Building, re-building, promoting and maintaining websites is what we love doing. Over the years we have used a lot of third party software, built a lot of our own and also rely on various subscription model websites to help us maintain our competitive advantage.
Here are some of the tools that we use in our Digital Kit Bag and a little bit about how we use them.
BarkWeb CMS
Your website needs to be easily managed, updated without help and highly focused on delivering a quality result to visitors and search engines. Built over 5 years the BarkWeb Content Management System is second to none and delivers us and our clients a major advantage in it’s flexibility, ease of use for us and our clients as well as being entirely written by ourselves so we can easily produce bespoke modules as required by new and existing clients.
SEO Power Suite
We have been using the software available from www.linkassistant.com for over 5 years. Each of the 4 elements are accessible, responsive and provide excellent information.
Specifically we use Rank Tracker to measure historical changes in Google Rankings (see establishing a base line), we can also use this in conjunction with Hide My Ass – www.hidemyass.com - to spoof our location to another UK City (we often use a London VPN) for local rankings.
For some of our long standing clients we now have an archive of 5 years of data from which to refer back to. From this we can see the impact on rankings from major and minor Google updates (Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird come to mind).
Website Auditor gives us access to information on site content, meta information, broken links (also available in our CMS system) and W3C compliancy. We can also check a sites performance against competitors content and analyse key phrase and keyword density and optimisation. All sites are now audited through this software as part of our sign-off process.
SEO SpyGlass allows us to asses backlinks, link location and link value. A great tool to check out clients competition, see where they are strong and build a landscape of target phrases to optimise and where to place links.
LinkAssistant helps us automate the process of link building, link maintenance and makes sure that external links are verified. We also use this tool to asses the impact of external links including toxicity so that bad links can have a removal request placed.
Google Analytics
If you are not using Google Analytics then you are missing a big trick. As a Google Partner, we are certified in Google Analytics and have the knowledge to not just asses simple tasks such as page visits and bounce rates but start to gain real insight into a websites performance with conversion tracking, drop out zones and insight into overall website usage.
Google Webmaster Tools
Webmaster tools sits alongside Google Analytics but delivers information about site indexing, optimisation efficiency and site issues. This is an essential tool for monitoring websites that we have converted onto our system from a previous platform, it will quickly identify a multitude of problems that can effect website migration that may be invisible at launch.
Google AdWords
AdWords is the Pay Per Click (PPC) part of the Google results engine. We recently became a certified Google Partner in AdWords which recognises an agency’s ability to effectively manage a paid for campaign.
Done the right way, measured well and optimised to the teeth, AdWords can deliver extremely effective results for most companies wishing to gain enquiries and sales via online marketing. Done wrong AdWords can cost a lot and be a money-pit! We have taken over many AdWords campaigns from other agencies that within a few days have increased enquiries and decreased spend. Typically we can double your enquiries and half your expenditure (drum banging over!)
We also use Analytics and AdWords in parallel to accurately attribute enquiries and sales to spend. This information is gold, as we can provide a ratio of spend over enquires (or sales) which for a marketing department or business owner provides real world information.
Retargeting
Retargeting is the act of dropping a tracking cookie on a visitors browser and then displaying an advert on a third party site for the product or service that has been viewed on the host website.
This is another massively effective medium for advertising and we use various display networks (Google included) for retargeting. Having the ability to tune these campaigns and choose the right display network for a client is a day to day task for us. Interestingly in the time we have been retargeting we have not yet had a client stop a campaign, I believe that alone tells you how effective this can be.
Retargeting can also be much more cost effective conversion driver than pure AdWords as the bid amounts (how much you are prepared to pay for a click) is generally lower and you are displaying to a visitor who has already shown an interest in your service or product, so they're already a warm lead.
Insightly
Recently we have been integrating Insightly CMS into our on boarding activities (on boarding is the process of bringing new clients into our business and ensures that both our clients expectations of us, our services and our quality and our expectations of our clients has the prerequisite symbiosis for success).
We also integrate this software into our outreach marketing such as e-marketing, social channels and offline wherever possible.
Raven Tools
Raven is predominantly a way of automating SEO reporting for which we use some of it’s features. But as part of our SEO services this software backs up our own reporting schedules to all our clients, helps solidify a baseline of performance from which we measure all campaigns be they organic or paid for.
Uptime Robot
All of our online services are monitored internally within our suppliers data centre but we also make sure that these are monitored by a third party tool as there are circumstances when systems fail that may not be noticed from within a network. Uptime Robot is free and recommended.
Summary
We constantly evolve our skills, software and services, our Digital Kit Bag is a core list of software that I hope you find useful.
Want to learn more about our Digital Kit Bag and how it can help your business? Please give Julian a call on 01323 735 800.