This Valentine’s Day, forget a dozen roses. You need a dozen GIFs.
The reason: Eye-catching visuals like GIFs in emails can increase click-through rates by 42% and conversion rates by 103%, and may positively impact your sales.
Go ahead and add GIFs to your February email campaigns. The AWeber design team has already done the work for you and created 12 downloadable Valentine’s Day GIFs!
Just download them and add them to your emails using AWeber’s ridiculously easy-to-use Drag and Drop message editor. These GIFs will be a sweet treat for your subscribers — and your bottom line.
Not an AWeber customer yet? Create your FREE account right now, and see how easy it is to use one of these GIFs in our Drag-and-Drop message editor.
Download Your Valentine’s Day GIFs
Step 1: Find the animated Valentine’s Day GIF below that you want to use in your email.
Step 2: Save it to your computer by either right clicking the GIF and selecting “Save Image,” or by dragging the GIF to your desktop.
Step 3: Upload the GIF into your email template inside AWeber. Under image size, choose “original.” That’s it!
You spin me right round, baby. Right round like a record, baby.
It’s almost like the 80s band “Dead or Alive” is performing in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Handwritten Love Note GIF
This is the email version of a hand-written love note to your crush. Your subscribers will LUV the middle-school nostalgia.
Cupid’s Arrow GIF:
Like Cupid, you won’t miss the mark with this heart and arrow GIF in your email.
Best Valentine’s Day GIFs
Here are some of our readers’ all-time favorite GIFs from past V-Days.
Popping Balloons GIF
Want to make your emails “pop”? Use this fun balloon GIF.
Valentine’s Day Sale GIF
Glow bright in the inbox with this neon sale sign.
Happy Valentine’s Day GIF
Make your subscribers’ hearts burst with this GIF.
Candy Hearts GIF
What’s almost as good as candy falling right into your mouth? This GIF.
Love You GIF
Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Olive.
Olive who?
Olive you.
Tell your subscribers how much you love them with this GIF.
Heart GIF
What do you call a very small Valentine?
A Valen-tiny. Just like this small heart GIF!
Happy Valentine’s Day GIFs
“You must be a keyboard, because you’re just my type.” No cheesy pick up lines required. Get the message across with these two GIFs.
Candy Heart “Hugs” GIF
Give your subscribers a hearty hug this V-Day.
Show your appreciation year round
Want to show your love for your customers the other 364 days of the year? Here are some clever ways to deliver awesome experiences.
1. Send personalized notes.
Have you ever received a tweet from your favorite company? Or a lightning-fast response from tech support when you’re having an issue? It feels good to be acknowledged, doesn’t it?
Do the same for your customers and send a bunch of individualized emails. You can say “thank you for your business” to a new or interesting customer. You can send a quick note of thanks to your subscribers who gave your product, service, or program great reviews. Or maybe you can send followup emails to the ones who didn’t gave you good reviews — and ask what you can do better.
Include your contact info and tell them to get in touch with you if they ever have any questions.
2. Deliver seasonal content.
Get creative and think outside the traditional holiday seasons. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner, you could send your subscribers a special coupon that they can use for a pick-me-up during tax season.
First-time customers could use a push to buy again and return customers deserve to be recognized. Give them a little something — like free shipping on their next order, a free consultation, or a downloadable resource that can help them make a buying decision.
4. Turn your 404 page into an opportunity.
A 404 doesn’t have to be a dead end. Instead,use it as a chance to delight.
One quick example: If you stumble upon a 404 page on the site Flooring Supplies — the UK’s largest online flooring company — it says “Floor…Oh … Floor!” Here are some more awesome 404 ideas.
5. Respond to questions and comments.
Join in on your customers’ conversation. Forums, Twitter chats, and your own social profiles are great places to start. When someone gives you a digital shoutout, respond! It’s a fantastic way to retain customers and maintain stellar customer service.
As Super Bowl ad spends continue to climb, with an estimated $435 million (nearly $100 million more than last year) spent during this year’s Big Game, brands are looking for other ways to leverage the spectacle of the Super Bowl. One prime example from this year was Verizon. As a partner of the NFL, Verizon…
When I was in grade school, Valentine’s Day was one of my favorite holidays. There were cards. There was the possibility that your crush actually liked you back. And, there was the chocolate — so much chocolate.
Little did I know that the roots of this holiday bore little-to-no resemblance to my childhood experience of it. We were never taught that Valentine’s Day actually originated with an arguably gruesome ancient festival, where there was no chocolate or exchange of cute, red-and-pink cards.
So how the heck did we get from an ancient Roman festival to a holiday that compels many of us to spend no less than $147 on celebrating it? That story, it turns out, is thousands of years old — but we’ll try to condense it.
The roots of Valentine’s Day are cited by some sources to lie in the ancient Roman festival Lupercalia, largely because it took place annually on February 15 — the day after what is today the observed date of Valentine’s Day — and involved some very primitive forms of courtship and matchmaking. But it was also ancient Rome that saw the famous execution of a St. Valentine on February 14, around 278 A.D. According to legend, he wrote a letter on the night before his execution to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had befriended, and signed it, “From Your Valentine.”
