Tuesday, August 28, 2012

How Google’s Free Tools Dominate Online Marketing Industry


Back in March in this year, SEOmoz conducted an Industry Survey that grabbed attention of almost 6500 people in more than 100 countries. From independent consultants to agency SEOs to in-house marketers, they got to see responses from a wide swath of the industry's demographics. Almost half of the respondents (47.3 percent) were from the U.S., and 77 percent were males.
By looking at the Industry Survey it emphasizes the fact that traditional SEO is alive and well being the 2nd highest-demand service area (71% of respondents), and SEO is the top priority for both individuals and their teams. 
Organizations are heavily focused on Online Marketing where SEO, Social Media & Analytics, two pretty big buckets. According to the survey most respondents (92 %) have SEO services as part of their mix followed by Analytics (82 %) & Social Media (70%).
These are the top 5 service areas that our respondents believe are growing (as % of respondents):
Here are the top 10 inbound marketing focused actions that respondents actually spent their time doing (as % of respondents):
It is very important to notice that the SEO industry relies heavily on the free SEO-related tools provided by Google. These free tools are changing the game, with an incredible 93% of respondents using Google Analytics. Google announced a new version of Google Analytics which introduces a whole new user experience.  
Some of the new features in Google Analytics version 5 include;
Navigation Changes and Account Management
Multiple Dashboards (and Widgets)
Events as Goals
Powerful Custom Reports
Term Cloud Visualization
Advance Segment Changes &
Interactive Help

Keyword research is the foundation of successful search engine optimization. Even though there are a number of free and paid online tools to help you identify your potential keywords and analyze, Google’s free tools have been able to protect its top positions with an incredible 88.3% of respondents using Google’s official Ad Words keyword research tool followed by Google Insights (58.6 %).


In the last 12 months, here are the top 10 free tools respondents have used (* denotes tools that also have paid versions):
It is clear that free tools from Google have been able to rank highly on this list with a significant usage of Google Webmaster Tools ( 83% )

(via)

No comments: