Starting from scratch: four tools to start a SEO campaign

Starting a business is not an easy task. Not everyone who decides to take a step further and walk through the dreary process of starting a personal business makes it out successfully. Sadly, today’s industry and today’s digital landscape has become extremely demanding: not long ago, well-known e-commerce site Econom founder Jody Sherman (47) took his own life. His death constituted a precedent in the entrepreneurial community and brought to light the discussion regarding entrepreneurship and mental health. In fact, such topic has been drifting around since Diaspora founder, Illya Zhitomirskiy (22), committed suicide just about two years ago.

We understand that for startups to thrive under these circumstances, entrepreneurs not only need to master a lot of things but also become savvy as to what kind of decisions will lead their businesses to success. Such premises have brought us to cover different aspects of the entrepreneurial journey: from search engine optimization (SEO) tools to the perks of attaining a positive and strong online reputation. Therefore, even though controlling every variable is certainly impossible when it comes to starting a business, and understanding that for a business to succeed it is almost compulsory to create a strong online presence, we have reviewed some tools that have been specifically tailored for those small businesses trying to make a name for themselves as they join the tough, yet marvelous, roller coaster of today’s business world.

Moz Open Site Explorer

 

Moz Open Site Explorer provides webmasters and users in general with several tracking tools that help business owners collect more, and more accurate as well, information about search engine atmosphere. Simply put, this tool is what enables users to get the most out of their link building processes, as it displays a compilation of pages that happen to have the highest authority. Besides, it allows users to have a glimpse at the latest links to their sites. This is indeed and incredibly useful tool for anyone seeking to increase the amount of outbound links redirecting to their site. In order to see how it works at first glance, just visit the tool’s official website and enter the site’s URL and then click the search button. Soon afterward, the tool with display a compilation of different KPI and metrics such as authority numbers, links, and URLs directing to that specific site.

Google’s Keyword Planner

 

This is a basic, yet powerful tool that never ceases to achieve wonders. For any startup seeking to launch its first search engine optimization campaign —or even for those well-established businesses hoping to make some adjustments to existing ones—, the Keyword Planner definitely comes in handy.
It allows users to look for ad group and keyword ideas, and even catch a glimpse at how well would these keywords perform. It is actually really helpful for coming up with other relevant keywords, probably disregarded in the first time. Additionally, the Google Keyword Planner also provides the user with historical search data and a compilation of traffic statistics, which can be used to predict clicks and conversions as well as to decide on the budget destined to ‘Pay Per Click’ marketing.

Image courtesy of Negative Space at Pexels.com

Remove’em

 

In a previous article we addressed the topic of guest posting; although we at ReputationDefender mentioned that guest posting has historically been an efficacious activity that has indeed help a lot of business gain links, over time, the vast majority of these posts turned out to be of poor quality. In response to this, as of 2014, Google started penalizing guest posting for search engine optimization matters. In fact, this tactic was so common, that well-established companies and businesses were called out and subsequently went on to struggle trying to regain their lost rankings. Back then, the only way to get rid of such publications was to contact the websites where these links were posted and ask them to remove them. Afterward, webmasters were required to submit a request to Google asking for the site to be re-awarded its original rankings. Given the nature of this process and how dreary it certainly was, several tools have been developed so that webmasters can identify where such links have been posted and whether they have in fact extra-optimized their anchors; Remove’em is amongst these tools. Simply enter the URL and click search; the tool will display an accurate compilation of the site’s anchor texts and whether these are effectively extra-optimized or not. With this information, it is then possible for the user to either contact the webmasters where these links happen to be or use Google’s Disavow in order to remove them.

Google Trends

 

This is actually one of the most versatile tools we at ReputationDefender have come across with. It definitely serves a much better purpose when used alongside the previous tool, Google Keyword Planner: it is responsible for assessing the level of interest for a keyword or a keyphrase during a determined amount of time. Besides, it finds out which topics are trending in real time.