There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.

We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.

And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.

Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.

That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), in partnership with IHS Global Insight, studied U.S. mobile marketing expenditures and their impact on sales for the “Mobile Marketing Impact Study,” released in May. The study found that this year spending on mobile marketing — including mobile advertising, mobile customer-relationship management and mobile direct-response marketing on non-mobile media — will reach $10.46 billion. By 2015, spending on the channel will approach $20 billion.

All of that sounds great, but what it does it mean for actual sales and leads generated? Well, quite a lot actually.

InsightExpress found that in 2013, mobile and tablet advertising got strong results across brand health metrics, raising ad awareness, purchase intent and brand favorability. Tablets performed particularly well.

The below chart breaks down how mobile marketing performs across several critical brand metrics.

While there is still quite a ways to go before mobile marketing becomes a true customer-acquisition channel, the key metrics are moving in the right direction. For performance marketers, where consumer purchase intent is crucial, this is a welcomed sign.

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Much of the recent talk in the online marketing world has centered around the emerging concept of SoLoMoCo. For the uninitiated, that stands for SOcial LOcal MObile COmmerce. Boiled down to its most basic parts, this funny looking acronym encapsulates the future of digital marketing: everything social, everything local and everything mobile.

It’s with that perspective in mind that a recent report issued by the Local Search Association (look them up here) caught my eye. The report finds that nearly half (48% to be precise) of mobile phone owners use their device to look for local information.

The Local Search Association findings point to the increased role that smartphones and tablets are increasingly playing for the search industry in the United States. In particular, the report points to the need for marketers to view mobile at a local level.

From local search and SEO, to local mobile (what we at MediaWhiz call “LoMo”), online marketing is becoming more targeted and geo-specific. That presents huge opportunities to marketers that wisely find ways to blend their traditional and mobile SEO campaigns to achieve comprehensive search results.

As my colleague Marc Purtell, MediaWhiz’s director of SEO, attests, the future of SEO is local mobile.

Search marketers need to cater to consumers regardless of the device they use.

Mobile can no longer thought of as a separate search component. Running a comprehensive search and SEO strategy that targets users on all devices opens up several new opportunities, among them:

1. Ranking for mobile-specific searches
2. Using Google’s mobile-specific search content index
3. Tapping into local

Need help with your local mobile search campaign? MediaWhiz is here to help! Learn more about MediaWhiz Mobile, our mobile performance marketing practice, here.

How is your brand adapting to the local mobile search/SEO era? 

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What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.

According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.

These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10^th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.

What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities?

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What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.

That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.

About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services

MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!

We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.

By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers.

Must-Have Information

MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at the APSCU Convention and Expo, June 5-7, at Rosen Shingle Creek resort, Orlando, Fla.

Meet us at booth #708.

Contact Kristen Pulver for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the show.

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By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO

It’s not uncommon in today’s SEO landscape to wake up and find a sudden drop of organic search traffic and/or keyword rankings. When such a disaster occurs, most large brands have access to a qualified SEO agency or robust in-house team to identify and rectify any issues that led to the drops. For smaller brands with limited budget allocated to SEO, this could mean the end of the organic search channel as a driver of business.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I explore in a new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools,” there are a variety of excellent free SEO tools that marketers can use to analyze the situation and identify the problem and solution.

By taking advantage of the intelligence that is available for free, brands with low budgets can recover from SEO issues in order to return to leveraging the organic search channel as a revenue generator. Below is a review of three such SEO tools.

 RELATED: 3 Free SEO Tools for Auditing and Troubleshooting Onsite Issues

Google Webmaster Tools

An invaluable resource for SEO experts and webmasters alike, Google Webmaster Tools suite provides insight into the overall health of a website and explicitly points out many issues that can negatively affect a site’s organic search health.

Getting started is as simple as signing up for a Google account and verifying ownership of the website in question by adding either a verification file to the website’s server – including a verification meta tag on the homepage – or signing in to the site’s domain name provider.

This tool is provided by Google at no charge so there is no excuse for any website to not have an account.

Once a Google Webmaster Tools account is active, upon logging in Google will provide a list of recent alerts for each website being managed under the account. This is the first place to look for any issues that may have caused a loss of performance. More information on the issues identified as well as a list of recommended actions can be seen by clicking on “View details”.