Over two centuries later, Pope Gelasius ordered that Lupercalia be replaced with the February 14 observation of St. Valentine’s Day. That set the tone, some believe, for the day’s forthcoming tradition of exchanging “love messages,” perhaps in remembrance of St. Valentine’s farewell letter.
The Romans are also credited with constructing the idea of Cupid — a god of love often depicted with arrows that, as the legend goes, inflict love upon those who are hit by them. The Roman version of Cupid was adapted from Eros, a god of passion and fertility in Greek mythology. It seems that no one is quite sure when cupid became associated with Valentine’s Day, but the fact that both have origins in ancient Roman culture suggests that there may have been some very early overlap between the two.
When NPR’s Arnie Seipel set out to explore the history of Valentine’s Day, he found that it first became romanticized by classic authors like William Shakespeare in the late 16th century, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s.
Chaucer
Dartmouth English professor Peter Travis cites Chaucer’s epic poem The Parliament of Fowls, which was one of the first literary references to St. Valentine’s Day, or “Seynt Valentynes day,” as Chaucer spelled it. One such mention is made, Travis explains, alongside the line, “Now welcom somer, with thy sonne sonne, That hast this wintres weders over-shake.” In other words, when we celebrate love in the coldest depths of winter — in February, for instance — it’s so heartwarming that it makes summer feel less far away.
Shakespeare
Some literary historians credit Shakespeare for the permeation of love into popular culture with his composition of “Sonnet 18” — said to be written between 1593-1601 — a.k.a., “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” It’s unclear when or how this particular work became associated with Valentine’s Day, but like Chaucer, Shakespeare compares love to the seasons.
“While summer days may fade and fall into” colder months, writes Shakespeare analyst Lee Jamieson, “his love is eternal.”
Of course, Saint Valentine’s day is alluded to outright in Hamlet — written between 1599-1601 — when the character Ophelia recites a song about a young lady’s experience with the holiday, which includes lyrics like, “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day,” and, “To be your Valentine.”
By the 1700s, it’s said that Valentine’s Day made its way from Europe to the United States, which aligns with the establishment of the North American colonies between 1607-1770. It became traditional, according to HISTORY.com, “for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes.” That was more common in England, however, where the Industrial Revolution began earlier and eventually included the production of “fancy valentines [that] were extremely expensive to import.“
It’s said that one American woman, Esther Howland, was so intrigued when she received her first English valentine greeting in 1847, that she became infatuated with the idea of manufacturing them in the U.S. She was an early entrepreneur, and instinctively believed that there could be an American market for these formal, English-style greetings. After procuring materials like high-quality paper and lace from her father, a stationer, she created what many credit as the earliest American Valentine’s Day greeting cards.
Charles II of Sweden begins communicating with flowers, by assigning a different message to each type. This tradition allegedly assigned love and romance to the red rose, setting the stage for this flower to be exchanged during the later, commercialized era of Valentine’s Day. However, it remains unclear if a specific brand is responsible for first marketing flowers as part of Valentine’s Day gift-giving.
In England, where Valentine’s Day had by now already been celebrated with the exchange of gifts and cards for many years, the Cadbury chocolate company sells the first heart-shaped box of chocolates.
1849
In Massachusetts, Howland produces a dozen sample Valentine’s Day cards and sends them off with her brother to distribute during a sales trip for their father’s company — S.A. Howland & Sons — hoping to earn $200. Instead, he returns with 25X that amount, indicating a much higher-than-expected demand.
Here’s an example of a card Howland created around this time.
Conversation candies are developed, when Daniel Chase — brother of New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) founder Oliver Chase — uses vegetable dye to print words onto confections.
1870
Howland incorporates her booming card business as the New England Valentine Company, operating out of her home via an assembly line that was largely comprised of her friends.
The New England Valentine Company moves operations from Howland’s home to a Main Street factory in Worcester, Massachusetts. That same year, the company publishes the Valentine Verse Book, which contained 131 “verses” that people could cut out and paste inside of cards that came without a greeting — or those with a greeting that the buyer didn’t like.
Whitney has acquired at least 10 competitors, including Berlin and Jones, which had become New York City’s “largest manufacturer of Valentines.” Ten years later, the company moves to large-scale headquarters on Worcester’s Union Street.
1894
The Hershey Chocolate Company is founded, bringing what was previously “a European luxury product” to the U.S.
The Hershey Chocolate Company introduces its Hershey Kisses candy product. Interestingly enough, the product was allegedly named Kisses because whenever a piece of chocolate was dropped on the conveyer belt at the Hershey factory, it sounded like a kiss.
That January, a massive fire destroys much of Whitney’s headquarters. However, most of the Valentine’s Day products had already been shipped for the season, having little impact on that particular holiday.
That same year, Hallmark is founded. Meanwhile, 1910 also saw the creation of Florists’ Telegraph Delivery — today known as FTD — which pioneered the remote ordering and delivery of flowers, providing a way to send them to far-away loved ones.
The De Beers diamond company launches its “A Diamond is Forever“ campaign, sending the message that gifting high-end jewelry can be used as an expression of love.
1985
In the ’80s companies like Hallmark began launching more Valentine’s Day related commercials. In 1985, one commercial, which dubs Hallmark as “The Valentine’s Store” shows off all of the cards and heart-shaped products you can buy for your loved one in their locations.
