The most difficult thing to do in digital marketing is getting a full understanding of whether you're performing well or not. There are so many factors to consider when trying to gauge your online success. These include backlinks, website speed, and on-page content. If you're starting a business or have an existing business, you have to find the tools and assets that will allow you to measure your success.
Google has a ton of tools for you to fully understand everything to do with your website. These include Google Analytics, Google Ads and Google Search Consoles. But what about other tools outside of the Google world that you can use? Well, today's your lucky day! I'm going to be walking you through the tools that I use as an Account Manager at TechWyse on a daily basis outside of Google to gauge the success of the clients I manage. These tools range from industry news to analytics analysis. The majority of these tools focus on organic optimization, as Google Ads covers everything else you could imagine, yet organic can be hard to measure.
5 Online Success Measurement Tools
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great website to get an idea of what topics people are writing about and the traffic that these pages are getting. It's focused on the content marketing side of the digital world and allows a person to discover, research, and monitor content on a specific topic. The great thing about BuzzSumo is it tells you all the interactions a page is getting for the topic you're looking for. BuzzSumo breaks down the total engagements across all social media platforms. As well, the total number of backlinks the page is getting.
The main reason I use BuzzSumo is to develop Infographic ideas based on the backlink metric. Let's say I look up Invisalign for a dental client. I can see what's ranking and has the most amount of backlinks and turn it into an infographic. If the content is ranking without an infographic, it should perform better with more dynamic content like visuals, especially on social.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best all-encompassing tools a digital marketer could need for gauging online success. It allows a digital marketer to understand how you're doing across all platforms. These range from Google Organic and paid media, to keyword research and competitor analysis. The one major benefit of using Ahrefs is the competitor analysis and keyword research that you can do. The competitor analysis will take a look at the whole site and see how many keywords they rank for, as well as backlinks acquired and the overall quality of the backlink profile. Keyword research allows you to see the search volumes, behaviour trends, and related topics to the keyword.
I use Ahrefs for keyword research and organic ranking positioning. The keyword research functionality is great because it shows you the search volume, click rates, organic vs. paid split, and related keywords. Being able to see all of this data allows you to see what keywords actually have volume. As well, it shows you what you need to do to rank. Organic positioning is great for client management to show what you are ranking for and the movement of their ranking.
GTMetrix/Google Page Insights
GTMetrix is a website that does full website speed evaluation and evaluates what can be improved on. Over the past years, website speed has become more and more important to not just website experience, but Google rankings. This year, Google will be giving websites a badge of shame for those that don't meet the website speed quota. Google does have its own speed evaluator with Google Page Insights. Yet, this only evaluates a single page at a time instead of the whole site.
I use GTMetrix to get the whole picture of how a website is performing and where there's room to improve. It gives an overall grade of the website and the average loading time on the site, which makes it easy for me to see what can be improved on.
Search Engine Journal
The Search Engine Journal is a news website that goes through every level of digital marketing. Everyday Search Engine Journal releases suggestions, industry news, and tutorials 3-4 times a day to read up on. In the mornings, I read a summary of the articles and go through each one. I check to see if anything is new or could be compounded on top of strategies that I'm currently using. Although some of the articles are focused on people in the industry, beginners in the digital marketing game can learn a lot from their beginner tutorials.
Answer The Public
Answer The Public is a visual keyword research and FAQ tool for Google and Bing searches. It allows you to type in a topic or keyword you want more information on. Then, it pulls related keywords and questions people have asked about it. This is a great tool in building an FAQ Schema strategy and voice to search strategy. For my clients, I get the core keywords and pull the top searched questions, then dump them onto their service page. Use Answer The Public to gauge what people are searching for and do your best to answer those questions.
Conclusion
It's obvious that Google has some of the best tools in terms of gauging the success of your online business. However, the tools I mentioned can be used as third party references for your business. They can add to the data from Google Analytics and Ads. If you use the tools mentioned above, you can be on your way to making yourself a complete digital marketer!
