Important Factors When Choosing SEO Software for Your Online Businesses

Every online entrepreneur or blogger needs a piece of good SEO software at some point of their career. What for? Well, without any kind of tool you’re not going to be able to recognize possible opportunities or areas of improvement.

A good piece of software gives you a visual representation of both your niche’s and site’s characteristics. And I’m sure you are aware that knowing where you stand is the first step towards any kind of advancement.

What follows is a guest post by James from findthebest.com, in which he talks about the most important traits of your software of choice. By the way, just a couple of days ago I’ve published a review of Market Samurai – which is the tool I’m using every day, check it out.

Enter James

According to social media experts, 57% of companies have acquired customers through their company blog and 67% of marketing executives say Facebook even provided customers.

Though these numbers are telling, they also show that an online presence –  whether it’s a blog, a twitter page or a highly optimized website – isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessary survival mechanism in today’s digital jungle.

Many marketing and optimizing tasks are necessary to reach your site’s intended audience. Optimizing your website is also tedious, costly, and time consuming if you utilize an expensive SEO company or manually research keywords, instead of employing some SEO software to facilitate your research.

Starting and maintaining an internet marketing campaign will require an excruciating amount of work without any software that allows you to analyze and optimize not only your own site, but the markets in which you are competing.

For starters, keyword features generated by different kinds of SEO software show what people are searching for, allowing you to target the right words and capture your intended audience.

Important Features

Here is a list of the major key features and their definitions that a quality SEO software should offer:

1. Estimating Monetization Value determines how much revenue could be generated in a successful SEO marketing campaign. This will give you a good way to weigh the costs and benefits of attempting to reach a specific audience.
2. (Find Sites with) Keyword in Title allows you to find competitors and other relevant websites in your industry. This goes much more in-depth than your standard search, allowing you to discover additional resources and up-and-coming competitors.
3. Keyword Density Analysis uses the percentage of pertinent keywords found on a page to determine a website’s competitiveness and relevance.
4. Rank Tracking displays site ranks for a given keyword as well as your SEO ranking over time. This is very important in tracking your performance especially at a keyword-specific level.
5. ROI Prioritization Tools allow you to better organize your time to target keywords of greater monetization value.
6. Estimate Search Traffic creates detailed traffic analysis for keywords under different parameters and many times it will suggest high-traffic synonyms/typos as well.

With the utilization of each of these features, the more pertinent and valuable your marketing efforts will become.

Analytical Features

Site analysis is the other major category of features a good piece of SEO software should include. With these features you can analyze your own site to find errors and impediments to your rankings. The features below also allow you to discover, examine and track competitors’ online marketing strategies and SEO approaches as well.

The major site analysis features are:

1. Automated Competitor Website Audits identifies your competitor’s keywords and site architecture to help you better understand their marketing and strategy.
2. Automated Subdomain Analysis checks the optimization and viability of your subdomains as well as offer suggestions and locate subdomain errors
3. Finding bad and dead links allows you to make your site more user and search engine-friendly.
4. Class C Checking can determine what domains are hosted in your same Class C IP range which can be important as these sites are thought to be more heavily weighted in terms of SEO.
5. Domain Age can be important to analyze the effect of site maturity on rankings.
6. HTML Validation will check your HTML for syntax errors.
7. Spider Simulation simulates a search engine crawling your site, so you can see how (and if) your pages are indexed.
8. Term Extraction analyzes a page in order to determine the keywords that it is targeting. This feature is useful in determining competitor strategy.

Deciding which of these features you want to utilize will help you decide on the best SEO software available to you, based on the features offered by a particular program.

While all these features can seem overwhelming at first, usually they are integrated seamlessly inside various tools, which saves time by creating an in-depth analysis of your site and marketing efforts. Using SEO software effectively can be a great way for you to compete on the same level with professional marketers and increase your site’s visibility.

About the author: James Resetco does Business Development for FindTheBest, the unbiased and data-driven comparison website. He is also a Business Economics student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.