ClickZ along with its sister site Search Engine Watch have embarked on a mission to help its readers and the wider industry understand the marketing technologies that are changing and transforming businesses and even industries.
Last month we released the ClickZ Buyers Guide to Bid Management Tools and this month our focus is on enterprise SEO tools. In particular, we will be reviewing tools like Conductor, BrightEdge, Searchmetrics, SEMRush, Ahrefs and Moz Pro.
With over 5,000 marketing technologies in the market, it has become almost impossible to determine which are right for your business, or whether the ones you are currently using are still the best suited to your needs.
What are we trying to achieve
With the power of technology revealed all around us (look at Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, for example), it is no surprise that picking the right set of technologies has become the single biggest factor enabling businesses to gain an advantage over their competitors – so it is important to get it right.
Coupled with the huge costs, integrations with legacy technology, management of stakeholders and the long onboarding periods, choosing the right technology is not an easy process.
Whilst many companies and publications offer a single view of a particular landscape, our goal is to provide an independent three-dimensional view that empowers marketers with the information they need to make a purchase decision themselves.
Why SEO tools
SEO remains a very significant source of online traffic, driving an average of 51% of clicks to any website.
As a result, it is unsurprising that brands are projected to spend $79.27 billion annually on organic search services and technologies by 2020.
The landscape is constantly changing, however. Organic search has now evolved into a sophisticated, multi-device conversation between brands and consumers.
Just some of the developments shaping the industry in 2018 include:
• The shift to mobile-first
• Voice search
• Visual search
• RankBrain and machine learning-driven results
• The convergence of content and SEO
Amidst this flux, marketers need control over their data to help maximize what is one of the foremost digital marketing opportunities available.
That challenge grows ever more difficult as the industry fragments; it is technology that helps us bring some sense of cohesion.
Enterprise SEO tools aim to achieve exactly this. They perform a number of vital functions and bring these together into one, comprehensive dashboard.
The process
Our guides are built by the community for the community so it is essential that we get as much feedback and collaboration with both the users and the technologies themselves.
To do this, we start the research process with a survey that asks our readers and the wider community to review their current SEO tools. This combines over 1,000 reviews and accounts for the majority of the final scores (60%).
The final report features 6 tools/technologies and is broken into 6 categories and 6 further subcategories. All of the featured providers are then interviewed by our panel of judges which add an extra layer of both quantitative data (20%) and also qualitative data that will feed into the judges own scores that are compiled after a judging day (20%).
The final report aggregates all of this data and distills it into a Buyers Guide which is presented at our Buyers Forums in New York and London.
The judges
Our judges are a panel of experts from both brands and agencies that have had extensive use of SEO tools.
3 ways to get involved
- The survey is live until April 6, so please review your SEO tool if you use one.
- Sign up for one of the Buyers Forums (New York – May 3, & London – May 10) where we present the results of the research.
- Let us know if you would be interested in being a judge on our next Buyers guide which will look at Attribution tools. Email Sam.Lawson@ClickZ.com