If there are no alerts or if the recommended actions from the alerts do not remedy the issue, the next place to look is in the “Health” section within the Google Webmaster Tools interface using the left sidebar navigation. There are several reports in the Health section, including Crawl Stats, Blocked URLs, Fetch as Google, Index Status and Malware.

The Crawl Stats report is very useful in troubleshooting because it provides both a list of URLs that return errors and a timeline showing the total number of errors found on a day-to-day basis. This timeline can help pinpoint the day things went awry if there is a sudden increase in errors detected. For example, if a recent change to the website caused a number of pages to return server errors, that could definitely account for the loss of organic traffic.

The Index Status report is another useful tool in troubleshooting on-site issues that can cause decreased traffic and keyword rankings. Reviewing the timeline for sudden changes in the number of Web pages Google has indexed can provide insight into exactly when these changes occurred so they can be attributed to on-site changes or search engine algorithm updates.

Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of additional information, reports, alerts, recommendations and analyses that can not only help identify recent issues, but ensure maintenance of a healthy website going forward and is constantly being updated with increased capabilities.

Screaming Frog

In order to fully understand how a website is capable of performing in organic search, it’s important to understand exactly what search engines will find when their spiders crawl the site. The best way to do so is by running one’s own crawl of the website. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a desktop program that can do just that – for free.

Crawling a website with Screaming Frog returns a vast amount of data and is capable of identifying server errors, duplicate content, broken links, etc. that may not have been reported in Google Webmaster Tools.

After downloading the desktop program, simply run it by entering the URL of the homepage and clicking “Start”. The crawl will return various data points, segmented out of different tabs. For example, the “Internal” tab will list all internal pages linked from the page that was inputted, along with the status code. This makes it very easy to find broken internal links so they can be fixed immediately.

Similarly, the “External” tab, will list all outbound links along with the status code. This will inform broken outbound links and more importantly links to pages that are redirecting. It’s good practice to see where those URLs are redirecting to because there is potential for them to redirect to bad neighborhood sites (i.e., adult content, gambling, pharmaceuticals, etc.), which could reflect negatively on the website in question.

The “Page Titles” and “Meta Descriptions” tabs can help pinpoint duplicate content issues by identifying duplicate title tags and meta description tags, respectively. If duplicate tags are identified, there is potential that the on-page content of those URLs is also duplicate.

Even if performance issues have not occurred on a website, it’s always a good idea to run regularly scheduled (i.e., monthly) Screaming Frog crawls simply to ensure there are no new problems that could lead to performance issues down the road.

BrowSEO

While Screaming Frog is useful for looking at a website as a whole and identifying server errors, and duplicate meta tags, it’s also important to understand exactly what a search engine spider sees when it crawls each page.

BrowSEO Spider Simulator provides a free look into a page as viewed by search engine spiders. In many cases, a webpage may have great information for users, but that information may not be visible to search engines. Therefore, the page does not get any credit for it by the search engines.

BrowSEO is very easy to use. Simply input the URL of a webpage and click “Browse”. The tool will return two columns: a left-hand column containing each page element as it would be seen by a search engine spider (i.e., images, image alt tags, links, body copy, etc.); and a right-hand column that provides details about the various page elements (i.e., server response, word counts, character counts, meta tags, heading tags, etc.).

Compare the spider simulation of the page to the actual version a user sees. If there is any important content visible to users but not spiders, the page is likely not being credited for that content and there is missed opportunity for organic search performance.

When using BrowSEO for troubleshooting something like a traffic drop, a useful feature is the “Check for Cloaking-Attempt” available from the “Check for fraud” link in the right column. Cloaking will often exist on a page inadvertently, leading to search engine penalties. This feature compares the version of the page a spider sees to the version a user sees to ensure there is no cloaking being performed on the page.

What are your favorite free SEO tools for auditing and troubleshooting onsite SEO issues? Share your recommendations in the comments.

Want more insight like this? Download our new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools” today. 

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MediaWhiz Senior Vice President of Media Services Peter Klein is a fount of information about performance marketing. Especially affiliate marketing. The guy loves affiliate marketing. The good kind, of course. Not the fraud-based affiliate marketing of the past. That kind of junk pains him. It

It’s with this perspective in mind that I recently sat down with Pete, who oversees MediaWhiz’s affiliate marketing business, to discuss a topic that he is particularly passionate about: launching performance marketing campaigns. damages the industry’s reputation, he says, and makes it harder for reputable affiliate networks, such as MonetizeIt, the MediaWhiz affiliate network, to earn the trust and business of today’s digitally savvy CMO.