1986
As if Kisses weren’t romantic enough based on their name, Hershey’s enforced them as a Valentine’s Day staple with one slight design tweak. The company began packaging Kisses candies in pink and red foil specifically for Valentine’s Day.
2004
As marketers continued to embrace new media, we saw an influx of high-quality and insanely high-budgeted commercials mark the holiday from the ’80s until now. One of the most iconic and beautifully shot commercials was a mini-romance drama, called “Le Film,” promoting Chanel No. 5 perfume.
In the ad, a man falls in love and runs away with a starlet, played by Nicole Kidman. In the end, she returns back to her life of fame. As she walks down the red carpet, he notes all the things he’ll remember about her, including the smell of her Chanel No. 5 perfume.
2005
Valentine’s Day begins to go digital. On February 14, 2005, YouTube — which originated as an online dating site — makes its debut. Co-founder Steve Chen still credits its invention as the brainchild of “three guys on Valentine’s Day that had nothing to do.”
Ride sharing company Uber rolls out “Romance On Demand,” allowing users to send flowers on Valentine’s Day via the app. This initiative would continue to progress, with on-demand skywriting becoming available the following year.
NetBase, a social media analytics platform, releases a Valentine’s Day Sentiment Analysis, measuring how people engage with and discuss the holiday on social media. In total, it measured nine million mentions of Valentine’s Day, with the vast majority of them mentioning a specific brand — Netflix. The top hashtag was #happyvalentinesday.
2017
In the earlier years of the Google Doodle, Google used Valentine’s Day to spread awareness of a rare species. In 2017, a series of Google Doodles shown in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day highlighted the stories of pangolins, the only mammal species with scales, as they give each other Valentine’s Day gifts or serenade their mates. Here’s one example:
While, at this point, Google didn’t need to market themselves with Doodles, this shows an early example of a brand that used its platform to creatively market another cause on the holiday.
2018 to Present Day
In recent years, we’ve seen Valentine’s Day marketing go completely digital with an emphasis on social media marketing. With these new opportunities, smaller companies that don’t have Hallmark’s budget can easily spread awareness of their own brands during the holiday. Here’s one example of an Instagram post which highlighted a fine Italian restaurant ahead of Valentine’s Day:
While these real dog’s mimicking Lady and the Tramp grabbed attention, especially from the animal lovers on Instagram, this post’s caption encourages audiences to interact with the brand. To learn more about this marketing campaign and eight others from recent years, check out this blog post.
What Marketers Can Learn from Valentine’s Day Marketing
Like so many other holidays, Valentine’s Day has experienced a transition into pop culture that has shaped the way it’s perceived, discussed, and celebrated. Sure, it’s often accused of being nothing more than a money-making marketing holiday — just look at these numbers compiled by HISTORY.com. But next time you hear someone label Valentine’s Day as “Hallmark holiday,” you’ll have a wealth of historical information to respond with.
From our hearts to yours, Happy Valentine’s Day. We’ll be keeping an eye on its continued evolution.
Click here to see more of our favorite modern Valentine’s Day campaigns.
Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in February 2017, but was updated in February 2020 for comprehensiveness and freshness.
Just like any marketer, we all fear what we can’t control.
And sadly, for years, a lot of our future is being determined by algorithms.
From social sites to search engines… they all have algorithms. Heck, you even have to deal with them with things like email.
When you send marketing emails, you can bet that there is a good chance that they will end up in the “Promotions tab.”
Now sometimes these algorithms do adjust in your favor, but
we all know that’s rare in the long run.
But what if there was a way you could drive consistent traffic, not have to deal with algorithms, and not have to spend money on ads?
There actually is. And I bet you’ve never used it before.
Here’s the best part, it’s generated me more than 231,608 visitors and it automated and free. 🙂
How so?
Alright, check this out.
Every time I publish a blog post or anytime I want to drive
traffic to any page on my site, all I have to do is click a few buttons and instantly
I am able to get more traffic.
It leverages something that you are familiar with but probably don’t know what it is.
It’s called push notifications.
What’s a push notification?
Does this look familiar to you?
You can receive messages through your browsers. This is
called a push notification.
What’s cool about push notifications is that anytime someone
visits your website you can ask them to subscribe to your site.
And at any time, you can send them a message promoting your
website.
Each time someone clicks on it, you get traffic to your
site.
But here is the best part: not only do you not have to deal with any algorithms, but you also don’t have to worry about people missing your push notification either.
See, unlike email, if you send someone a push notification while they are on vacation or sleeping, the next time they log onto their computer and pull up their web browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox), they’ll see the push notification.
Here are my stats from some of my most recent push notifications:
How to grow your traffic through push notifications
Head over to Subscribers and sign up for a free account.
Once you add your site and sign up, you’ll need to either
add a piece of javascript to your site or you’ll have to install a plugin.
Whether you are on Shopify or WordPress, Subscribers has a good amount of options for you.
Once you are up and running, you’ll want to head to the
“prompt settings” navigation option in the sidebar of Subscribers.
This is where you control what people see when they come to
your website so they can subscribe.
You’ll want to make sure you have turned on “prompt enabled.” Then select “use custom popup prompt by default” as this will allow you to select what message you show your users.
Here’s what my page looks like.
In my prompt settings, you’ll notice I did a few things:
I uploaded my own image. My site is NeilPatel.com so it makes sense for me to use my own image. For you, it could be your face or your company logo.
