The world of research and data can be extremely daunting and confusing, endless hours of trawling Google for help or staring at countless numbers and graphs. Here I’ve compiled a list of some of the tools and resources that I’ve found to be super useful during my time working in PPC and SEO.
Kparser
Kparser has a range of free online tools that generate lists of keywords or negative keywords for a variety of platforms based on your initial keyword list.
Personally, I find the keyword and negative keyword suggestion tools the most useful. They are particularly handy when putting together negative keyword lists since it returns thousands of results to help ensure you haven’t missed any important negatives.
The site also has tools for specific platforms such as YouTube, eBay and Amazon. The latter 2 being extremely useful for any eCommerce marketing campaigns,since they are excellent for identifying similar products that you can either include or exclude them from your keywords.
It’s worth mention that Kparser offer a paid tier of their tools, however I find that the features in the free tier are more than enough for most people.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is a marketing expert and entrepreneur; he has co-founded multiple digital marketing tools such as CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics as well as his own brand; Neil Patel Digital. His website, neilpatel.com, has a range of extremely useful tools including keyword suggestions as well as website and traffic analysers.
The keyword suggestion tool is pretty self-explanatory, it generates a list of keywords related to either a URL or some existing keywords. Whilst maybe not the most effective suggestion tool (on the free tier at least), it offers a good alternative to sites like Kparser and Google’s own keyword tool.
The analyser tools however can prove to be extremely useful for monitoring the behaviour and demographics of organic traffic that comes to your site. The data it provides, whilst not as in-depth as platforms like Google Analytics, gives helpful insight into traffic and can be very beneficial for SEO and PPC practices. Neil’s tools have come on leaps and bounds over the past few years, and are almost essential for any SEO’er or advertiser.
A lot of you have probably heard of the social media platform Reddit but not so many will be aware of just how useful it can be things like this. For those of you unfamiliar with how it works, basically, Reddit is broken down into groups called Subreddits, whereby people can create their own posts and also comment on others. Each Subreddit is dedicated to a certain topic and there are virtually endless amounts of weird and interesting topics.
I’ve found that some of these dedicated groups can prove extremely helpful when it comes to learning new things or simply answering queries. You can search in a community to try and find a post relating to your query that may answer your question straight away. Failing that communities are full of experienced professionals who are always happy to help and will almost certainly help you solve your issue.
Some of the top Subreddits I would recommend are:
• r/PPC
• r/SEO
• r/FacebookAds
• r/marketing
• r/askmarketing
Now this one might seem a tad obvious since a lot of the time a person’s first thought is simply to ‘Google it’, but there’s actually a lot more to Google than simply the website results it offers you.
One very useful feature is something that’s often overlooked. Make use of the search suggestion bar that throws you a tonne of ideas whilst you’re typing your search query. Type a few terms into the search bar and you’ll soon get a good list of any keywords to avoid or any longer tail keywords that you could be targeting.
I’m aware that there are a lot of expensive platforms out there that let you monitor your competitors and track how well you compete with them. Whilst Google maybe can’t give you any detailed, behind the scenes data, it allows you to see your competitors first hand. Be it ads or organic results, you can compare how your listing looks versus a competitor and see where people are ranking on a results page.
These listings will also allow you to take a look at their websites and more specifically the landing pages they’re using to see how they weigh up against your own. When it comes to content creation nothing can beat seeing what your competitors are doing and viewing how well it’s working.
I’m not suggesting that any of these resources are going to change your life instantly, however they can certainly contribute towards an effective campaign and improve your marketing when utilised correctly!