Pete’s so passionate and informed about this topic, in fact, that he’s written an eBook on it called “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.” You can download a free copy here.

Download the Free eBook

Recently, I asked Peter to describe how marketers can launch their own performance marketing campaign. Here he outlines the five steps every marketer needs to take to launch a successful performance marketing campaign:

Step 1: Define Your Goal

Defining the goal is important because in most cases campaigns fail because there is no strategic goal in place. What are your goals? Are you interested in generating leads or interested in generating sales? It’s best to figure out what your desired outcome is and have a defined goal that you will be targeting for the campaign.

Step 2: Choose the Right Affiliate Network

I highly recommend conducting thorough due diligence when searching for an affiliate network, just like you would with any other business partner. Make sure you figure out how long they have been in business. What kinds of support team is in place? What verticals do they specialize in? Learn the affiliate network’s financial background and history.

All of those factors are important when figuring what affiliate network you want to work with. Once that is done, it’s best to start with one affiliate network because it will allow for a smaller budget at the start of the campaign. Get some success under your belt with a small affiliate campaign and then start branching out and expanding your campaign with multiple affiliate networks.

Step 3: Plan the Media Mix

The beauty of a media mix with performance marketing is that you have access to so many different media channels like social, mobile, display, search, email, incentivize, co-registration and so much more. The list goes on-and-on.

Make sure you know how much money you want to spend and what channels you want to test. After picking your channels invest between $5,000-$10,000 in each channel. Based on your results, either hone in and remove channels that didn’t work or expand into other channels.

Step 4: Monitor the Campaign

Once your performance marketing campaign has launched you must follow the key objectives and needs of your campaign. There are compliance issues and regulations that could arise. It’s important to ensure every aspect of your campaign – and the work of your performance marketing agency or affiliate network – is compliant and that your brand integrity is being maintained and accurately represented within the marketplace. It’s also important to ensure results are trending in the right direction, your budget is being filled in a proper manner and your key performance indicators are being hit.

Step 5: Optimize

Optimizing your performance marketing campaign comes down to looking at all your media spend and making sure that within each channel you are paying appropriately for the leads. Some quality sources might be fantastic and you might want to pay more for those leads in order to bring in a larger volume. Other quality sources might be poor but will still viable. In that case, you may want to pay less for those leads. Really focus on optimizing to hit your target return on investment.

To get a more detailed description about affiliate marketing and how to start your own affiliate marketing campaign download our free guide, “The CMO’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing.”  To keep up to date on all things MediaWhiz follow us on Twitter @MediaWhizInc, like us on Facebook  and follow us on LinkedIn

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With last week’s news of a major affiliate network closing its doors, we wanted to remind you that MonetizeIt, the MediaWhiz affiliate network, remains one of the strongest affiliate networks in the industry. It was just three months ago that mThink ranked MonetizeIt as the No. 5 affiliate network in the world.

We’re rapidly expanding our affiliate network to include new offers in mobile, as well as game and app downloads, dating and entertainment offers. These are in addition to MediaWhiz’s extensive selection of branded campaigns in verticals such as finance, education, health and beauty and insurance.

A full listing of all of our campaigns can be found by logging into MoneitizeIt.com. And if you’re not a MediaWhiz affiliate, what are you waiting for? We’ve made it easier than ever to join our affiliate network and start monetizing your site(s).

Join MonetizeIt today

If one of your affiliate partners or advertisers now finds themselves stranded after this week’s news, please send them our way. We welcome their business, as we can offer substantial scale and reach, a full range of verticals, international presence, financial strength and a strong reputation in the industry.

As always, any business you refer to MonetizeIt will earn you a 3% lifetime referral bonus. So don’t delay! Talk to your affiliate partners and advertisers today and ask them to join MonetizeIt.

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The post As Google Closes Its Affiliate Network, We’re Expanding Ours appeared first on MediaWhiz.

By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO

It’s not uncommon in today’s SEO landscape to wake up and find a sudden drop of organic search traffic and/or keyword rankings. When such a disaster occurs, most large brands have access to a qualified SEO agency or robust in-house team to identify and rectify any issues that led to the drops. For smaller brands with limited budget allocated to SEO, this could mean the end of the organic search channel as a driver of business.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I explore in a new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools,” there are a variety of excellent free SEO tools that marketers can use to analyze the situation and identify the problem and solution.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK

By taking advantage of the intelligence that is available for free, brands with low budgets can recover from SEO issues in order to return to leveraging the organic search channel as a revenue generator. Below is a review of three such SEO tools.

