James Spillane
Managing your website to effectively understand where the best opportunities are is an exercise that all of us should do frequently. Depending on your website, and the list of projects that you currently have running, this may be once a quarter, once a year, or once a week! I use many tools to help with the “basics”, and help me keep on top of areas that can help my websites perform better.
The tools I am listing below, are the tools that I have used to help generate millions in revenue for companies that I have worked for. (See www.hill-consulting.net if you are interested in learning more or need help getting started). From my perspective as a seasoned Online Marketer, we don’t need fancy tools and amazing programs to understand, segment, and make wise decisions around our websites. These tools are all accessible by everyone, and can be used to great effect!
Microsoft Excel & MySQL or Microsoft SQL
No matter how much you may like or dislike spreadsheets, Excel is still the basic mainstay to go back to for quick and dirty Ad Hoc reporting and data mining. Pull in a simple csv file, and in moments you can pivot, count, filter and sort to reveal extremely interesting trends in your datasets. When Excel just won’t cut it, a relational database like MySQL (FREE!) or Microsoft SQL can help get the job done with more complex data manipulation methods. Grouping data, doing wholesale replacements or simply merging data together for a complex or distributed dataset.
What Excel and SQL do for me
- Group and Sort Data
- Merge like data into summary information & totals
- Mining data from external databases via ODBC
- Handling data merges for Normalized datasets
- Creating views and more permanent ways to pull data regularly
Screaming Frog
Screaming frog is a website crawler that I use frequently to pull data from a website to understand issues like duplicate title tags, multiple H1 tags, and many other SEO “basics” that could be damaging a websites potential rankings with sites like Google or Bing. With this tool you can easily crawl a website, pull down data into an excel spreadsheet and with a few formula’s, understand where basic problems are happening.
Screaming frog can also perform the role of a load test (in a limited way), and can also reveal to you issues about how spiders may crawl your website. If Screaming frog get’s trapped, or cannot locate content you are trying to reveal to the search engines or your users – you may have a problem!
What I often check for are basics like:
- duplicate title tags
- Missing Title tags
- Multiple H1 Tags
- 404 errors
- incorrect 301 or 302 redirects
- Duplicate content
- URL patterns
FireBug
Firebug for Firefox browsers is a key tool that allows me to examine the source code of a website or web page. More importantly, it allows me to quickly and easily drill down into the HTML source for a specific section of a web page. And finally, it allows me to look at the web page post render, which can be very important for dynamically generated web pages where the original source (viewed by “View Source”) can often times be dramatically different than the actual modified display source of a page.
And, on top of that, Firebug allows me to actually make changes to the CSS and HTML, and see the actual effects on the webpage itself. For a quick an dirty “fix” for a web page, this can be invaluable in communicating with an IT or HTML development team!
What FireFox does for me:
- Quickly locate and view post source code for a page
- Modify and test changes to a web page on the fly
- Post Render HTML source viewing
- CSS and HTML level changes
Google Analytics
It’s free, it’s fully functional, and it contains data insights that you have to have for your website. When people talk about analytics, Google Analytics is the standard that 95% of websites use and depend on to understand trends and changes to their online business. With the powerful Google Custom Reports tool, I can slice and dice much of my data into actionable chunks that can give me not only insight into opportunities, but can aid me in understanding what the payoffs might be if I do act on those opportunities.
Google analytics can be setup for one site, multiple sites, and multiple domain names. Filters can be setup to prevent tracking of your IT Teams daily testing, and segments can be created so that you can better understand your customers.
What Google Analytics does for me:
- Aids me in understanding how my websites are doing YOY, MOM or WOW
- Aids me in segmenting data and statistics into actionable tasks
- Helps me to examine trends and spot threats or opportunities
Google Keyword Tool
Want to know what keywords might drive more traffic to your website? You are going to spend a lot of time with the Google Keyword Tool. This tool will help discover keyword tools that you may not have thought of. Certainly it will help you to rank keyword choices into those that may most effectively drive traffic to your websites. Assuming of course that you can drive more ranking and traffic to those keywords!
Additionally, Google Keyword Tool will help you to understand how competitive a keyword might be. With this knowledge you can start weighing the potential traffic and the difficulty, and choose where you want to spend your time.
What Google Keyword Tool does for me:
- Allows me to gather keyword ideas
- Shows me what Google thinks about keywords
- Allows me to understand potential competition for keywords
BrightEdge
One of the only “pay” tools that I can’t praise highly enough are the tools provided by Brightedge. It’s a one stop nerd shop for SEO rankings, insights and time saving metrics all tied together in one package. This tool is a time saver which can take data that would normally take a few hours to work with, and can cut that down to seconds!
Brightedge allows me to track over time SEO keyword rankings (Google only tracks for 2 months of time, and then erases the data!) and puts many other metrics together with said rankings. Thinks like Traffic generated and more! For me, the time savings generated by this allows me to focus in on activites to generate traffic and revenue, rather than manipulating data to find actionable data.
What Brightedge does for me:
- Pulls together data from disparate sources and puts in easy to use reports
- pulls together basic SEO activities and fixes and allows me to assign these tasks
- Tracks rankings over time, not just 2 Months.
These are certainly not all of the tools that I use, but they are tools that I use frequently in my daily job. If you become versed with these tools, you will be well on your way to proving your value to your company or your clients!
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Great tools! I already tried some of them and will definitely try the others soon…
Thank you!
Anytime. If you get the chance, also check out Kgen and SearchStatus plugins for Firefox. Good stuff.