Best Buy Marketing Software for Small Businesses

MARKETING SOFTWAREBEST BUY FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

http://www.searchlabmarketing.com/

INTRODUCTIONThis deck is a representation of what we consider to be the best marketing software choices for small business owners that want to improve their website’s performance across three critical dimensions of inbound marketing: SEO, conversions, and lead attribution. Each dimension contains three tools necessary to achieve success in that dimension and each tool is individually graded on its usability, data quality, and the tool’s flexibility in reporting collected data.

Each tool was graded on their entry-level products and assigned 0-5 points (5 being the best). Individual experiences are highly subject to the size of your business, the number of websites you manage, your role in the company, and your marketing budget. This analysis assumes that you are a VSB/SMB with a $250 a month budget for marketing and have a limited knowledge of inbound marketing.

MOZ Analytics

HubSpotAll-in-One

Google Tools

The Contenders

IMG Source: moz.com

IMG Source: hubspot.com

IMG Source: google.com

SEORound

#1

Content Analysis

Criteria Google Tools Moz Tools HubSpot Tools

Usability 0 3 5

Data Quality 0 5 3

Flexibility 0 3 0

Total Score 0 11 8

One facet of SEO that we consider to be a universal task is fixing mistakes in a website’s content. From missing alt text to ugly page titles, somewhere at some point a mistake has or will be made in your website’s content. Content analysis tools make it easy to spot the mistakes and take the appropriate measures to correct them fast. Google Tools provide some indication of more technical and serious SEO issues, but overall I’m assigning them a score of 0 down the list. They’re not intuitive, they’re not reliable, and there’s 0 flexibility in them.

MOZ

Moz has done a fantastic job with their On-Page Optimization tools. A clear numeric grade is prominent at the top of the report, the grading system explanation is just below, and a detailed list of contributing factors is clearly displayed to indicate which areas of a site need attention, in order of their SEO significance, and with detailed explanations of how to fix them just below the grading criteria.

Pages are graded against a user specified keyword which makes it easy for a viewer to test their content against several keyword variants.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s Page Performance reports also grade a page’s SEO and while HubSpot doesn’t allow you to cross check a page with a specific keyword, the Page Performance report does detail the ranked keywords for that page, the number of inbound links to the page, and gives you the opportunity to refresh the data on the page immediately after publishing a fix.

Keyword Tools


Usability 2 0 5

Data Quality 5 1 1

Flexibility 5 0 5

Total Score 12 1 11

In light of Google’s changes to keyword tracking, we are unable to award any marketing software with a score above 1. Of course, Google allows its users to see this information so they get an automatic 5, even though the entire marketing community hates them for this.

For this analysis we’re focused on finding keywords to use as part of an SEO strategy, determining the level of competition and difficulty for those words, and tracking changes in rank position over time.

MOZUnfortunately for MOZ they’ve lost any potential points for usability and flexibility because of their software. We actually started a MOZ trial 1+ week before taking this screen shot and it was still stuck on updating. We ran into several other parts of the app that also suggested we should be happy to wait a week, 24 hours, or 48 hours to get a piece of data. Not user-friendly. Not flexible.

HubSpot

In terms of user-friendliness and reporting flexibility, there are not too many options out that that can beat HubSpot’s Keywords tool. Sort and filter by 8 different metrics, examine the difference between your ranking and your competitor’s ranking, identify long-tail opportunities, get suggestions, and more. The only downside to this app is their lack of “change” filter on the front page (though you can see it in a detailed page report).

Google

If you integrate Google Webmasters with Google Analytics you can get some decent data on how people are finding your website in organic search. Their data is top-notch and isn’t piped through a third party, making it more reliable than other sources, but their UI is clunky. One thing they do offer that the other two do not is total impressions and average CTR.

Link Analysis


Usability 3 5 2

Data Quality 4 5 4

Flexibility 0 5 2

Total Score 7 15 8

Link building is one of the trickier aspects of SEO to be sure. It’s rife with penalties, it’s hard to manage, and one slipup can torpedo your website into the nether regions of Google’s listings. All three of these tools offer marketers an easy way to measure their link building strategy and to keep an eye out for potentially bad inbound links, leaving this comparison hinging on usability and the flexibility in reporting.

MOZMOZ wins the link analysis portion of SEO by a landslide. Open Site Explorer is fast, accurate, provides an extremely detailed look at how pages are being linked to, as well as the overall domain authority of the link’s source. This same level of detail is transferred to their in-app link analysis tool, so no great surprises on that front.

Google

Google’s inbound links analysis tool is far more simplistic than either of the other tools, but still an effective way to track a link building strategy. The UI feels clumsy however and it’s relatively inflexible in terms of generating in-app reports.

HubSpot

Though HubSpot does offer a dedicated link grader tool the best way to perform link analysis is in Page Grader. The UI is clean. You can easily toggle between inbound links, internal links, and outgoing links, and see the type of link and the text being used in the link.

LEADSRound

#2

Conversion Attribution


Usability 2 0 5

Data Quality 4 0 4

Flexibility 5 0 5

Total Score 11 0 14

While it may no longer be possible to identify which keywords led to a conversion on our websites, understanding the source of conversions will remain a critical component of marketing. We use the data to measure our SEO, to develop better customer personas, and to identify which channels are delivering in terms of lead volume and quality.