RELATED: 3 Free SEO Tools for Identifying Target Keywords

Google Webmaster Tools

An invaluable resource for SEO experts and webmasters alike, Google Webmaster Tools suite provides insight into the overall health of a website and explicitly points out many issues that can negatively affect a site’s organic search health.

Getting started is as simple as signing up for a Google account and verifying ownership of the website in question by adding either a verification file to the website’s server – including a verification meta tag on the homepage – or signing in to the site’s domain name provider.

This tool is provided by Google at no charge so there is no excuse for any website to not have an account.

Once a Google Webmaster Tools account is active, upon logging in Google will provide a list of recent alerts for each website being managed under the account. This is the first place to look for any issues that may have caused a loss of performance. More information on the issues identified as well as a list of recommended actions can be seen by clicking on “View details”.

If there are no alerts or if the recommended actions from the alerts do not remedy the issue, the next place to look is in the “Health” section within the Google Webmaster Tools interface using the left sidebar navigation. There are several reports in the Health section, including Crawl Stats, Blocked URLs, Fetch as Google, Index Status and Malware.

The Crawl Stats report is very useful in troubleshooting because it provides both a list of URLs that return errors and a timeline showing the total number of errors found on a day-to-day basis. This timeline can help pinpoint the day things went awry if there is a sudden increase in errors detected. For example, if a recent change to the website caused a number of pages to return server errors, that could definitely account for the loss of organic traffic.

The Index Status report is another useful tool in troubleshooting on-site issues that can cause decreased traffic and keyword rankings. Reviewing the timeline for sudden changes in the number of Web pages Google has indexed can provide insight into exactly when these changes occurred so they can be attributed to on-site changes or search engine algorithm updates.

Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of additional information, reports, alerts, recommendations and analyses that can not only help identify recent issues, but ensure maintenance of a healthy website going forward and is constantly being updated with increased capabilities.

Screaming Frog

In order to fully understand how a website is capable of performing in organic search, it’s important to understand exactly what search engines will find when their spiders crawl the site. The best way to do so is by running one’s own crawl of the website. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a desktop program that can do just that – for free.

Crawling a website with Screaming Frog returns a vast amount of data and is capable of identifying server errors, duplicate content, broken links, etc. that may not have been reported in Google Webmaster Tools.

After downloading the desktop program, simply run it by entering the URL of the homepage and clicking “Start”. The crawl will return various data points, segmented out of different tabs. For example, the “Internal” tab will list all internal pages linked from the page that was inputted, along with the status code. This makes it very easy to find broken internal links so they can be fixed immediately.

Similarly, the “External” tab, will list all outbound links along with the status code. This will inform broken outbound links and more importantly links to pages that are redirecting. It’s good practice to see where those URLs are redirecting to because there is potential for them to redirect to bad neighborhood sites (i.e., adult content, gambling, pharmaceuticals, etc.), which could reflect negatively on the website in question.

The “Page Titles” and “Meta Descriptions” tabs can help pinpoint duplicate content issues by identifying duplicate title tags and meta description tags, respectively. If duplicate tags are identified, there is potential that the on-page content of those URLs is also duplicate.

Even if performance issues have not occurred on a website, it’s always a good idea to run regularly scheduled (i.e., monthly) Screaming Frog crawls simply to ensure there are no new problems that could lead to performance issues down the road.

BrowSEO

While Screaming Frog is useful for looking at a website as a whole and identifying server errors, and duplicate meta tags, it’s also important to understand exactly what a search engine spider sees when it crawls each page.

BrowSEO Spider Simulator provides a free look into a page as viewed by search engine spiders. In many cases, a webpage may have great information for users, but that information may not be visible to search engines. Therefore, the page does not get any credit for it by the search engines.

BrowSEO is very easy to use. Simply input the URL of a webpage and click “Browse”. The tool will return two columns: a left-hand column containing each page element as it would be seen by a search engine spider (i.e., images, image alt tags, links, body copy, etc.); and a right-hand column that provides details about the various page elements (i.e., server response, word counts, character counts, meta tags, heading tags, etc.).

