When it comes down to pitching a brand to the public, digital marketers have a lot of work to do before the campaign is officially launched. First, you have to decide who the public is in the first place, and then you have to define a strategy to determine the right rhetoric to use with them. In today’s digital age, what we’re really talking about is keywords. Here are a number of great keyword tools to make the digital marketer’s job a little easier.
It all begins with data
Social media insights
Social Report is a tool to, in its own words, “engage, monitor, and measure” the data that social media can offer. Among other features, it affords a digital marketer detailed analytics, a scheduler for posting to social media platforms, a topic tracker, code snippets to measure ROI, a write-up of full reports, team management, API for your team’s coders to play with, and more. The reason this falls into the realm of keyword tools is because it’s intrinsically linked with the process whereby you gauge the nature of your audience.
Competitor Analysis
No data is complete without a detailed analysis of competitors. To this purpose there are many useful tools out there for the digital marketer. To wet your palette, you can start with these:
Use these crafty tools to scope out competitors’ websites. You’ll find out which keywords they’re targeting, how they’re ranking, what kind of content is most shareable, and so on. When you’re done digging, you can start thinking more intently about your own keywords.
Taking advantage of those long-tail keywords
We’ve written about keyword research before, so you may recall the term “long-tail keywords”. These comprise all those keyword chains that have been proven to bring greater conversion rates than the heavy-hitter keywords that make up only 10% of all queries. Usually they are developed with a particular niche in mind, making them more concise and less competitive. The best tools for figuring out powerful long-tail keywords are Ubersuggest (free) and Grepwords (min 15 dollars per month). With these powerful tools you can plan your content strategy to target all the keyword phrases you were unaware of.
Why use synonyms as keywords
Digital marketers and SEO professionals are always keen to read up on the newest Google updates. So far, every time we see a Google search algorithm patch, it’s clear that the company is trying to make search more intuitive and less dependent on keywords and links. Today, semantic phrases and synonyms of keywords and keyword chains are just as important as the keywords themselves.
Google’s Knowledge Graph is a massive database that describes connections between topics. Digital marketers can use the Google Freebase Tool to search this database. Unfortunately, Google recently announced that they’re closing down Freebase in March 2015, but hopefully we’ll continue to see a similar tool available in updated forms.
Another good, free tool for LSI keyword research is Ultimate Keyword Hunter. ‘LSI’ stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, which is essentially what Google Knowledge Graph is known for. This tool is a great alternative to the former if you need to figure out synonyms for your main keyword phrases.
SEMrush is one of the most popular keyword research tools out there, and it’s no surprise that they’re on the ball when it comes to synonym research. Although the premium version will cost you 79 bucks a month, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a digital marketer who wasn’t impressed by it.
These are a few tools that digital marketers use to save themselves countless hours of independent brainstorming. If you can’t imagine how you’d use them now, you will soon. These are tricks of the trade you won’t want to pass up.
Header photo by plenty.r. on flickr. Embed image by Kangrex on flickr.
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