Which SEO Tools Should You Use to Start Ranking Your Content? (2020 SEO Guide)

In this clip, we're gonna talk about the SEO tools that you should use when you are trying to rank your content. So this is part of a series on YouTube on how to grow your SEO traffic faster. So if you're coming from a different channel that's not YouTube, go to our YouTube channel, just type in Leveling Up Eric Siu, and you will find it. And also, don't forget to rate and, well, don't forget to subscribe, I'm sorry, and hit the bell button if you're coming from YouTube, whatever channel you're coming from. So let's talk about this real quick. So before I jump into it, I wanna share a story around SEO tools in general in terms of the things that actually help ranking content. So my thing with tools, when I think about, um, when I think about all the tools I've used in the past, is the very initial thought that I have is, well, there are so many tools out there, so many free tools out there. And I've actually like, I spent so much time actually at one point when I was working at an agency, I became a tool person. I started installing every single new tool. I'm like, We should get this tool. We should get this tool. We should get this tool. So I started adding all these different tools and what I didn't realize was that the tools themselves are not, they're not going to help you get the work done. They're just there to support you. But in terms of doing the actual work, that has to be you doing it. So the tools are there to kind of enhance how you do work. But ultimately at the end of the day, if you think the tools are going to help shortcut things for you in terms of doing the actual work for you, that's not going to happen. So let me give you an example. I remember I was using a tool called Search Engine Cockpit, and there's another one called SEO PowerSuite. So these are, I think they're still relevant tools nowadays. And I actually installed different rank trackers too. So I had, you know, I was using Raven Tools, I was using another rank tracker over here. I actually, there's so much redundancies. I actually had, I think at one point I had 4 or 5 rank trackers. And what I started to realize there was like, I only need one rank tracker. I only need one reporting tool. I only need one of this, one of that. So Like at the end of the day, you want to consolidate. You don't want to overdo it when it comes to tools because what started happening was I spent so much time onboarding myself on every single tool that that actually distracted me from actually getting the work done. So what you want to do is nail it down to a couple of tools, a couple of key tools, core tools, and you don't want to make the mistake wasting all the time that I wasted. So what I'm going to provide to you here in the next video, this is actually coming from the Leveling Up Marketing training that we have for individuals and teams. This is just a piece of it. Um, and basically you can check it out. Um, if you want to learn more about that, by the way, it's singlegrain.com/leveling-up. And without further ado, let's check out the next video because we're going to hone in on the tools that I think are going to help you grow your traffic so you don't need to go out there and find other tools to slow you down. Okay, so now I'm going to show you how I go about doing keyword research. There's a lot of different tools out there. My tools of choice are Ahrefs or SEMrush, and there are some free tools out there. I'm going to start with some of the free tools out there to get things going because I don't want you guys to pay money right out of the gate. So let's take a look. So the free tool you can use here is Google Trends, and Google Trends doesn't exactly show you the volume, but it shows you how things are doing over time. So let me give you an example right now. I mean, blockchain cryptocurrency, this keyword is exploding and it has been over the last couple of years. Oh, look at this. Blockchain has gone crazy. It went especially crazy in December because the price went up really high to about $20,000 or so. And we can even look at the keyword, how it's trending worldwide too. So this can kind of give you a guiding star or guiding point on what keyword you should be going for, because if it's trending downwards, it might not be worth going for. So blockchain right now, you can see it's trending downwards, but I can guarantee you it's gonna come back up because it's really tailored to the price. But another example might be, let's say, artificial intelligence, for example. Take a look at that. Okay, and we can also look at it over the last 5 years as well, and you can see in the last 5 years it's really gone up. And then if I even break out blockchain again, going back to the first example, in the last 5 years, look at that spike, right? So I really like to look for keywords that are really, it's not just a spike, but it's like a slow, slow ramp and it's on its way up. Even if it's a really old-school keyword, it's still holding its trend, because if it's on its way down, why would you wanna invest your money into a depreciating asset? Okay, think of it as you're investing. Which you basically are. You're putting your time into it, you're putting your money into it. So think of it that way. And then my podcast co-host, Neil Patel, he ended up buying this tool called Ubersuggest because he saw me buy a website and he decided to go on a buying spree. And Ubersuggest, it's free. Neil has made it free. I never told him to spend this much money in the first place. But hey, let's take advantage of this and let's go with the keyword blockchain again. Let's just stay with that example. So let's look it up. Blockchain, we know that it drives 301,000 visits a month. That's just for that, that keyword blockchain. That's not including all the different variations out