How Serpstat Helps Digital Marketing Agencies: Experience Of Strategy Plus

Strategy Plus was established in 1997 by my father who was a Marketing Consultant, with the help of a developer he met. They started creating custom websites and purposeful packages to help our clients gain traffic through search engines. These packages would include 3 domains, two of which would be keyword stuffed such as www.birmingham-removals-company.co.uk, using different meta titles and descriptions for each. That was about it!

Eventually, my Dad was no longer able to continue working and I took over the agency in 2012. With this, I evolved the business into a more full-service agency - more in line with the Hubspot principles of Inbound Marketing - and now provide holistic Digital Marketing strategies for our clients, including PPC services, Social Media, and Videography, in addition to our Website Development and SEO services.

Although I feel as though I have excelled in my knowledge of Digital Marketing and nurtured a small team around me, I haven't adopted my Dad's salesman-like traits. Therefore, I don't charge what we can get out of the client, but what is financially beneficial for them. We also don't tie clients down into lengthy contracts, allowing projects to be put on hold as and when they like. What this means to us is that we need to look at solutions that are also cost-effective and flexible.

Software that helps us ensure our time is spent effectively on our tasks and reporting is essential for our SEO department. We have used many in the past, including market leaders such as Moz, but as the yearly subscription came up for renewal, it became evident that this wasn't cost-effective. We had a lot of projects to report on, and many of those didn't require all the features available, and as the pricing of the software increased, it seemed that our client budget would be better spent on more man hours. Around this time, when I began looking for a more cost-effective alternative, I came across Serpstat content on Twitter and was pretty impressed. I looked into the business a little further and thought about trying out the software, low and behold I realised it did pretty much the same as Moz but without the stringent limits on the number of projects.

This means for the same price we are able to have all our projects analysed and reported via Serpstat, plus we can use the tool to impress prospective clients by adding their site into the system, before we have even started the project.

A general outline of our SEO tasks will be added to our main Digital Marketing strategy, while our SEO department will break down the specific steps required for each task using Serpstat's checklist feature. Usually, we will create our own template, but the checklist templates provided by Serpstat are very comprehensive and help us make sure we don't miss anything important.

All SEO projects will differ in size. Therefore, the time we allocate to each project will also differ. For some businesses, organic search is their main source of revenue - in this case, they'll either require the help of an agency to ensure their rankings are maintained, or to go all-out and dominate as many keywords as possible. Elsewhere, there are clients who request basic on-page SEO work - updating their metadata and blog, for example - while others are simply experimenting with SEO, either because they're a new website, or they're curious about it.

The time we allocate will be determined by the goals each client sets out to achieve. The larger the objective, the higher their investment and the more of our time is required.

Once we submit a new project into the system, we will run a site audit and start on search term research. From Serpstat's SEO Keywords section we evaluate which terms have good buyer intent and a suitable search volume. We also research clients' suggestions, to find out whether or not people are in fact using them in any great volume. Once we have these, we look at competitor keyword analysis to ensure these search terms are worth working on. From this, we will add the chosen terms to Serpstat's Rank Tracker tool.

As soon as the agreed search terms are in place, we turn our focus towards the site audit, starting with correcting priority technical errors. This is all about ensuring the site is crawled correctly and easy to use on all devices.

Content then becomes into play, where we evaluate where content needs to be improved, deleted, and created.

Last but not least we evaluate the site's internal link structure and it's external authority. This will also consist of competitor analysis and content creation to build the domain's authority.

Serpstat will be able to provide a good base for where to benchmark and track progress in all areas.

Once we have determined our desired search terms for a project, we will also ask clients to provide us with the immediate competitors they're aware of. We will then check the search results for the agreed search terms and find which brands they're likely to rank above. The analysis will then consist of finding which main keywords these sites have been optimised for, which of their pages or blogs are ranking for our chosen search terms (and comparing that content with our client's), and finding which referring domains they receive backlinks from.

Keyword research is a crucial step for working with the client's project. If you optimize your site's pages with proper relevant keywords, this will bring you undoubted benefits. It will be simple for you to achieve high rankings in search engines, get high-quality traffic, and convert it to loyal clients.

To find keywords, we use several Serpstat reports. First, we go to Keyword Research → SEO Research → Keywords Selection. You can also apply filters if needed.

Related Keywords report is the perfect tool to find keywords that are semantically connected to our keyword. Go to Keyword Research → SEO Research → Related Keywords.

Search Suggestions report will help you find a list of search suggestions related to the researched query. These are popular search queries that pop under the search bar as you start typing the query. Go to Keyword Research → SEO Research → Search Suggestions.

Your clients expect that their website is optimized to keep up with search engine demands. So it is necessary to improve site ranking, including meta tags, headings, content, and redirects.

Serpstat allows to do all this via a clear user interface, and also receive an SDO score, a metric used by the Serpstat team.

The SDO score can easily be explained to clients and can act as a clear indicator of SEO success, and is, therefore, a great addition to any website SEO audit report.

To see the site's technical issues, click on any summary report indicator or go to the reports. Serpstat not only shows specific problems on the site but also gives suggestions on fixing them. The tool also notes the corrected issues since the last audit on the site.

Rank Tracker tool allows you to search for relevant keywords, review competitors, and monitor search engine rankings for the clients. Analyzing site positions is necessary to track the success of a promotion; so you can study the results of your work or your team.

You can upload keywords, divide them into groups by topics, and track your site's positions and the positions of your competitors. You will get all the information on the top 100:

Start tracking positions by clicking on the button Start tracking positions at the bottom of the Overview report.

After you checked all the fields and made sure that everything is correct - click the Create button. Then set up the tracking according to your needs.

After Serpstat tracks domain positions, you will get several reports:

In the Keywords report, you can see basic information about the project's positions for the keywords added to the project. The report will display the highest domain position in the SERP .

In the Competitors section you will find a report with a graph of the dynamics of changes in your positions in comparison with the top 100 competitors. To add competitors to the report, tick the check box next to the corresponding competitor.

URLs report helps determine if the tracked / expected URL matches the one that is in fact ranked in the SERP. As the actual URL, we display the one that has the highest position in the SERP.

As one of the ranking factors, links can positively affect the position of a site in SERPs. We used Serpstat to control the number and quality of our backlinks as well as competitors' links. It was a necessary step to examine links and anchor lists of top competitors, analyze the quality and naturalness of the backlinks, and control the growth dynamics of the backlink profile.

In Serpstat, you can also check backlinks for link building. Enter your domain and check these parameters:

It is essential to manage our many client SEO projects using market-leading software. However, when we deal with SME's and some local campaigns, other leading software was too expensive to make it cost-effective for our clients. We researched the market for potential alternatives to Moz and Serpstat came to our attention because of the great content they created. We created a trial with one of our projects and could see the system offered more than enough tools and reporting software to service our clients to the best of our ability.

Serpstat offered an affordable solution, which allowed us to remain extremely competitive in the SEO marketplace. We have managed more of our clients' projects through market-leading SEO software, enabling us to give far better results and save time.

We would highly recommend any SEO agency looking to offer the best, cost-effective services to SME's to trial Serpstat and see that they are a real alternative to Moz and SEMrush.