Bruce Clay Talks Choosing the Right SEO Tools

The days of looking at your rankings to measure SEO success are long gone; I know this not only because it's true, but also because I just discovered a "vintage" interview with Bruce way back in 2008 titled, "Ranking Is Dead." The real goals of SEO today are visibility, traffic and conversion (this is straight from the Bruce's mouth). He recently talked about this and other ideas at length in an article he wrote for Visibility Magazine, "Retooling the SEO Tool Belt." CC BY 2.0 In the article, Bruce talks about the tools that SEOs use and how they must adapt to the ever-changing goals of the search engines. And because you're all such loyal readers, I'm going to give you the CliffsNotes, so to speak, in case you want to skip class aka only really have time to skim a shortened version and hopefully your brain registers some of it. In his article, Bruce points out the major changes that have occurred with search engines that make rankings a complicated little thing: • Personalized search: Depending on a user's prior searches, bookmarks and websites visited, the search engines try to interpret what the user is really searching for with any given query. • Behavioral search: A search engine can monitor the behavior for all users of a particular query and make predictions for the results based on a community-level understanding. • Intent-based search: Search engines try to understand what the intention of the user is based on the query, for example, research, commerce or something else. • Localization: Depending on the user's location, search engines tailor the results to the geographic area. New updates to the way search engines work require that the tools in a person's SEO arsenal must also evolve. No longer can people solely rely on a print out of a ranking report to gauge success. The new tools must work harder and develop faster than ever before to keep up with the changing search marketing industry. Just some of the features SEO tools should have today, says Bruce, include: • Features for assisting geotargeting efforts. • Features that make optimizing simple for search engines other than just Google. • Tools that offer mulitbrowser compatibility and work just as well on a Mac as they do on a PC. • Features for multilanguage support as search marketing continues to go global. • Features that allow research to be more convenient, serving up info like keyword stats, daily activity, demographics and so on, without ever leaving the SERP. Check out the full article, "Retooling the SEO Tool Belt," on VisibilityMagazine.com for more tidbits from Bruce on how search is changing, and the free and subscription-based tools you can use to stay ahead of the game.