over time search engines have become much smarter in interpreting content and attributing signals from various sources in ascertaining the relevance of the content to user’s query and keywords are not really a necessity any more.
3. Use of Microformats: Most search engines today can read and interpret micro formats. This micro formats go a long way in establishing context and helping search engine bots understand the true meaning of the textual content. This is definitely an additional help that search engines get in understanding content and further reduces the burden on webmasters to use keyword rich content.
4. Removal of Keyword Data from Analytics: Around a year back Google stopped sending the keyword data for all organic search clicks and now they are planning to cut down the same for paid search as well, which basically means your analytics will not have any keyword data. While many consultants have been interpreting this as a signal towards reducing importance of keywords, without going into such speculation let’s look at the practical problem. If we do not know which keyword performs well, how do we know which keyword to optimize for?
5. Mobile Search Gaining Traction: If you look at your analytics I am sure you will see the rising curve of mobile users. Yes, mobile users are increasing day by day and Google is also trying its best to cater to the same.  When a user is surfing on mobile he doesn’t have the time to read long form keyword rich content but they are looking for specific relevant information.  Also with Hummingbird Google is trying to answer questions directly, which needs specific, relevant and well-formatted information.

We are all moving towards a context driven, socially connected smart world and keywords might be a little primitive for the same. This is not to say keywords are redundant, they definitely have their roles to play in few cases (think about extremely narrow niches) but they are no longer the priority.  Write content that adds value to your users, content that is sharable, content that people would love; if keywords are present its ok, if they are not, no worries.

The post Why You Don’t Need Keyword Rich SEO Content Writing appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.