At this time, MOZ doesn’t provide any contacts integration, making attribution impossible and resulting in a score of 0.

HubSpot

HubSpot not only provides data about your incoming traffic but when that traffic results in a conversion on your website that contact information is attributed directly to the visitor’s original source in the sources report. You can use this data to run reports, generate lists for email marketing campaigns and more.

Google

We actually prefer Google’s Goals tool over Hubspot’s Sources tool but it loses points on a few key areas. The data is rich, you can do A/B testing using Goals/Experiments, and it provides more information in terms of bounce rate, visit duration, and pages viewed, but (with all things Google) the UI is hard to use. It also doesn’t tie back to a specific contact, so it can’t be used to generate mail lists.

CRM Options


Usability 0 0 5

Data Quality 0 0 4

Flexibility 0 0 5

Total Score 0 0 14

The only package to offer any type of CRM is HubSpot.

Dashboards


Usability 3 5 5

Data Quality 5 3 5

Flexibility 4 0 5

Total Score 12 8 15

All three packages offer a performance dashboard that segments out by date range. The MOZ dashboard feels fresh and has a great traffic breakdown. Google has a dashboard for everything, but also allows users to create a custom dashboard spanning several apps. HubSpot’s dashboard integrates both contact, content, and analytic information to give users the biggest “quick view” possible.

MOZThere’s a lot to love about the MOZ Analytics dashboard. The design is so clean and easy to read. We all love that social and brand metrics are front and center, as well as the inclusion of domain metrics and link metrics. If they add the ability to track conversion information into their app it’s going to elevate this to amazing.

HubSpotHubSpot’s dashboard’s only limit is the user’s imagination and desires. You can segment and run comparisons against several date ranges. Content performance is broken down by source, size, conversions, views, and content type, making it ridiculously easy to see which activities are performing month over month.

HubSpot customers can also customize the widgets they want displayed and the order in which they should be displayed on the dashboard.

Google

Google’s custom dashboard really saves it in this challenge. Thankfully, setting up custom dashboards in Google Analytics is relatively easy for most users and the breadth of data you can collect in one spot is pretty amazing, but you still can’t track a contact by name here.

Round#3 CONTENT

Landing Pages


Usability 0 0 5

Data Quality 0 0 4

Flexibility 0 0 5

Total Score 0 0 14

HubSpot is the only contender that offers landing pages as part of the package. These landing pages and forms are fully integrated with HubSpot’s Contacts tool, Conversions tool, and analytics from the start.

Not only are the pages easy to configure, HubSpot customers also enjoy responsive design templates for free.

Social Monitoring


Usability 3 5 5

Data Quality 5 5 2

Flexibility 2 3 5

Total Score 10 13 12

All three contenders have made monitoring social media interactions with your company possible and relatively easy. Out of all the social integrations, MOZ was our winner because of their social dashboard integration and their integrated followerwonk.

MOZSocial Media remains one of those ambiguous marketing techniques that many folks haven’t quite yet mastered in terms of reporting. Followerwonk makes it much easier to track ROI, your reach, your influence, who your brand evangelists are, and how your brand is performing in terms of social networking than any tool we’ve ever seen. The integration of this ability into MOZ Analytics is both natural and saves users a ton of time when trying to glean a quick glance at MoM social performance.

IMG Source: follwerwonk.com

Google

We love that Google integrates conversions with social interactions, both in terms of general interactions and final interaction conversions. They also report on the specific pages visited by social users, making it easy to see which content is working across different platforms.

HubSpot

Social Monitoring is probably the best feature of HubSpot’s social networking tools. It allows users to follow streams from connected social accounts and interact with those posts directly from the application, giving the user real-time ways to build social influence and reach. They also include an auto-publish tool for blog users, eliminating the need for another app to accomplish that basic task.

A/B Testing


Usability 3 0 0

Data Quality 4 0 0

Flexibility 5 0 0

Total Score 12 0 0

I’m not sure which gods at Google we have to thank for this ability, but we thank them daily. While HubSpot also does A/B testing, it requires a product upgrade and therefore isn’t eligible to be scored in this review.

Google’s A/B testing is free, contains a ton of segmentation options and metrics, and comes with some great reporting data to boot. They win this round hands down.

FINAL SCORES

Google MOZ HubSpot

64 48 96

Total Points

CONCLUSIONIn terms of available features and user-friendliness HubSpot is the clear winner in this challenge. They make it so dang easy to manage all of your marketing activities in one place and to understand performance data that it’s hard not to love them. A basic subscription runs about $200 a month, putting them on the pricier side, but it is well worth the expense if you can swing it.

We were a little shocked at how poorly MOZ Analytics performed in testing. The long wait to retrieve data and lack of content management tools really hurt them here, but this is their beta offering. They have plenty of time to develop content tools and as they do (if they do) we have no doubt that they’ll reach the 1st or 2nd spot. Regardless of their performance in terms of small business marketing, we definitely consider them a must have tool for marketing agencies.

If we had to make a recommendation for a marketer without a budget we’d have to recommend Google’s free tools in conjunction with MOZ’s free tools. The data is solid, despite the UI deficiencies, and everything the common marketer needs is available somewhere in their many packages.

THANK YOU!

Best Buy Marketing Software for Small Businesses

Technology

keyword tools

page optimization tools

content analysis tools

marketing budget

pages seo

tools flexibility

websites content

seo significance