For the title and description, you’ll want to clearly state the benefit. I let you know that I am going to send you proven SEO tips and how easy it will be.
You can then test the “subscribe” and “no thanks” button text. I’ve found that text to work well on my site.
As for timing, I like showing the prompt right away as well as showcasing my “subscriber count.” I’ve found that the bottom-right corner converts well for me.
Once everything is set up the way you want, just click “save settings” and you’ll see your prompt on your site.
Here’s what it looks like on the NeilPatel.com site.
When someone clicks on “subscribe” they will see a prompt
box that looks something like this…
And then when they click to subscribe in the prompt box their browser will ask them if they want to subscribe to your site.
It’s so effective I have over 600,000 subscribers. It’s a
lot!
It may take time for your subscriber numbers to build up, but the longer you do it the easier it is. Keep in mind I’ve been doing this for a few years now, that’s how I have been able to build up such a large following.
So, once you have subscribers, what’s next?
How to generate traffic through subscribers
What I like doing is promoting my blog posts through Subscribers.
Just click on the “New Notifications” navigation link.
You’ll now be able to send a message to all of your subscribers. More importantly, you’ll be able to promote a URL or a service or product you are selling.
There are a few key things you’ll want to do on this page if
you want the maximum amount of traffic.
Evoke curiosity – with your headline and description try to pique peoples’ curiosity. This is a simple way to get a ton of clicks. Just like how I asked, “Is SEO Dead?”
Show a large image – when you use a large image, you’ll find that you will get more clicks. Large images don’t show up on all push notifications, it only shows up for users who are on a PC. If you don’t know where to find images, you can use this free stock photography site.
Show custom buttons – this feature also only shows up on PCs and not Macs. But it is still worth using. I’ve found that if I can ask a “yes or no” type of question with my headline, such as “Is SEO Dead?” then when I use “yes” and “no” as the two options in the custom buttons, I get a ton of clicks.
If you follow those 3 tips, you’ll find that you’ll be able
to maximize how much traffic you get from push notifications.
Just look at the push I did on the post about SEO being dead… it drove 16,263 visitors to my blog. That’s a lot of traffic for one push notification.
Don’t forget to set up a Welcome Campaign
Now the best way to generate traffic from Subscribers isn’t to manually send out
notifications.
Yes, manual notifications generate traffic but there is a better way.
Through a Welcome Campaign, you can generate even more traffic.
Think of a “welcome campaign” as a drip sequence like you
would have in email. But this is through push notifications.
So, in the navigation click on “Welcome Campaign.”
From there, you’ll want to click on “create a new campaign.” From there you will see a page that looks like this:
Similar to sending a normal push notification, you’ll want
to use a larger image and use custom buttons as this increases how many clicks
you’ll get to your site.
The other thing you’ll want to do is be careful and not spam.
Don’t send them a message every 30 minutes or anything annoying like that. I
spread out my messages in my drip by at least a few days.
The first notification goes out instantly, but the rest are
spread out.
Once you set up your welcome campaign, just hit save and you’ll be good to go.
As new people subscribe to your site, they will
automatically receive notifications which will increase your traffic.
Just like at my welcome campaign stats, it drives more traffic than manual pushes.
231,608!
That’s how much traffic I’ve gotten just from my welcome campaign and that number continually climbs each day.
Conclusion
Although most of the popular platforms have algorithms that
are hard to crack, it doesn’t mean that all hope is lost.
There are still other ways to get consistent traffic to your
site.
What’s beautiful about Subscribers is that it drives traffic
without you having to deal with algorithms or filters. But it does take time to
see results, just like email marketing, the longer you use it the more traffic
you’ll see.
So, have you tried push notifications or Subscribers before?
New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wants the United States government more involved in protecting digital privacy, and she wants to create a new federal agency to do it. Gillibrand (D-NY) proposed legislation Thursday to create a Data Protection Agency at the federal level. In an outline of her proposal, published on the official Senate Medium…
One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?
Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.
For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…
but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.
That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business.
(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)
Realize the full potential of your brand
Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.
To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:
More data to provide a more complete picture of your brand
Data that are easy to understand and share
Strategies and tactics to achieve your goals
Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.
Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!
When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.
Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:
Social + sales
Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard
“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”
When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.
With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.
At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.
One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.
You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.
Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?
Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?
Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?
This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.
To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.
Connecting social media and sales
For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.
Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.
(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)
You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.
Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.
Gain a better understanding of your brand
Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.
This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:
Per-post sales: Find out how much sales each social media post has generated
Campaign sales: Know how much sales your campaign has generated
Customer insights: Learn more about the social media users who are buying your products
Customer lifetime value: Calculate customer lifetime value for different segments
Product buzz: Get insights into who’s talking about your products on social
For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.
Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords.
Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent.
The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research.
In this post, we’ll cover the nine best tools out there for performing keyword research for your website content. Before we get started though, let’s briefly go over two important things to consider as you do your research: relevance and (if applicable) location.
Keyword Relevance
Relevance is the most important factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Why? Because the more specific you are, the better.
For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, it’s likely that you’d attract more qualified prospects by targeting a keyword such as “fiberglass in-ground pool installation,” rather than “swimming pools.” That’s because there’s a good chance that someone searching for “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” is looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation … and that could be you!
