SEO & ICO LANDING PAGES: 5 tools to master

Launching an Initial Coin Offering is becoming an hype, such as investing in one. Due to the increased popularity of ICO’s, the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of its landing pages and websites is becoming more and more important. A bad SEO positioning can mean a loss of online visibility which can lead to a less successful ICO, while a strong SEO position can attract potential investors for your Inital Coin Offering and has a positive influence on ICO rating.

Next to that, SEO provides fairly good ROI. Although online paid advertising (PPC) campaigns will get you good results, your organic position in search engines should be a bedrock of your online presence. Having a great SEO will allow you to lower your PPC investment in paid search campaigns.

WHY USE SEO TOOLS?

Mainly, SEO tools are useful to analyze your own SEO position and keywords, to find opportunities and to optimize your marketing strategies. Next to that, some tools can also provide you with high quality insights of your target based on the behaviour of the visitors of your website.

Also, SEO tools can be very useful when setting up or optimizing a marketing campaign. This because, when these tools are being used the right way, it will allow you to have a look on what your competitors are doing. Like this, you can see what your competitors are aiming for (Pay per Click Campaigns and SEO wise), and you can learn from their successes and failures.

5 BASIC, YET MUST-HAVE SEO TOOLS

There are lots of SEO tools available online: free, freemium and paid. But, we would like to share with you 5 basic SEO tools that can be useful for your ICO landing page and marketing strategy.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Whether you are doing the marketing for an ICO launch or a regular marketing campaign, Google Analytics is definitely a must. If you haven’t installed it yet on your landing page or website, we recommend you to do this as soon as possible.

This free tool from Google let’s you get real time insights of the traffic on your website. This information is very useful, especially marketing wise. For example, you can see where the traffic on your website is coming from: are they coming from your social media? Do they come from paid advertising campaigns? Where are those users based? Which pages do they visit within your website? What are they searching for in Google?

With the data you gather in analytics, you can optimize your marketing campaigns to have more results with less in investment in search engine advertising. Next to that, it is also useful to see whether your website audience coincides with your target and to create audiences for paid remarketing campaigns.

SEO wise speaking, this tool is useful to see whether you are actually getting qualified traffic to your websites from the SEO strategies that you are implementing. It gets you an insight on how “SEO healthy” your website is, what people search for and how they end up on your website. It also lets you see how and from which channels you acquire the traffic to your landing page and which channels you should empower more.

AHREFS

SEO is not just about having enough relevant keywords linked to your website, it is a lot more. Part of what determines a good SEO is the authority your website has. Partly, you can gain authority through link building strategies. A great tool for link building is Ahrefs.

This is a paid tool that allows you to track your back- and internal links and it gives you an insight on how the authority of your domain is.

Ahrefs let’s you track as many websites as you want, so this tool is great to “spy” on your competitors. Are they applying a link building strategy? If so, through which websites? What is giving them traffic to their website?

You can easily analyze the data and see what is working well for them, copy that strategy and you can also see what did not work for them, something you can automatically discard from your own strategy.

This tool is also useful to track your keyword evolution and to spy on the organic keywords of your competitor. Next to that, you can even get insights on which keywords your competitors are bidding on through Google Adwords.

MOZ BAR

The MozBar is an extension you can download and add to your browser. It sits right up your toolbar, just where all the action is going on. While visiting any site, this bar gives you some insights on how the SEO of the website and its links are.

For example, it shows you the authority rate of a website. This information can be very useful when you want to implement a link building strategy. The higher the authority of a website, the more it can help your SEO positioning if you appear on that website.

For example, if you want to pay a website for your article to appear or for mentioning your website, it’s obviously very important that your target is actually visiting and reading that website. But, next to that, for the SEO positioning it is important that this website has a high authority, and if possible, so called “dofollow links”. These links are very powerful for your SEO positioning.
There are nofollow and dofollow links. Nofollow is an html attribute value that is being implemented on a website and instructs search engine bots that the hyperlink should not influence the links ranking in the index of the search engine. This means that a nofollow link will not empower your website’s authority, whereas a dofollow link does empower it.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Search Console is a free service that provides you with useful information about your website and its visitors. For example, you can get insights on who is visiting your website and how they are finding it. This tool is very useful for different kind of aspects:

• Search appearance: how is your website being displayed within search engines
• Search traffic: this section will give you insights such as where your traffic is coming from, which keywords your users have searched for and demographic data of your users.
• Google Index: this section will report on how Google is crawling and indexing your website and keywords. It will tell you which pages are indexed and if there are any errors or broken URLS.
• Crawl: This part reports your website crawl rate, if it picked up any errors and if so, which, it shows you where those issues are found and what type of error it is.
• Security issues: security is high valued, and Google knows that. This section will show you whether your website is secured. If your website has been compromised, hacked or is vulnerable to be hacked, you will find out about it in the security issue section.
• Other resources: This section is full of other useful resources, such as a page speed tester (page speed is a very important SEO factor) and email markup checker, a tool that can validate the structured data contents of an HTML email.

SEMRUSH

Semrush is a freemium tool that is very useful for paid search campaigns and keyword ranking analysis. The free version will only allow you to get basic information (showing you up to 10 keywords) and analysis a limited amount of websites a day but it can be useful if you want to obtain a general vision of your website or the one of your competitor.

The free version will show you a graphic of the evolution of the organic keywords of the website that you have entered, the top 10 organic keywords that is giving the most traffic to the website and the top 10 keywords the website is best ranked for.

This tool is mainly very useful to find keywords to rank for. The premium version of this tool can provide you with data about keywords that competitors are ranking for, organically and paid. This information can be very useful when setting up or optimizing SEO strategies and PPC campaigns. You can learn from the successes and failures of your competitors and find a gap in the market for yourself.

To conclude, these 5 basic tools will help you monitor your website’s traffic, get information on your users’ behaviour, find opportunities and optimize your ranking, analyze keywords to build a solid and effective paid advertising campaign and get data to make informed decisions related to your SEO and paid digital marketing strategies.