I’ve been talking quite a bit lately about SEO Tools that I use to improve search results for my own site(s) and others that I work on. Most of these tools are free, but I have to confess that I use a variety of paid tools too.
An interesting attribute for some of these tools is they can actually help with other important business and marketing functions. In particular, I use some of the SEO Tools for doing actual Market Research and Business Analysis. As I mention these tools I’ll point out how and where I use them for these functions.
If you use SEO Tools for other marketing tasks please post a comment. I’m sure a number of people would be interested.
SEO and other InBound Marketing activities are typically low cost in dollars but require a lot of work initially and on an on-going to be successful. There are significant differences between building results using SEO and InBound Marketing techniques and using PPC {Pay Per Click} services such as Google Adwords.
Don’t get me wrong. Each approach has it’s place and best practical use case. For example, using Google Adwords PPC service is probably a good approach when first starting out. For the money you pay, you’ll get a consistent level of clicks and traffic to your site for the money you pay. The problem with this is that if costly and yeilds little long term benefit for the business. Essentially, when you stop using Adwords your site traffic pretty much goes away.
On the other hand SEO and InBound techniques give your site meaningful traffic that grows and builds upon itself over time. Moreover, click trough rates for organic search results Vs those of PPC are shown to be three times higher. The Organic results are trusted more by people and are in fact in very real terms a result of people referencing or recommending the sites. These sites are even viewed as more relevent by people performing the searches.
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