Compare the spider simulation of the page to the actual version a user sees. If there is any important content visible to users but not spiders, the page is likely not being credited for that content and there is missed opportunity for organic search performance.

When using BrowSEO for troubleshooting something like a traffic drop, a useful feature is the “Check for Cloaking-Attempt” available from the “Check for fraud” link in the right column. Cloaking will often exist on a page inadvertently, leading to search engine penalties. This feature compares the version of the page a spider sees to the version a user sees to ensure there is no cloaking being performed on the page.

What are your favorite free SEO tools for auditing and troubleshooting onsite SEO issues? Share your recommendations in the comments.

Want more insight like this? Download our new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools” today. 

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The post 3 Free SEO Tools for Auditing and Troubleshooting Onsite Issues appeared first on MediaWhiz.

By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO

Choosing the right target keywords builds the foundation for an entire SEO campaign. If the right keywords with the highest potential for return are not selected, the foundation of the campaign will be weak and, therefore, success is nearly impossible.

In order to select the right keywords, data must be collected and analyzed so projections on return can be made. Gathering the necessary data, however, can be expensive and many businesses will not invest in best-of-breed SEO tools.

For those with limited budgets and without access to paid SEO tools, impactful keyword data is not out of reach. There are plenty of data sources and tools that can be used for free or offer free versions. By leveraging several free tools, advertisers can generate enough information to make informed decisions on keyword targets and set themselves up for successful SEO campaigns.

Below are three such tools. In subsequent posts, I will examine the best free SEO tools for auditing, troubleshooting and gaining competitive intelligence. For a full account of the 10 best free SEO tools, download MediaWhiz’s new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools.”

DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

The first step in choosing the right keywords is to understand what keywords consumers are searching and the demand of each of those keywords. This data can be determined using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In order to gain full access to the data you need to sign up for an Adwords account. You do not need to set up any campaigns or spend any advertising money.

There are three main ways to find relevant keywords using this tool, including inputting the website or page that is to be optimized, the category of the products or services the website offers, or a seed list of keywords related to those products or services. Before researching the keywords, however, it is important to implement the correct settings. Since we are looking for specific keywords that the market is searching, we want to analyze at the demand of exact match keywords rather than variations. In order to see the demand (search volume) of the keywords, use the “Match Types” option in the right sidebar and select [Exact].

The first way to identify keywords is to input the domain or page you are trying to optimize. Google will crawl the website and return a list of suggestions based on the content. For example, if you are looking for keywords relevant to www.MediaWhiz.com, you would enter the domain into the Website field and click the Search button for a list of relevant keywords. Once results are returned, be sure to select the Keyword ideas tab as opposed to the Ad group ideas tab. This will provide a comprehensive list of keywords with associated search volume. This can also be done using the domains of direct competitors.

For keywords related to a specific page, simply input the URL of the page rather than the domain into the tool for a list of keywords specific to that page.

The second way to identify relevant keywords is by selecting the category. In this instance you would input the category of the products or services offered instead of a domain or URL. For example, if the service offered is “marketing,” you would select the “Advertising & Marketing” category in the Category field and click Search. This is not always the best use of this keyword tool, however, because the categories are often very general and some categories are not available.

The third and most common way to leverage the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is to input a list of seed keywords (typically the names of the products or services offered) into the Word or phrase field. This will return a list of popular searches related to those seed keywords.

Google Analytics

Another method of identifying potential keyword targets is to look at the phrases that are already generating organic traffic to a website. This gives insight into the possibility to increase that traffic via optimization. Using Google Analytics, advertisers can review the keywords that are driving traffic organically to a website. Of course, having a Web analytics platform in today’s digital marketing world is essential for many reasons and this is just one. There are many good analytics platforms, some of which have very high price tags. The standard version of Google Analytics is, in my opinion, just as useful as any other platform, with the only difference being it is free of cost.

The keywords driving organic traffic can be seen in Google Analytics using the Organic Search Traffic report. This can be found by navigating the following sequence within the right sidebar: Traffic Sources>Sources>Search>Organic.

In order to see the specific keywords generating traffic, ensure “Keyword” is selected as the Primary Dimension.

This report will pull up the keyword level organic traffic metrics for the time period specified. It’s recommended to look at a minimum of the last three months of data. If the business is seasonal, look at the time period reflective of high season.