Sure, optimizing for “swimming pools” has its place. But there’s no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer. Go for the relevant, long-tail keywords instead.
Location-Based Keywords
Another major factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their specific area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” becomes “fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Boston, MA.”
If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages, since traffic from other locations isn’t going to be very much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is also a wise choice to create a separate web page dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people are searching for individual locations.
Now, how do you choose the right keywords for your business? We certainly don’t recommend guessing, for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business.
Here are nine awesome free and paid keyword research tools you can use to quickly and easily identify strong long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign.
Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research, and their free AdWords tool called Keyword Planner is a great place to start — especially if you use AdWords for some of your campaigns. (Note: You’ll need to set up an AdWords account to use Keyword Planner, but that doesn’t mean you have to create an ad.)
When you input one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address into Keyword Planner, Google will spit out a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.
It’ll also show you historical statistics and information on how a list of keywords might perform — and it’ll create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Since it’s a free AdWords tool, it can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your AdWords campaigns.
Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality — but you can make up for it somewhat if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.
Google Trends is another free tool from Google. It lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter that information in, it’ll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (e.g., press coverage), and where the traffic is coming from — along with similar keywords.
The best part about Google Trends is that it doesn’t just give you static keyword volume numbers like most keyword research tools. Instead, it generates colorful, interactive graphs that you can play with, download, and even embed on your website. It’ll also give you more dynamic insight into a keyword with information like relative popularity of a search term over time.
Interestingly, its data doesn’t include in repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, which makes results cleaner. It also groups together searches that it infers to mean the same thing, like misspellings.
One way to use Google Trends? If you’re trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title. Simply perform a quick comparison search in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often.
Keyword Tool is pretty rudimentary online keyword research tool, but if you’re just looking for a list of long-tail keyword suggestions related to one you already have in mind, then it can be useful. It’s also totally free — to use the most basic version, you don’t even need to create an account.
What Keyword Tool does is use Google Autocomplete to generate a list of relevant long-tail keywords suggestions. The search terms suggested by Google Autocomplete are based on a few different factors, like how often users were searching for a particular term in the past.
This type of suggestion tool can help you understand what people are searching for around your topics. For example, bloggers might use a tool like this to brainstorm blog post titles that’ll do well in search.
Again, all the free version does for you is generate other keyword suggestions in alphabetical order — it doesn’t tell you anything about search volume or cost-per-click (CPC). To get that information, you’ll have to upgrade to Keyword Tool Pro. The Pro version will also let you export the keywords and use them for content creation, search engine optimization, CPC/PPC, or other marketing activities.
Price: $34/mo. for Basic; $97/mo. for Pro; $499/mo. for Agency
Term Explorer offers probably the deepest research reports of any keyword research tool on the market. From one single seed term, you can get over 10,000 keyword variations.
Best of all, the tool does a great job of keeping the results as relevant as possible and pulling through lots of supporting metrics with them.
It’ll give you data for all the results on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), including the number of results, link strength, trust score, and keyword difficulty. To help you get a handle on your competitors, you can use the tool to research domain age, page ranking, and links, as well as the word count, page rank, links, outbound links, and the number of keyword occurrences in title, URL, and headers for individual webpages. You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.
Note: If you only plan on using it a few times a day, there is actually a free version of this tool that’ll do five tiny keyword jobs and five keyword analyses per day, with no queue priority.
Price: $99/mo. for Standard; $149/mo. for Medium; $249/mo. for Large; $599/mo. for Premium
The keyword difficulty tool from Moz is one of the most useful components of their paid suite. It’s a fantastic resource for analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword and for unearthing low-hanging fruit.
When you input a keyword into this tool, it’ll find the top 10 rankings for that keyword. Then, it’ll assign that keyword a “Difficulty Score” based on the pages that currently rank for that word. You can look at search volume data for your keywords, then pull up the SERP to see the top 10 results for each term.
Want to do some competitive keyword analysis? You can use the tool to see who else is ranking for your targeted keywords, along with information like each site’s page authority and the number of root domains linking to their page.
You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.
Price: $69.95/mo. for Pro; $149.95/mo. for Guru; $549.95/mo. for Business
SEMrush is a competitive research tool that lets you keep an eye on on your competitors’ keywords to find opportunities to bump them out for a top position in Google’s and Bing’s organic search results. You can compare a number of domains against one another to evaluate the competitive landscape, including their common keywords and positions in Google’s organic, paid, and shopping search results.
Position tracking is kind of like a sophisticated version of Google Trends, letting you see a keyword’s position in SERPs and analyze the history of rises and drops. Their colorful, visual charts are also super helpful for more quickly understanding trends and analyzing results.
Price: $99/mo. for Lite; $179/mo. for Standard; $399/mo. for Advanced
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is similar to SEMrush, but with some extra bonuses and a much more intuitive design.
For example, it’s able to estimate how many searches become real page visits. Not all of them do so, since Google gives instant answers for some queries. With Clicks and Clicks Per Search metrics, you’ll figure out traffic-generating keywords and skip dead-end options.
When it comes to the number of relevant keyword suggestions, Ahrefs goes the extra mile. It runs the biggest database – 5.1 billion keywords for over 200 countries – which means it can detect opportunities other tools could be missing.
