You’re in the industrial marketing space, and you need the world (which, in 2016, means the internet) to know how great your company is.
You’ve got amazing content that should provide your visitors with enough incentive to offer up some basic information in order to access, but you can’t take any chances. You want to make sure your conversion rate is as high as possible.
When you have quality website design and content, paired with insight through a marketing automation tool such as HubSpot, you're already on the right track.
There are some great website analysis tools available at your fingertips to further your understanding of how you're getting prospects to your website (on the SEO side) and how you can best engage them (on the website design and UX side). Check out a few of our favorites below.
SEO Tools
1. Authority Spy: This, as its name suggests, will help you find out who has influence online. With Authority Spy you can find and evaluate the level of authority of individuals and/or blogs across the web.
2. LinkPatrol: A WordPress plugin that cleans up your outgoing link profile. Policies regarding outgoing links are updated every so often, and not everyone is aware of those changes or the impact they will have on links. This tool makes it possible to examine all of the links on your site in one fell swoop. Use LinkPatrol to protect your site and get rid of undesirable (spammy) keywords.
3. Panguin Tool: This allows you to see how Google’s algorithm updates have impacted your traffic. Those familiar with SEO know that Google’s algorithm determines where a page will rank. Understanding how to maintain a high ranking is critical to a web page's success.
4. Site Condor: This application is for website auditing and optimization. It’s ideal for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data; monitoring site performance; and controlling when and how crawl jobs run.
5. Google Trends: Google Trends is a classic. It’s simple enough: use it to understand what’s trending and adjust the keywords you’re using across your website accordingly.
Website Tools
6. Sass: A CSS Preprocessor that prides itself on having “more features and ability than any other CSS extension language out there.” The Sass community comprises a number of tech companies and developers. Our Design Director’s a big fan, though he also acknowledges Less and Stylus as alternatives.
7. Git: An open source (read: free) distributed version control system designed to handle projects of any size with speed and efficiency. Git claims that it’s easy to learn and performs with lightning speed. Alternatives include Mercurial and SVN.
8. Sublime Text: A cross-platform text and source code editor. “You’ll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance.” Coda, Vim, and Atom are common alternatives.
9. Crazy Egg: A data visualization tool that shows you exactly what people are doing on your website through heat map analytics. Wondering if the Request for Quote button in your top navigation is getting more action than the one at the bottom of the page? This is how you find out.
10. BrowserStack: Live, web-based browser testing. It provides you with instant access to all desktop and mobile browsers so that you can see if your site isn’t rendering properly on one particular browser or view, and fix it before it becomes a problem.
Final Thoughts
These are only a handful of the innumerable tools out there to improve your website design and SEO performance. Try these out, for sure, but understand that this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Part of the excitement of the digital marketing industry is that there are so many methods and tactics to make our jobs easier and our work more effective. We have plenty of free resources for you to view, but please feel free to reach out to our team with any questions.
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