Marketing research and analysis

The following are some helpful tools for doing your research and analysis when creating your marketing plan, specifically an online marketing plan. Learning to use the right tools can help make your marketing dollars go further, and your efforts pay off faster.

SEO Digger - With this tool you can find out the keywords that your site might rank high enough to be in the Google top 20. The beauty of this tool is that it is not something you can only use for yourself. When doing your competitive analysis, you can use SEO Digger to analyze the competitions keywords as well.

Blog Juice Analysis - If your company has a blog and you want to see how it holds up to the competition, this is a great tool. You can use it to compare your blog to others on a variety of factors. This will help you more clearly see which posts work, which don't, what your audience wants to hear, and more.

Authority Finder - This is a great tool when doing your market research and analysis as it will help you to compare top ranking sites on Google and Yahoo in a nodal graph. You can better evaluate your competition using a tool that highlights and graphs their strengths for you.

Web Spam Detector - Everyone wants a webpage that is a success, and often that desire results in short cuts or common errors that can hurt page rankings. This tool will help you take a quick look for potential flags a web page may have. In other words, it helps identify problems that a search engine might identify as spamming.

SEOmoz Page Strength - This is one of the best tools you can use as it will give you a great in depth look at your page's visibility and relative importance in the industry. It provides a great metric to assess your site, and provides information useful for creating a new, or tweaking existing SEO efforts.

Xinu - This is another overview tool that can help you get a better idea of how well your site is actually doing. It can be used to check your Page Rank, back links and a lot more. It is great for the company that wants to pinpoint weaknesses in order to shore them up, as well as highlight strengths.

Search engine Saturation- This tool will help you to check your Search Engine Saturation levels , which is an important part of understanding how well your online marketing is going. It will also allow you to compare your website to competitors. Again this is great for a competitive analysis, and also great for assessing your own strengths and weaknesses.

Keyword Analysis - This is a great tool that will help you figure out what keywords to optimize, and what keywords your pages are already optimized for.

KW and Phrase density tool - This is a tool that often goes hand in hand with the Keyword Analysis tool, as it provides you with a clear idea of your key word density.