Ahrefs can also help you with competitive research. Their Site Explorer tool lifts the veil on competitors’ keyword strategies, while Content Gap lets you compare competitor keywords with your own to identify your might-have-beens.
Ahrefs will also email you about even the smallest ranking progress of your competitors. Backlinks have a direct impacton ranking, and backlink research is one of Ahrefs’ strongest muscles.
Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, say that Ahrefs is his #1 go-to tool for backlink analysis: “I’ve tested over 25 link analysis tools and none come close to Ahref’s in terms of index size, freshness, and overall usability.”
Price: $19.95/mo. for Beginner; $29.95/mo. for Pro 300; $44.95/mo. for Pro 600; $74.95/mo. for Pro 1K
Accuranker is a keyword rank tracking tool with a key differentiator: It’s lightning fast while being extremely precise. So if you’re used to spending hours monitoring the rank progression of your keywords, this’ll end up saving you a ton of time.
Other advantages of this tool? It has built-in proxies to get a quick glance at whose ranking within the SERPs for any given keyword. If you plan to report keyword metrics to your manager or your team, you’ll like its scheduled weekly reports feature.
It’s also one of the best rank trackers out there that offers highly localized search engine rankings for your keywords. So if you’re marketing your business to an international audience, it’s a great tool for analyzing which pages are ranking in different countries.
Finally, it has integrations available with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Social Monitoring, and YouTube so you can keep an eye on statistics and estimated search traffic for your keywords straight from your AccuRanker dashboard.
HubSpot also has its very own Content Strategy tool within the Marketing Hub. The Content Strategy tool helps you identify and research topics, find keywords or subtopics to go after, and ultimately help grow your content presence for generating more organic traffic over time.
If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can access the Content Strategy tool, click on Content > Strategy.
Price: $69/mo. for Lite, $149/mo. for Standard, $299/mo. for Advanced, $499/mo. for Enterprise
Serpstat provides you with a list of historically profitable keywords used by competitors to make them rank high in search results. It also figures the value of your keywords using different factors, like number of search results and cost-per-click.
The software will offer suggestions for more suggestive keywords as well as provide long-tail keywords, which are low-volume keywords related to your business. Plus, if your business is international, you can adapt keywords to different countries in the tool’s database.
Finally, with Serpstat, you can check the relevancy of your webpages and analyze the trends that might be attractive to browsers.
Serpstat will be extremely useful to you if you want full analyses of keywords that work well for competitors. It’s also a great tool for making sure your page has a lower chance of losing a favorable ranking on SERPs.
Now that you know about all these great tools, get out there and start discovering your best keywords for SEO.
What tools and methods do you use to find long-tail keywords? Share your favorites with us in the comments below.
One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?
Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.
For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…
but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.
That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business.
(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)
Realize the full potential of your brand
Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.
To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:
More data to provide a more complete picture of your brand
Data that are easy to understand and share
Strategies and tactics to achieve your goals
Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.
Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!
When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.
Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:
Social + sales
Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard
“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”
When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.
With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.
At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.
One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.
You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.
Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?
Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?
Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?
This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.
To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.
Connecting social media and sales
For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.
Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.
(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)
You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.
Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.
Gain a better understanding of your brand
Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.
This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:
Per-post sales: Find out how much sales each social media post has generated
Campaign sales: Know how much sales your campaign has generated
Customer insights: Learn more about the social media users who are buying your products
Customer lifetime value: Calculate customer lifetime value for different segments
Product buzz: Get insights into who’s talking about your products on social
For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.
This Valentine’s Day, forget a dozen roses. You need a dozen GIFs.
The reason: Eye-catching visuals like GIFs in emails can increase click-through rates by 42% and conversion rates by 103%, and may positively impact your sales.
Go ahead and add GIFs to your February email campaigns. The AWeber design team has already done the work for you and created 12 downloadable Valentine’s Day GIFs!
Just download them and add them to your emails using AWeber’s ridiculously easy-to-use Drag and Drop message editor. These GIFs will be a sweet treat for your subscribers — and your bottom line.
Not an AWeber customer yet? Create your FREE account right now, and see how easy it is to use one of these GIFs in our Drag-and-Drop message editor.
Download Your Valentine’s Day GIFs
Step 1: Find the animated Valentine’s Day GIF below that you want to use in your email.
Step 2: Save it to your computer by either right clicking the GIF and selecting “Save Image,” or by dragging the GIF to your desktop.
Step 3: Upload the GIF into your email template inside AWeber. Under image size, choose “original.” That’s it!
You spin me right round, baby. Right round like a record, baby.
It’s almost like the 80s band “Dead or Alive” is performing in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Handwritten Love Note GIF
This is the email version of a hand-written love note to your crush. Your subscribers will LUV the middle-school nostalgia.
Cupid’s Arrow GIF:
Like Cupid, you won’t miss the mark with this heart and arrow GIF in your email.
Best Valentine’s Day GIFs
Here are some of our readers’ all-time favorite GIFs from past V-Days.
Popping Balloons GIF
Want to make your emails “pop”? Use this fun balloon GIF.
Valentine’s Day Sale GIF
Glow bright in the inbox with this neon sale sign.
Happy Valentine’s Day GIF
Make your subscribers’ hearts burst with this GIF.