there. And then also the CPC, this is a cost per click. It's another acronym. That's how much it would cost if you're trying to buy that keyword. And you'd, you'd pay $3.83 for each click that you drove for that keyword if you're running ads, for example. So it's just good for you to know. And also the competition, it's 0.39. So what does that mean exactly? That is scored from a scale of 0 to 1. So 0.39 means it's, it's moderate, moderately competitive just for that keyword blockchain. But just keep in mind that keyword is a head tail keyword, just means it is a main keyword. A long tail keyword might be blockchain news website, for example. Okay, that's a little more long tail, but the more long tail a keyword is, the more intent there is behind the keyword. More people tend to convert or buy or purchase behind a keyword that that is a little more long tail. So think of it that way. If I search for the keyword red, for example, I'm probably not gonna buy anything. If I search for the keyword red shoes, still probably not gonna buy anything. If I search for the keyword red Allbirds shoes, which I like Allbirds, so I might buy it because I like Allbirds. So just keep that in mind, just long tail versus head tail, okay? So going down a little more, Ubersuggest will show me different keywords people are searching to that are related, and it'll pull suggestions from Google Keyword Planner, which is their free keyword tool from Google, and it'll pull from Google Suggest as well. And it will also allow me to put in negative keywords. And look, look at all this. If I search for blockchain, if I wanted to write about blockchain, I might not have known about this other keyword over here. Altcoin, altcoin wallet, 18,000 searches a month, 2,400 searches a month. Okay, all these different ideas over here, I can save it. It's great. I hope Neil doesn't charge anybody for this or else it would make me look bad, but it's free. Check it out, Ubersuggest. And there are some other things I would look at too. Such as Answer the Public. So Answer the Public gives me more keyword ideas. So again, I'm going to keep going with blockchain right now. If I search for blockchain, it is going, going to give me a net of different keywords that people are searching. Look, I just typed in the keyword blockchain. I got 193 questions. This is an opportunity for anybody that's looking to get into this space. Who invented blockchain? Who owns blockchain? How does blockchain work? Who cares about blockchain? Uh, how blockchain can change the world, how blockchain can end poverty. You can see I can just continue to go down the list here because ultimately when you are— a big piece of what you're doing when you're creating content is you're trying to solve a problem for people. That's how people tend to find you in the first place. They start to fall in love with your brand is because you're helping them. It's not because they like you first and foremost. They might eventually start liking you. It's because you solve their problem first and foremost and you help them. All right, so here's one more video from our YouTube channel to go a little deeper. First and foremost, you start using BuzzSumo. So BuzzSumo allows you to basically pick a good topic and pick a topic that's trending well. So if I go here to my screen, I'm logged into BuzzSumo right here. Let's say I want to write something about content marketing. So I type in content marketing right here. Okay. I can see the most popular topics, what's working well, what's been shared the most, what's been linked to the most. Also, at the same time, I can look at the trending topics as well. So I can look at trending topics. I can dive into a topic to see who's doing the best there. And then also have a bunch of other options. But we're not going to go into those because we're just talking about content here. The next tool that you want to use is SERPstat. So SERPstat allows you to look at various SEO factors. You can look at keyword data, you can basically audit your website as well, and you can look at a whole host of things that will help you with better content marketing. SERPstat is an all-in-one SEO platform. Of course, there are a bunch of other SEO platforms that I talk about, but for the sake of simplicity and because SERPstat is relatively cheap, this is what you want to look at. So SERPstat's right here. And then the third thing that you want to look at is Grammarly. So Grammarly helps you check mistakes and avoid plagiarism. I actually had Grammarly, one of the co-founders, on the Growth Everywhere podcast recently, and they are doing really well. I mean, they've raised over $100 million and this is a couple of years deep into the business. So they're doing really, really well. So check out Grammarly. It's going to help you write more SEO-friendly content. It's going to make people happier. And if people are happier, then they're— well, they're going to— they're going to convert and then they're going to buy stuff from you and they're going to make a lot of money and then you're going to be happy yourself. Everybody's happy. Next thing is, you do wanna make sure that you are using bucket brigades. So everybody likes to write walls of text, right? When people write me walls of text through email all the time, I basically just ignore them. Nobody wants to read walls of text. When I write emails to people, it's like 1 or 2 lines, then another 1 or 2 lines, 1 or 2 lines. You're just breaking things up into 1 or 2 sentence paragraphs, that's all. It's easier to digest. It makes you a better writer too, because when you're more brief, it requires you to almost be more creative. And then when I see other people write just walls of text to me, I know that they are noobs. Noobs. The 5th thing I wanna say is using a keyword density tool. So you can just Google keyword density tool. I'm