Since this provides a list of keywords that are already sending traffic to the website, it is often the case that this traffic is generated because the keywords have some organic presence in one or more search engines. Optimizing against those keywords provides the opportunity to rank higher in the search engines in which the site is already ranking as well as infiltrating the organic results of additional search engines. Make a list of non-branded keywords from this report for further investigation. This may include inputting keywords into the Adwords Keyword Tool mentioned above to check the demand and into the Rank Checker tool mentioned below to see where the website is currently ranking.

There are some other important metrics to look at when determining target keywords for an SEO campaign. This analytics report also gives insight into engagement factors, such as bounce rate and average visit duration at the keyword level. By focusing on keywords with low bounce rates and a good amount of time spent on the site, the campaign will be focused not only on the keywords most likely to drive traffic, but also to drive visitors that are likely to perform an action on the site.

Rank Checker

Finally, when starting a new SEO campaign, especially with a small budget, it is helpful to identify and target the low-hanging fruit. A good strategy is to target keywords that a website already ranks for but are not yet in a position capable of garnering strong results. Oftentimes, a website will rank low on page 1 or on page 2 for a strategic keyword without any optimization effort. By implementing an optimization plan for those keywords, the website can often quickly move up the ranks into a position that will garner strong results.

There are many paid tools to track keyword rankings but there is an excellent free tool that allows users to check the rankings of up to 100 keywords on the fly. Rank Checker is a Firefox extension that can be downloaded after signing up for a free SEOBook account. Once downloaded, Rank Checker is available via an icon located at the bottom right of the Firefox browser.

The usefulness of Rank Checker for keyword targeting comes in conjunction with other tools for keyword discovery such as the Adwords Keyword Tool or Google Analytics. After using those tools to identify lists of potential keyword targets, it’s easy to find some low hanging fruit using Rank Checker.

The first step is to set the options by right clicking the Rank Checker icon at the bottom right of Firefox and selecting “Options”.

You can opt-in to check the rankings of your keywords in Yahoo and Bing as well as two different country-specific versions of Google simultaneously. The country-specific versions of Google and Yahoo can be selected using the drop-downs. Finally, in most cases you will want to check off the “Don’t use Google personalized search results if any” option to get an idea of where the site ranks in general, not using your browsing history.

Now you’re ready to run Rank Checker. Simply add your domain and keyword list (up to 100 keywords at a time) and usually within about a minute you will have the rankings. Look for high-value keywords that the site is already ranking low on page 1 or on page 2 or 3 to see what low-hanging fruit is available. The fact that the site is already ranking on one of the top pages shows there is already some authority for that keyword that can be built upon. These are typically quick-win keywords.

The above tools are my recommendations as three of the best free SEO keyword resources marketers can find. In my next post, I will analyze free SEO auditing and troubleshooting tools.

What are your favorite free SEO tools for identifying target keywords? Share your recommendations in the comments.

Want more insight like this? Download our new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools” today. 

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The post 3 Free SEO Tools for Identifying Target Keywords appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Today, we’re releasing a new eBook in our growing stable of Insights reports (read them all here). Titled, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools,” the report outlines our top picks for the best free SEO tools and resources marketers can use to identify target keywords, audit and troubleshoot onsite SEO issues and gain competitive intelligence.

Below is a snippet of the many useful insights you’ll find inside the eBook. Download your free copy to find more.

Download the Free eBook

Performance in organic search engine marketing requires an investment. Depending on the goals of a search engine optimization campaign, that investment can be quite substantial. Budget often must be allocated strategically in order to stretch it enough for success.

Part of the investment in any SEO campaign goes toward tools that help brands analyze data, strategize and track results. To do so, marketers need a bevy of tools and resources.

This is an area in which marketers can be frugal, if necessary. There are hundreds of great paid search marketing tools that will help generate a strong return from an SEO campaign. If budget must be used sparingly, however, there are ways around paying for high-end tools.

This report analyzes the best free tools marketers can use to track and measure the success of their SEO campaigns, troubleshoot problems, gain important competitive intelligence and plan for future SEO success.

Key Takeaways

1. Using a free tool or combination of free tools can often eliminate the need to invest in a paid search marketing or SEO tool.
2. SEO tools are important in selecting the right keywords to target in an SEO campaign.
3. Troubleshooting on-site SEO issues becomes much easier with access to the right tools.
4. Competitive intelligence tools can be a great asset for building a successful SEO strategy.

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