Candy Hearts GIF
What’s almost as good as candy falling right into your mouth? This GIF.
Love You GIF
Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Olive.
Olive who?
Olive you.
Tell your subscribers how much you love them with this GIF.
Heart GIF
What do you call a very small Valentine?
A Valen-tiny. Just like this small heart GIF!
Happy Valentine’s Day GIFs
“You must be a keyboard, because you’re just my type.” No cheesy pick up lines required. Get the message across with these two GIFs.
Candy Heart “Hugs” GIF
Give your subscribers a hearty hug this V-Day.
Show your appreciation year round
Want to show your love for your customers the other 364 days of the year? Here are some clever ways to deliver awesome experiences.
1. Send personalized notes.
Have you ever received a tweet from your favorite company? Or a lightning-fast response from tech support when you’re having an issue? It feels good to be acknowledged, doesn’t it?
Do the same for your customers and send a bunch of individualized emails. You can say “thank you for your business” to a new or interesting customer. You can send a quick note of thanks to your subscribers who gave your product, service, or program great reviews. Or maybe you can send followup emails to the ones who didn’t gave you good reviews — and ask what you can do better.
Include your contact info and tell them to get in touch with you if they ever have any questions.
2. Deliver seasonal content.
Get creative and think outside the traditional holiday seasons. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner, you could send your subscribers a special coupon that they can use for a pick-me-up during tax season.
First-time customers could use a push to buy again and return customers deserve to be recognized. Give them a little something — like free shipping on their next order, a free consultation, or a downloadable resource that can help them make a buying decision.
4. Turn your 404 page into an opportunity.
A 404 doesn’t have to be a dead end. Instead,use it as a chance to delight.
One quick example: If you stumble upon a 404 page on the site Flooring Supplies — the UK’s largest online flooring company — it says “Floor…Oh … Floor!” Here are some more awesome 404 ideas.
5. Respond to questions and comments.
Join in on your customers’ conversation. Forums, Twitter chats, and your own social profiles are great places to start. When someone gives you a digital shoutout, respond! It’s a fantastic way to retain customers and maintain stellar customer service.
Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords.
Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent.
The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research.
In this post, we’ll cover the nine best tools out there for performing keyword research for your website content. Before we get started though, let’s briefly go over two important things to consider as you do your research: relevance and (if applicable) location.
Keyword Relevance
Relevance is the most important factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Why? Because the more specific you are, the better.
For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, it’s likely that you’d attract more qualified prospects by targeting a keyword such as “fiberglass in-ground pool installation,” rather than “swimming pools.” That’s because there’s a good chance that someone searching for “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” is looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation … and that could be you!
Sure, optimizing for “swimming pools” has its place. But there’s no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer. Go for the relevant, long-tail keywords instead.
Location-Based Keywords
Another major factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their specific area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” becomes “fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Boston, MA.”
If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages, since traffic from other locations isn’t going to be very much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is also a wise choice to create a separate web page dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people are searching for individual locations.
Now, how do you choose the right keywords for your business? We certainly don’t recommend guessing, for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business.
Here are nine awesome free and paid keyword research tools you can use to quickly and easily identify strong long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign.
Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research, and their free AdWords tool called Keyword Planner is a great place to start — especially if you use AdWords for some of your campaigns. (Note: You’ll need to set up an AdWords account to use Keyword Planner, but that doesn’t mean you have to create an ad.)
When you input one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address into Keyword Planner, Google will spit out a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.
It’ll also show you historical statistics and information on how a list of keywords might perform — and it’ll create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Since it’s a free AdWords tool, it can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your AdWords campaigns.
Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality — but you can make up for it somewhat if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.
Google Trends is another free tool from Google. It lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter that information in, it’ll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (e.g., press coverage), and where the traffic is coming from — along with similar keywords.
The best part about Google Trends is that it doesn’t just give you static keyword volume numbers like most keyword research tools. Instead, it generates colorful, interactive graphs that you can play with, download, and even embed on your website. It’ll also give you more dynamic insight into a keyword with information like relative popularity of a search term over time.
Interestingly, its data doesn’t include in repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, which makes results cleaner. It also groups together searches that it infers to mean the same thing, like misspellings.
One way to use Google Trends? If you’re trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title. Simply perform a quick comparison search in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often.
Keyword Tool is pretty rudimentary online keyword research tool, but if you’re just looking for a list of long-tail keyword suggestions related to one you already have in mind, then it can be useful. It’s also totally free — to use the most basic version, you don’t even need to create an account.
What Keyword Tool does is use Google Autocomplete to generate a list of relevant long-tail keywords suggestions. The search terms suggested by Google Autocomplete are based on a few different factors, like how often users were searching for a particular term in the past.
This type of suggestion tool can help you understand what people are searching for around your topics. For example, bloggers might use a tool like this to brainstorm blog post titles that’ll do well in search.
Again, all the free version does for you is generate other keyword suggestions in alphabetical order — it doesn’t tell you anything about search volume or cost-per-click (CPC). To get that information, you’ll have to upgrade to Keyword Tool Pro. The Pro version will also let you export the keywords and use them for content creation, search engine optimization, CPC/PPC, or other marketing activities.
