digital marketing Archivi | Paolo Margari

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Top SEO tools by Google Search Volume Growth: the status in 2020

1 January 2020/0 Comments/in SEO /by Paolo Margari

Exploding Topics by Brian Dean analyzed Google search volume growth for the most well-known SEO tools between 2014 and 2019.

Here the full findings.

Here’s the ranking of SEO Tools based on Google search volume growth over the last 5 years:

KWFinder (Score: 6.12) – Keyword finder
Google Search Console (Score: 5.75) – Checkup of index status
Keywords Everywhere (Score: 5.56) – Browser add-on for Chrome or Firefox
Answer The Public (Score: 4.45)
Ubersuggest (Score: 4.24) – Keyword suggetsion
SEMrush (Score: 4.08) – Full-Stack SEO Platform
Seobility (Score: 4.02) – Full-stack SEO Platform
Serpstat (Score: 3.69) – Full-stack SEO Platform
Ahrefs (Score: 3.66) – Website and competitor audit
GTmetrix (Score: 3.14) – Check site-speed and optimise performance
Screaming Frog (Score: 2.33) – Map web pages
SEOquake (Score: 1.02)
Yoast SEO (Score: 0.87) – WordPress plugin
Can I Rank (Score: 0.6)
Google Keyword Planner (Score: 0.33) – Available with a Google Ads account
Seed Keywords (Score: 0.24)
Siteliner (Score: 0.09)
Moz (Score: -0.08)
Long Tail Pro (Score: -3.62) – Long-tail keyword suggestion
Majestic SEO (Score: -3.63) – Ranking of many authority factors
WooRank (Score: -4.22)

The above ranking is not based on their market share or usefulness, but it’s rather an indicator of their popularity among users.

Some of them are free (like Google Search Console or UberSuggest integrated in Neil Patel’s website), others are freemium, others are paid.

Among them, few are full platforms with many features including also non-SEO functionalities, others are only providing niche insights or services (like YoastSEO that is a very popular WordPress plug-in), but are still valuable.

Personally, I still believe that it’s better to test and improve search ranking of a website using a range of tools (and anyone has its own recipe or preferences), but still, focus on one that can provide many aspects. The most valuable platform, including everything you need to do SEO, is SEMRush, that has increased its features in recent years.

Disclaimer: this post contains some affiliate links

LinkedIn social Media performance dashboard built on Google Data Studio

Enhance your social media dataset to build and visualise insightful KPI’s [Free PDF]

17 October 2019/0 Comments/in Guides, Social Media, Social Media Marketing /by Paolo Margari

Enhance your social media dataset to build insightful KPI’s from Paolo Margari

Above, you can find the slides I presented at Digital First 2019, the leading digital event in Belgium (Brussels, 16-17 October 2019).

Social platforms offer a highly valuable snapshot of your brand and products health. From prospects to leads, from customers to employees – including enthusiasts and evangelists as well as haters and trolls – the full range of users that learn and interact with your social channels are continuously shaping your brand equity.
What are you looking at to measure and improve your campaign performance?
Looking at the right KPIs, beyond the usual suspects, and thinking of social channels not just as broadcast, amplifier or communication tools, but also as customer feedback and market research platform gives valuable information to improve communication (content, tone of voice, style) and the product portfolio – or at least its perception.
During the presentation, I have shown how to build a social performance dashboard with actionable insights, easy to understand by different stakeholders. With some little hacks to your dataset, it is possible to explore performance under different points of view, going beyond the usual metrics, by creating new ones and adding more meaning and context to your social media analysis.

Facebook Professional Services, the next big thing for Local Search? (2018)

24 April 2018/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, Facebook, Social Media Marketing /by Paolo Margari

Facebook Professional Services

Facebook Professional Services is a new feature – still unannounced – that can be the next big thing for local search in 2016.

Update: it’s 2018 and the feature hasn’t been announced or promoted yet, but it’s still there, quite useful.

With this move Facebook is entering as a direct competitor of platforms such as Google Places (recently re-shaped as My Business), Yelp, Foursquare, Tripadvisor and others in the #local search market.

All Facebook Pages with a physical location will be listed in their respective primary business category and cannot avoid users rating/reviews – in fact, to remove the possibility that users leave reviews the page does not have to be associated with any physical location (e.g. brand pages).

