There is an old adage that goes, “Work smarter, not harder.”
By applying this basic concept, you can effectively manage your time and produce quality results. In the realm of SEO, however, it seems that some of the most important factors in delivering a quality product take time, energy, and endless cups of coffee.
In an effort to save that needed time and energy, we went searching for tools that could allow us to work smarter, but deliver the same results as would be produced by hours of tedious work. Here are some of the awesome tools we found.
BrightLocal
One of the first tools, which is more like a whole workbench, is an amazing service called BrightLocal. The tools that BrightLocal provides to its customers are unmatched amongst its competitors. Within the BrightLocal Dashboard are keys to saving hours of keyword research, competitive citation research, rank checking, and citation building.
With such features as Citation Burst, which allows you to push out bundles of citations to high-authority websites, and Google+ Local Wizard, which provides you with quality information about not only your Google+ listing’s reach, but also the competition in your area. BrightLocal has become a service we use daily to gain the most accurate, detailed information needed to help boost our clients into the local search spotlight.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
The second tool we came across is a WordPress plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast. This plugin is a fantastic tool, which combines multiple elements of basic SEO in an easy-to-use interface.
Some of the basic features of WordPress SEO are being able to set title tags and meta description templates, permalink clean up, XML sitemap generation, and easy to use Robots Meta configuration.
This WordPress plugin also has add-on tools available for purchase, including Video SEO plugins and a Local SEO plugin. The Local SEO tool allows you to easily set and add schema markup and maps to any page with a click of a button, making it extremely valuable for local search.
With these two tools, we have effectively been able to reduce the amount of hours spent on manual keyword research, citation building, manually creating schema markup, and many others. By working smarter, we can provide our clients with the unmatched quality that we promise.
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