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Got accounts? Got issues! By creating online profiles and websites, logging into members-only sites, using apps and multiple devices without truly understanding the ramifications, people set themselves up for whole heap of trouble! Several times extra personnel have to be brought in to come to the rescue of clients and friends who have issues to do with the likes of multiple Facebook profiles, triple Gmail addresses, lost passwords, and much more. Many of these issues can be prevented with a bit of forethought, some auditing, small corrections, an understanding of each platform, and minimum up keep. But you’ve got to be willing. Account accountability is what this is. The question is, are you ready to tackle organization, safety and reputation issues?

The thing with accounts is this: accounts get abandoned. Each time an account gets abandoned it leaves the account open for cyber attacks, hackers, identity theft, and just plain identity confusion about the previous owner.

Some scenarios of people and businesses that lead to account abandonment include having several email addresses (which are overwhelming and not exactly time-friendly), having several email address (creating confusion about accounts as well as many linked accounts), change in work email (acquiring a new job status often leads to old email addresses getting abandoned), new devices (creating new log-ins and multiple accounts by accident), kids accounts (for example, parents make email accounts, kids make duplicate (own) accounts as well), business accounts (usually, well-meaning employees start accounts for social media), new platforms (especially new platforms that do not take off), membership sites (void after non-payment), death, death of a spouse or child (zero access), and shared accounts.

What can be done to avoid abandoned accounts and get a better system of organization? Here are several tips to get organized. Each of them is just as important as the next one. With that in mind, keep track of your accounts by noting the following about each email address you create: Account name, passwords, additional log in information (like secondary email address or phone number), what tools and programs you’ve used that email address for, who else has access to your email address, and which devices you’ve used to log in. That being said, don’t forget to delete old accounts as you create new ones. All this is bound to help, and then some.

If more people devised solid social media strategies they would definitely have a much more solid internet presence than they may already have. With that in mind, how does one go about designing the ultimate social media strategy?

To determine what is and isn’t working in your social media strategy, go over the analytics for your posts. Review your posts over the last three months, six months or year. See which posts got the most traffic, as well as the most shares and other engagements. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Use the “Shotgun Approach” for reliable reach. It doesn’t matter how large your following is, your messages can sometimes fall through the cracks. With increasing numbers of brands utilizing social channels you certainly have to find better ways to get your message to stand out from the noise. The gist of it all is this – unless you call, email or otherwise send your content to your audience, you have no idea if it’s going to reach them. Even if you have a huge fan base on your social networks, you never know if your people will see your message.

Analyze Competitors. Perhaps the most important research effort for your social strategy is an analysis of your competition. Discover what works for your competitors and then determine how to use that information to improve your social media strategy. To effectively analyze your competitors you need to look at their keyword prioritization patterns, break down their rankings, and monitor their online visibility, especially on search engines.

Create an Audience Strategy. Produce content with your (whole) audience in mind (who your customers are and what they have in common), and you’re more likely to inspire consistent, share-worthy content. Basically the recommendation is this: create an audience strategy rather than pander around thereby wasting effort, time and money.

Want to know what’s trending in Google search? What about the hottest videos on YouTube at this moment? Now it’s easier than ever to find out.

Google announced that as of today you can search for “2014 trends”, or an equivalent search in over 45 different languages, and Google will populate a list of the year’s top trends based on Google Trends data.

Simply click on one of the topics while in Google search to learn more about it. Google is bringing similar functionality to YouTube, but making it even better by showing you what’s trending in real-time.

If you visit google.com/trends you’ll see a new “Trending on YouTube” tab where you can explore a list of videos that are rising in viewership.

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because Google launched something similar last month in the United States only, but now it has been expanded to 27 additional countries.

It sounds as though the feature has also been improved from its initial launch last month:

“The new YouTube lists in Google Trends are our most comprehensive and dynamic yet, taking Google Trends technology and building on earlier efforts that started with YouTube Trends and the YouTube Popular Now Channel.”

You may find up to 200 trending videos in this section, which will vary from day to day, so you can keep up with all the hottest new videos across the web.

So, What Exactly Are People Searching For?

Google has put together comprehensive lists of what’s trending across multiple categories within multiple countries, or you can choose to view a combined list of top global searches.

I won’t provide the entire lists here because there are far too many of them, and quite frankly it would take the fun out of you exploring them for yourself. However, I will list out some of the favorites I found during my own exploring:

• How To Teleport: Yes, this was really one of the top searches. I wonder if anyone got the answer they were looking for.
• Selfie Tips: Apparently there are some selfie experts out there. It is possible we’ve been doing it wrong all this time?
• Buy Pharrell Hat: Thank goodness this trend didn’t catch on.
• Mutant Giant Spider Dog: Always fascinating to find out what the top video of the year was, wasn’t expecting this one.

Let me know in the comments what you came across that was either interesting or unexpected.

SEO still matters. Jean Dion recently wrote a piece detailing why search engine optimization is still very much on the plate.

