One of the added benefits of SMX West this year was being exposed to an entire panel specifically focusing on Industrial Strength SEO & Analytic Power Tools. There are a wide variety of strong SEO tools currently available on the market, and while it is impossible to test them all, below are four easy to use tools that could be a valuable asset for any hotel marketer.
Tool #1: Authority Lab
What is it? Authority Lab is an online web ranking tool intended for tracking keyword performance for any website across a given period of time.
Figure #1: One unique aspect of Authority Lab includes discovering what additional
channels your keywords list may be saturating (Image, Video, Rich Snippets.
Why use it? While Milestone does not recommend ranking reports as the primary measure of a successful website (primarily due to the personalized and localized nature of search) there are some instances where using a ranking tool can yield some interesting information – in particular when analyzing competitive and industry growth rates.
Figure #2: Example of competitive analysis aspect of Authority Lab.
Tool #3: Cognitive SEO
What is it? Cognitive SEO is a powerful backlink analysis tool that gives hotel owners more strategic insight into all of their website’s backlinks. Users are provided with a visual breakdown of all inbound links as well as key metrics including webpage type, webpage authority & link status (figure #3 below).
Figure #3: Cognitive SEO
Why use it? Hotels can use this tool to ensure that any local backlink they end up purchasing is providing the necessary placement and ROI they had originally intended.
Tools #3 & #4 – Free Google Chrome Plug-ins
Woo Rank: Woo Rank is a SEO plug-in for Chrome that provides a very deep SEO report for any website. Using Woo Rank you can get a complete breakdown of a website’s performance including traffic metrics, social media metrics, a basic breakdown of the websites optimization and much more. If any hotel is in need of a quick and easy breakdown of their website’s performance, Woo Rank is the way to go.
Figure #4: Quickly highlight the most frequently used and strongest performing keywords
of any site using iSEO.
iSEO: Quickly provides users with a list of any website’s most frequently used and strongest performing keywords (i.e. in title, headers, description etc). Using this tool, hotels can quickly perform a competitive keyword analysis on anyone in their comp set.
Figure #5: Quickly highlight the most frequently used and strongest performing
keywords of any site using iSEO.
While each of the tools mentioned above can prove to be a valuable asset to any hotel, they can only be used effectively when the hotel has a strong understanding of the data they are looking at. Always leverage the data as best you can to become more strategic in your existing market or possibly even begin developing a presence in a new market segment.
Speakers:
- Allison Hartsoe, VP Analytics, Semphonic
- Dixon Jones, Director, Majestic SEO
- Dave Lloyd, Manager, Global SEO, Adobe Systems
_____________________
Contributed by: David Addison, eStrategist
