How to Choose the Right Search Engine Marketing Software

Choosing the right tool can be difficult. But you’ve got to do it because your prospects and customers are searching the web right now—they're looking for your business website. In fact, people all over the world do more than 6,586,013,574 searches a day and about 2 trillion searches in 2016.

Your potential customers are part of the 6.5 billion people. An SEO tool provides you with data, reports, and insights about the health of your marketing campaigns and some of them allow you to collaborate with your team—this enables you to stay productive, save time and to increase profit.

There are a bunch of software tools out there and a hundred more are being launched every week. However, choosing the right one for your business can be challenging and it’s very crucial as most companies derive over 80% of their revenue directly from search engines. So in this article, we’ll be looking at what to look out for in SEM software to help you make the right choice. Let’s get started:

1). Software features and capabilities

What specific features should you look for? Well, it all depends on what you need. This is very crucial as the bulk of the work you’ll be doing with your software depends on the features and their capabilities. Are you looking for a tool that focuses on one of these?

• On-site SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Tools integration
• Reporting
• Competition research

Better yet, are you more interested in the ones that allow you to do all of these and more in one place? Considering these features and their accuracy is very important. Are you also looking to collaborate with your team? There are SEM tools that allow you to collaborate with your team, so you can assign a specific task to your each team member, brainstorm, improve your team communications, and track your team’s progress.

With most of the search engine marketing software out there, you can integrate all your other marketing tools and get insights all from one central dashboard—you could integrate Google Analytics, Facebook trends, etc. You can easily export the reports or send them to your clients via email or have them review it as soon as they log in from wherever they are.

Considering the features you are looking for in a SEM software is very important and tantamount to the success of your SEO campaigns, and of course, getting it right can help you retain your client and work on multiple clients’ projects simultaneously.

2). User experience

User experience is the ultimate goal you want to achieve when investing in a tool. You’ll agree with me that one of the reasons people use HubSpot, Ignitur, Marketo, and other web marketing software is because these tools are fun to use. Most of the SEO software programs allow you to try the products for a few days (mostly 7, 14, or 30 days).

Within this period, you can log in and see how everything all works and at this time, you should be looking at how easy it is to get exactly what you’re looking for. Since you’ll be spending a lot of time in search-related tasks, you don’t need software that will make things worse for you—even if it’s robust it should also be easy to use as well.

If you can easily access the features, that means you can work faster and accomplish a task faster, it’s that simple. And also, you don’t want a boring user interface. It’s no rule, but as much as possible, the design should be intuitively interesting for users.

3). Customized reporting

Customized reports are important in helping you know exactly what key performance indicators to watch. For example, you should be able to create a template of the metrics that are important to you and be able to access them easily from your dashboard.

You should be able to set a customized view of your keyword ranking report and campaigns, it all adds up. The features shouldn’t be rigid but it should be flexible—and if it has a drag and drops feature, it will be even easier to customize.

4). Automation

The whole purpose of automation is to help you save time. For example, Google AdWords is already automating some features like the “call now” AdWords feature. Based on your time and region, Google learns that you’ll be asleep at a particular time or off-work and can’t possibly take calls. So, the call now feature is removed at that time and it reappears when it’s working hours.

Your SEM software should allow you to automate some task as well. It’ll help you save money and time. According to VB Insights, 47% of marketing automation software users say it’s fairly priced, however, 22% said it’s pricey but worth it.

5). Data source

Many applications consume data from other web properties through the API provided by the third party resource. It’s important you know exactly where their data is coming from.

So, it’s crucial for you to do a proper research on the software and ensure their data source is reliable.

6). Optimization

What level of priority is optimization placed in the software, is it watching your conversion rate and giving you insights on how to make improvements? It’s important you look out for this.

7). Price

Even though pricing shouldn’t be the most important thing to look out for because a good search engine optimization tool will pay for itself if it’s used properly and effectively.

However, the price is important as you won’t start seeing returns the moment you start using the software. The price should be affordable—something you can afford to pay without breaking the bank.

Ensure you look out for extra fees like setup fees or any third party software integration fees, whatever it is look out for it.

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Conclusion

The right SEO tool can help improve your overall marketing efforts, save you money, and keep you organized and productive.

But remember that you must have a working marketing strategy in place—then, and only then, will the most-rated SEO software yield results for you.

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