You still want to use properly placed keywords, draft blog posts for people not bots, and work to build your reputation to earn legitimate links.

But, there is a lot more to SEO. See what goes into a post today, as Ethan Lyon explained on the SEER Interactive blog. There’s a whole analysis of “Who, why, what, and when” just like it is for full-blown product development – all for a blog post? Welcome to 2015 and beyond!

It’s clear that well-written content still wins hands down. Earning links is getting harder and SEO has evolved from a simple task of spraying keywords into a complicated, never-ending process of getting it all rolling together along with emphasis on UX/UI, speed, relevance, social engagement, content, and links.

Life would be easier with some awesome tools to ease up the process. 

Here are a few tools that aren’t very mainstream. But they’re feature-packed, and worth your attention. If you’re an numbers-focused marketer, you might have stumbled across some of them but didn’t have the time to check them out. Luckily, I did the research for you.

RankWatch

For all that work you put into content creation, basic SEO,  keyword research, and link building, you’d need a way to track, measure, analyze, and streamline your work.

RankWatch is a new tool that helps with effective, all-round and comprehensive SEO management. Featuring city-based rank tracking for geo-specific results, advanced dashboards, keyword archiving, tracking competitors, and a web page analyzer, it’s a powerful tool that helps get a lot done quicker.

RankWatch recommends potential keywords you didn’t track or consider, calculates and displays backlinks (with tons of relevant data such as follow versus nofollow, strongest pages, and deep link ratios) and gives you many ways to find the low hanging fruit.

Price – Starts from $47/month

GTmetrix

While page relevance and quality content is still weighed for ranking, today the need for speed is critical. Google makes a point, and it sits nicely with the critical contribution fast-loading pages make for overall UX/UI experience for your customers.

Geoff Kenyon, in an insightful post on Moz.com, points to research that webpage speed can boost conversions. Eric Enge also did a post on Search Engine Land that dwells on Google’s push for faster web pages.

Eric points out how conversions depend on page speeds and how different companies ran tests to determine how slow page speeds affect their respective businesses:

• Shopzilla ran an A/B test comparing the impact of the download speed had on conversion. They found that the faster pages delivered 7% to 12% more conversions than the slower pages. Firefox ran a similar test, and saw a 15.4% increase in conversions.

• Google and Microsoft ran a test and found that an artificially introduced delay of 500 milliseconds reduced user satisfaction by almost 1%. When the delay was increased to 2 seconds the drop in satisfaction was 4%.

Fast loading pages score points for your SEO, and a tool like GTMetrix makes for an essential inclusion in your SEO toolkit. It’s thorough, user-friendly, and it gets the job done.

Price – Free

Ontolo

You probably know Ontolo already. It’s been around for a long time and is a workhorse like no other. Ontolo makes the gargantuan and relentless task of link building easy by helping you “create better content, promote your content easily, and get more inbound links.”

Ontolo speeds up the backbreaking job of collecting, organizing, and prioritizing content. It allows you to identify link-building opportunities with an immediate “instant” and a comprehensive “nightly” option, finds out who links to you, who you should link to, and the contact information for every potential lead.

Price – Starts $29/month

SEO Gadget For Excel From Builtvisible

Rand Fishkin wanted to smuggle Richard Baxter into the U.S. and chain him to a desk at Moz for the brains that he is blessed with; so we ought to know that his new, improved SEO gadget for Excel tool from Builtvisible must be something extraordinary.

This tool allows you to gather valuable link and keyword search volume data from major industry tools such as MajesticSEO, Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush. You can uncover hidden opportunities by combining link acquisition history and search volume data without leaving your Excel Sheet.

Finally, it gives you a great idea of which keyword groups work as real assets for your business by harnessing the Grepwords and SEMRush APIs.

Price – Free

Target CPL Calculator from Jellop

Though SEO and PPC have their own die-hard supporters, we all agree that SEO efforts are best complemented by PPC campaigns. So we need a PPC tool to go along with the SEO resources in this list.

Logging into Bing Ads or Google AdWords is pain. However, you might still want a quick check on what costs on your campaigns would be with specific parameters such as Cost Per Lead. Jellop has an easy to use Target CPL calculator that you can use to optimize your PPC/SEM campaigns. No signups needed. Giving away your email is optional.

Any paid campaign could quickly turn disastrous if you don’t know what you are doing. Plus, there’s constant optimization, tweaking, analyzing, and then relaunching. On top of it all, you have the cost. Campaigns can turn expensive quickly and it always pays to know what you spend versus ROI, overall lead acquisition costs, lifetime value of customers, etc.

For all of these concerns, the Jellop Target CPL Calculator is your answer.

Price – Free

Final Thoughts

Simple rules often have a huge impact. Keep trying out the latest and the greatest tools as and when they come out, and you’ll never be left behind in the constant race for SEO one-upmanship.

What favorite SEO tools do you use on a daily basis? Have you used any of the tools mentioned here? Please share your results, both successes and failures, in the comments below.