Price: $34/mo. for Basic; $97/mo. for Pro; $499/mo. for Agency
Term Explorer offers probably the deepest research reports of any keyword research tool on the market. From one single seed term, you can get over 10,000 keyword variations.
Best of all, the tool does a great job of keeping the results as relevant as possible and pulling through lots of supporting metrics with them.
It’ll give you data for all the results on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), including the number of results, link strength, trust score, and keyword difficulty. To help you get a handle on your competitors, you can use the tool to research domain age, page ranking, and links, as well as the word count, page rank, links, outbound links, and the number of keyword occurrences in title, URL, and headers for individual webpages. You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.
Note: If you only plan on using it a few times a day, there is actually a free version of this tool that’ll do five tiny keyword jobs and five keyword analyses per day, with no queue priority.
Price: $99/mo. for Standard; $149/mo. for Medium; $249/mo. for Large; $599/mo. for Premium
The keyword difficulty tool from Moz is one of the most useful components of their paid suite. It’s a fantastic resource for analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword and for unearthing low-hanging fruit.
When you input a keyword into this tool, it’ll find the top 10 rankings for that keyword. Then, it’ll assign that keyword a “Difficulty Score” based on the pages that currently rank for that word. You can look at search volume data for your keywords, then pull up the SERP to see the top 10 results for each term.
Want to do some competitive keyword analysis? You can use the tool to see who else is ranking for your targeted keywords, along with information like each site’s page authority and the number of root domains linking to their page.
You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.
Price: $69.95/mo. for Pro; $149.95/mo. for Guru; $549.95/mo. for Business
SEMrush is a competitive research tool that lets you keep an eye on on your competitors’ keywords to find opportunities to bump them out for a top position in Google’s and Bing’s organic search results. You can compare a number of domains against one another to evaluate the competitive landscape, including their common keywords and positions in Google’s organic, paid, and shopping search results.
Position tracking is kind of like a sophisticated version of Google Trends, letting you see a keyword’s position in SERPs and analyze the history of rises and drops. Their colorful, visual charts are also super helpful for more quickly understanding trends and analyzing results.
Price: $99/mo. for Lite; $179/mo. for Standard; $399/mo. for Advanced
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is similar to SEMrush, but with some extra bonuses and a much more intuitive design.
For example, it’s able to estimate how many searches become real page visits. Not all of them do so, since Google gives instant answers for some queries. With Clicks and Clicks Per Search metrics, you’ll figure out traffic-generating keywords and skip dead-end options.
When it comes to the number of relevant keyword suggestions, Ahrefs goes the extra mile. It runs the biggest database – 5.1 billion keywords for over 200 countries – which means it can detect opportunities other tools could be missing.
Ahrefs can also help you with competitive research. Their Site Explorer tool lifts the veil on competitors’ keyword strategies, while Content Gap lets you compare competitor keywords with your own to identify your might-have-beens.
Ahrefs will also email you about even the smallest ranking progress of your competitors. Backlinks have a direct impacton ranking, and backlink research is one of Ahrefs’ strongest muscles.
Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, say that Ahrefs is his #1 go-to tool for backlink analysis: “I’ve tested over 25 link analysis tools and none come close to Ahref’s in terms of index size, freshness, and overall usability.”
Price: $19.95/mo. for Beginner; $29.95/mo. for Pro 300; $44.95/mo. for Pro 600; $74.95/mo. for Pro 1K
Accuranker is a keyword rank tracking tool with a key differentiator: It’s lightning fast while being extremely precise. So if you’re used to spending hours monitoring the rank progression of your keywords, this’ll end up saving you a ton of time.
Other advantages of this tool? It has built-in proxies to get a quick glance at whose ranking within the SERPs for any given keyword. If you plan to report keyword metrics to your manager or your team, you’ll like its scheduled weekly reports feature.
It’s also one of the best rank trackers out there that offers highly localized search engine rankings for your keywords. So if you’re marketing your business to an international audience, it’s a great tool for analyzing which pages are ranking in different countries.
Finally, it has integrations available with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Social Monitoring, and YouTube so you can keep an eye on statistics and estimated search traffic for your keywords straight from your AccuRanker dashboard.
HubSpot also has its very own Content Strategy tool within the Marketing Hub. The Content Strategy tool helps you identify and research topics, find keywords or subtopics to go after, and ultimately help grow your content presence for generating more organic traffic over time.
If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can access the Content Strategy tool, click on Content > Strategy.
Price: $69/mo. for Lite, $149/mo. for Standard, $299/mo. for Advanced, $499/mo. for Enterprise
Serpstat provides you with a list of historically profitable keywords used by competitors to make them rank high in search results. It also figures the value of your keywords using different factors, like number of search results and cost-per-click.
The software will offer suggestions for more suggestive keywords as well as provide long-tail keywords, which are low-volume keywords related to your business. Plus, if your business is international, you can adapt keywords to different countries in the tool’s database.
Finally, with Serpstat, you can check the relevancy of your webpages and analyze the trends that might be attractive to browsers.
Serpstat will be extremely useful to you if you want full analyses of keywords that work well for competitors. It’s also a great tool for making sure your page has a lower chance of losing a favorable ranking on SERPs.
Now that you know about all these great tools, get out there and start discovering your best keywords for SEO.
What tools and methods do you use to find long-tail keywords? Share your favorites with us in the comments below.