All pages can be linked to up to three categories, but only the main one will be relevant for indexation in Professional Services – mind that if you do not see your Page listed yet.

Ranking high and with a good rating is crucial to business success. Many prospective customers look for confirmations about their possible choice right before they are going to buy – what Google calls micro-moments. This fact applies in particular in mobile local search, but at the moment, Facebook Professional Services are only available on the desktop. Maybe a dedicated app will be released at some point?

In Facebook Professional Services, ranking level is determined by a combination that takes into account number of reviews and rating (and possibly other variables such as engagement, page authority, reviewers authority, etc.). Therefore, having many reviews is the first step to being sure that a local service ranks in the top ten – there are ten results per page/category/city. Besides, rating from relevant users is also important: generally a page with 70 reviews and an average rating of 4.4 ranks better than a page with 20 reviews with 4.9 average rating.

Are you looking to improve your local search ranking? Have a look at this Local SEO Guide for Businesses by Brad Richardson (Caseo, Canada).

SEO: 8 top ranking factors for Google in 2017 [infographic]

12 April 2017/6 Comments/in Digital Marketing, SEO /by Paolo Margari

The Google algorithm keeps on changing regularly, making life harder and harder for SEO experts. Some people assume that SEO is dead, but in fact SEO is alive more than ever. Simply, the old way of doing SEO is dead, or at least it’s not bringing the desired results anymore, whilst a new set of SEO strategies and techniques is rising due to search engine algorithms that become intelligent more than ever.

Here is an interesting infographic, created and designed by Harris Myers, that lists the 8 top factors to keep in mind to rank high on Google SERP in 2017.

Content Marketing Trends in 2017: infographic

24 February 2017/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing /by Paolo Margari

An interesting infographic by Jomer Gregorio, CEO at CJG Digital Marketing, listing some of the Content Marketing trends to watch out for in 2017.

In his work, Jomer summarizes predictions about the evolution of the following 8 aspects that characterize contemporary content marketing.

Increase in documented content marketing strategy
Rise of visual content
Content getting more niche-specific
More user-generated content
Promotion to become a priority
More video
Influencer marketing
VR (virtual reality)

Facebook Livemap: visualizing globalization through user-generated TV

19 May 2016/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, Media /by Paolo Margari

Facebook keeps on packaging user-generated content to offer new product and create new potential advertising spaces. This time the news is called Facebook Livemap. No big announcements before revealing a collection of user-generated live broadcasts from all over the world. The fact that it is endless and unpredictable makes it addictive.

This format is something different than on-demand TV (think of Netflix), a concept that caused a lot of suffer to specialised traditional channels, not to mention the old generic traditional channels.

Traditional channels might get a space over there, maybe in the future they can also have the option to pay in order to gain prominent visibility, but they will always face competition of a potential army constituted by more than a billion users that can broadcast whatever they feel (or need), anytime, (almost) anywhere. Advertising is not interrupting the show, but is just “sustaining” it, or in the future it might be just the show. A different model, much less invasive and able to target users with unprecedented precision in the television industry.

Users can choose what and when the big brother can watch, but there is always a small brother hidden inside algorithms that knows what’s in the shadow, often more relevant for marketing than what’s publicly shown.

Geography is the channel and content is random. There could be a leak from a Bilderberg meeting, a pre-recorded footage, a real-time suicide, sex, cheating, violence, a baby that is just born, one who is dying, a natural disaster, a revolution, in involution, the biggest lie ever that will cause a revolution or just bullshit, most of the time – useful material for contemporary anthropologists. What’s the next show?

Facebook to discard Conversion Tracking Pixel in the second half of 2016

3 March 2016/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, Facebook /by Paolo Margari

All digital advertisers that are currently using Facebook Conversion Tracking pixels have to move to Facebook Pixel by the second half of 2016.

Facebook pixel is a better solution for both building Custom Audiences (e.g. remarketing) and tracking any conversion (see image).

Custom Audience pixel will remain. However, it is advised to move to the new Pixel that enables to build everything.

The FB pixel can be implemented through Google Tag Manager or other tag management services, covering all pages of the website(s) along the customer journey.

There is no need to create and implement multiple Pixels as one can be shared among different Facebook Ad Accounts. Consequently, Custom Audiences and Custom Conversions can be created directly into each Ad Account according to specific needs.