looking at one from SEO Book right here and SEO Book, you know, there's an article right here and then, oh yeah, you have to log in to use this tool so you can use it for free. That's great. That's one way to go about it. But there are other free keyword density checkers out there. You can, of course, use tools like Ahrefs out there. You can use tools like SEMrush to take it one level higher. My favorite SEO tool called Ahrefs, or you call it Ahrefs, whatever you want to call it. Okay, so it's A-H-R-E-F-S as in sugar. We'll leave that link in the show notes if you want to get access to it. But basically with Ahrefs, it has a lot of SEO data that you can take a look at, right? So you can take a look at how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword, how many links you need to get to a top 10 position. Also at the same time, you can see the top pages for a specific domain, what the link velocity rate looks like, how their traffic is trending over time, and you can track keyword rankings over time too. So it is more or less a complete SEO suite. It is a go-to tool that I look at every single day, and it is a tool that Neil and I talk about on the Marketing School Podcast. We talk about it quite frequently because we're both SEO nerds. So let's take a look at the screen really quick. So with Ahrefs, basically you can see that we are in the Site Explorer section. So there's a lot of different options right here. You don't want to take a look at everything because you're going to bog yourself down. The learning curve is scary. You're just going to end up taking no action at all. It's like when you see a menu that has a lot of food in it, you're not going to do anything because there's so much food, or you're probably going to make a bad decision anyway. So to make the decision easier for you, just go to the organic keyword section. So all I do right here, I type in a domain in the Site Explorer section and I go to organic keywords right here. So singlegrain.com is ranking for about 22,000 organic keywords, which is not bad for a digital marketing agency. Most agencies aren't ranking for a lot of different keywords. So, not to toot my own horn, but anyway, so what I like to look at when I'm looking at the keywords I'm ranking for is it shows me, right, oh, I rank number 11 for Twitter ads. For marketing funnel, we rank number 5 for it, okay? For marketing school podcast, we're number 1, more or less. We wrote an article about ad networks, we're number 5 for it, right? So what you can do here, especially if you're an agency, you want to see what we're doing or what other competitive agencies are doing, is take a look at the keywords and then take a look at the pages, what their content strategy is, right? So What I might do is, oh, okay, so if Single Grain is ranking for a keyword like Twitter ads, well, let's go ahead and click in and see what that looks like. We can go even further. So we rank for keywords like, let's see, what else? SEO techniques, right? So you gotta think about what's relevant to you. If you're a video agency, what kind of video keywords make sense? Or if you are a social media influencer agency, right, what makes sense? So right here, this is the post that ranks for Twitter ads. And you can see that it's a super epic piece of content. You know, it's a couple thousand words, probably 3,000 to 4,000 words. And basically, I mean, for us, people generally stay on our site for more than 3 minutes because our content is generally longer. So think about that, right? If you see, okay, well, Single Grain is doing this and we're trying to emulate what Single Grain is doing, well, from a competitive standpoint, maybe there's something strategically that we can, we can, we can copy, right? So that's one thing. Now the other thing is I also like to look at what keywords they're within striking distance for. So if you're ranking number 5 to number 30 in Google, to me you're within striking distance of a top 5 ranking. With the top 5 ranking, you're going to get more clicks ultimately. If you're number 5 and beyond, your click-through rate is much lower. So to give you an example of what that means, if a search term is getting about 100,000 searches a month, if you're number 7 or number 8, you might be getting a 1% click-through rate, but if you're number 1, you might be getting a 20 to 40% click-through rate, which means you might be getting 20,000 to 40,000 clicks a month from that keyword if you're in the number 1 position. Number 2, it might go up to 20% or so. Number 3 might go up to 10 or 15% or so, right? Depends on the industry itself. So you got to do the math yourself and figure out, you know, these keywords, what's relevant, what is— what's gonna convert for us, and, you know, does it have a good amount of volume, right? And also what the keyword difficulty is. So What I mean by that, so if we look at, let's just say, you know, SEO techniques, okay? SEO techniques right here drives about 1,900 searches a month, and the keyword difficulty is about 47. Keyword difficulty is scaled on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the most difficult. And you can see that the CPC for this is $10. If you're, if you're running Google Ads for this, it's really expensive, and your current position is number 9 for it. So that tells me I just need to make a list of this, export it, and Sort it through in Excel, and then from there I can decide what I wanna do tactically. All right, so before you go, don't forget to check out the next video in this playlist. And even before that, don't forget, drop something in the comments in terms of if you think we're missing a tool in here. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're interested in the training itself, the Leveling Up Marketing training, singlegrain.com/leveling-up. And we'll see you in the next video in the playlist.