* the Conversion tracking pixel will be disabled by the second half of 2016 as announced by #Facebook.

How to re-target LinkedIn users through other channels

16 February 2016/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, Facebook, Google Adwords, Social Media Marketing /by Paolo Margari

Ok, this method might break some rule, but it can be an effective solution for specific goals, like a very focused lead generation campaign. Let’s imagine that your goal is to reach outside LinkedIn, some workers of a few competitors based in country x or y, or anyone that studied at university z.

Just follow these steps:

(alternative/1: choose this at your risk) Create a fake user profile on LinkedIn, possibly a high profile consultant;
(alternative/2) use your real profile;
If you go for alternative 1, you need to get new friends: define your target audience and add LinkedIn users through the most appropriate search fields (industry, company, country, etc.);
Dig into LinkedIn Groups
(extra/1) you can extend your contact list by joining the most relevant and popular LinkedIn groups that are related to your audience(s) industry and adding people that actively engage in conversation over there;
Chase people suggested
(extra/2) you might further extend the list by adding people suggested by LinkedIn, if having profiles matching your target audience;
Export your contact list from LinkedIn
Once you reach a certain amount of contacts (let’s say at least 300), export the contact list from #LinkedIn to a CSV format file, format it through a spreadsheet software using the function “text-to-column”, choosing comma as delimiter and save a new CSV file with just a column of emails;
Split the contact list to create different targets
(extra/3) Let’s suppose that you want to target all HR people of company X but you want to advertise in French and German, depending on where are they based. In this case, you can split the list into many by selecting specific job titles, country and/or company, the only fields relevant for such purpose, to create multiple remarketing lists (see next steps) but only if the sub-lists contains enough contacts;
Create a remarketing list on Adwords

On Google Adwords go to Shared Library, then Audiences, then select Customer Email and upload the CSV (one or many). Choose the duration up to 6 months, the time that your LinkedIn contacts will be able to be targeted with your textual and visual ads through the Google Display Network (that includes sites like Gmail and Youtube).
Create a Customer List on Facebook Ads
On Facebook Ads, select Audiences, then Custom Audience and import the CSV file(s) – you will be able to target LinkedIn users also through Instagram (if they have an account).

Important Notes

if the list is too small you cannot do any remarketing: the list should contain at least 100 contacts;
this operation implies serious privacy issues (therefore, take at your risk) in fact, target contacts should be previously and adequately informed about this (either if you choose option 1=fake profile or 2=real profile).

Opportunities

you can extend the list by using Lookalike audience on Facebook (with a similarity percentage from 0% to 10%) and Similar users on Adwords: this is an excellent opportunity in particular if your target audience is the right one;
if you want to target LinkedIn users on Gmail, just add mail.google.com as Placement and the domain of companies that might send them an email as Display Keyword.

Twitter is going to broaden its ads audience

26 December 2015/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing /by Paolo Margari

Twitter is going to broaden its ads audience. One of the reasons why Twitter has often been rejected as an advertising channel (sometimes also in our organisation) is that reach is was limited to users who are logged in into the platform.

However, the number of tweets’ readers are way more than Twitter users (it’s estimated around 700m), so this move is expected to bring new business to #Twitter and new opportunities for advertisers/business eager to reach a qualified audience.

There’s no mention about targeting options yet but probably, being impossible to segment anonymous un-logged readers, targeting should be similar to Youtube, based on tweets topic (or maybe even keywords and hashtags to narrow down the target).

Find out more about Testing Promoted Tweets on our logged-out experience.

Key Elements of a Digital Marketing Agency Proposal

5 November 2015/0 Comments/in Digital Marketing, Tutorials /by Paolo Margari

What elements a client expects to see in a digital marketing agency proposal for a campaign aimed at promoting a certain product? Find out the essential elements here.

You will get a better idea about questions should be answered by the proposal, an ideal structure to adopt and some details that you might want to outline.

Posts

Enhance your social media dataset to build insightful KPI’s from Paolo Margari

Dig into LinkedIn Groups

Chase people suggested

Export your contact list from LinkedIn

Split the contact list to create different targets

Create a remarketing list on Adwords

Create a Customer List on Facebook Ads

Important Notes

Opportunities