Search Engine Optimization Software Selection Guide

Struggling to adapt to Google's frequent algorithm changes, leading to fluctuations in SEO performance and decreased data accuracy.
Existing tools are not optimized for new user behaviors like voice and mobile search.
Unable to fully leverage AI-driven insights for content creation and keyword optimization.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Swift adaptation to search algorithm updates is critical for maintaining visibility and lead generation. Incorporating AI-powered predictive search and natural language optimization ensures relevance while enhancing user engagement with search engines.

Impact and Result

By recalibrating SEO strategies and integrating AI-driven tools, the client improved its search engine visibility, enhanced content relevance, and maintained data accuracy despite algorithm changes. These efforts significantly increased website traffic and boosted lead generation, establishing a competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Search Engine Optimization Software Selection Guide Research & Tools

1. Search Engine Optimization SEO Vendor Selection Guide

Learn and understand the SEO software capabilities and vendors.
Define your requirements and use cases
Discover SEO vendors.

2. SEO Selection Guide Workbook

Use this workbook to select an SEO vendor. List high-value use cases, technical requirements, qualifications, implementation deliverables, and total cost of ownership to make an informed decision.

Search Engine Optimization Software Selection Guide

Unlocking the future of search and SEO.

Analyst perspective

Being visible to search engines is pivotal in digital marketing, which requires strong SEO capabilities. SEO optimizes content for evolving search engine technologies and user behaviors, including mobile and voice search, to enhance online visibility and drive website traffic for lead generation.

Google's 2024 updates impact SEO tools in many ways. These changes have led to fluctuations in data accuracy, necessitated recalibrations for algorithm monitoring, and required updates for content evaluation and spam detection algorithms. Swiftly adapting to these updates is essential for maintaining the relevance and effectiveness of SEO tools for their customers.

AI-powered predictive search is transforming how users interact with search engines by providing more accurate and relevant results based on user behavior and preferences, while AI tools are revolutionizing content creation by generating high-quality, relevant content that improves SEO performance. Optimizing for natural language and conversational queries is essential for maintaining visibility as voice search continues to grow.

Joanne Morin Correia, Principal Director, Marketing

Joanne Morin Correia
Principal Director, Marketing
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech's Approach

With limited budgets and processes and manually handling large volumes of search data, organizations may fail to make informed decisions, leading to missed sales and other market opportunities. Challenges include:

Insufficient funds for website optimization, tools, and automation.
Dealing with search engine changes that may be outdated or inaccurate.
Lack of processes for optimizing websites and sharing SEO insights across the organization.

The inability to compete effectively results in stagnant sales growth, missed market and sales opportunities, challenges in attracting talent, partners, or future investors, and depreciation of company and brand value. Other obstacles include:

Insufficient expertise and inadequate in-house training for SEO.
Limited or no metrics to determine your ROI for the SEO evaluation.
Absence of methods and resources for handling search and website data.

By aligning your search and SEO requirements with sales and marketing priorities, you can gain insights to win against competitors' products and services. This blueprint will help you:

Learn which software can compare your product, brand, or company ranking against top competitors using industry SEO benchmarks and best practices.
Gain insights into your website performance at a level that can benefit sales, customer support, and other areas of customer engagement.

Info-Tech Insight

SEO is important. It is the most cost-effective marketing activity, as the software targets users actively looking for your products and services online.

Online is the first point of contact

In the digital age, a business's online presence is often the first point of contact with potential customers. SEO ensures this first impression is positive, helping companies attract and convert their target audience.

Competition: A robust SEO strategy can help a business outperform competitors by capturing more organic traffic.
Visibility and Ranking: SEO boosts website visibility by helping it rank higher in search results, increasing traffic.
User Experience: SEO also improves user experience by enhancing site speed, mobile-friendliness, and content organization, positively impacting rankings and user engagement.
Credibility and Trust: High search rankings enhance credibility, making brands appear more trustworthy.
Cost-Effectiveness: SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising, providing a competitive edge, especially for smaller budgets.
Customer Insights: Search technology offers data on customer behavior, helping tailor marketing strategies and content.

Example image from Dalle

Source: ChatGPT, April 19, 20245, with Dalle, illustrating the concept of the digital age.

"SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, compared to outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising), which have a 1.7% close rate."

Source: Search Engine Journal

A good SEO keyword strategy is necessary for sustainable digital marketing growth

To be successful, digital marketers need to follow certain rules to ensure their content and websites are prioritized over the competition.

Write content for people, not algorithms – Good SEO prioritizes the needs of humans over the needs of computers, being ever thoughtful of the meaning of content and keywords.
Content that aligns with intent – Content and keyword intent will align with the buyer journey to help move prospects through the funnel.
Competitive keyword strategy – Find keyword white space for your brand. Keywords will be selected to optimize your ranking among competition with reasonable and sustainable targets.
Actionable and impactful fixes – By automating SEO using the selection methodology, you can divide an enormous task into conquerable actions. Minor improvements every day lead to substantial improvements over time.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group, Create an Effective SEO Keyword Strategy

Marketing SEO Stats

61% of marketers believe that SEO is the key to online success.

72% of users who did a Google search visited a store within eight kilometers of where they searched.

Source: Safari Digital, Oct 2023

Get to page 1 of Google Search

Google Search makes over 4,500 algorithm changes annually, directly impacting search engine optimization efforts

Digital marketers with SEO problems will often see the following issues:

Keyword ranking – A decline in keyword ranking is alarming and results in decreased PageRank.
Bounce rate – Attracting the wrong audience to your site will increase the bounce rate because the H1 doesn't resonate with your audience.
Outdated keywords – Many companies are operating on a poor keyword strategy, or even worse, no keyword strategy. In addition, many marketers haven't updated their strategy to include pillar and cluster content.
Errors – Neglected sites often have many errors.
Bad backlinks – Neglected sites often have a large number of toxic backlinks.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group, Create an Effective SEO Keyword Strategy

"The best place to hide a dead body is on page two of the search results."

Source: HuffPost, 2022.

Digital marketers face an uphill battle to stay ahead

Digital marketers are responsible for developing and executing a competitive SEO strategy but increasingly encounter the following obstacles:

Inefficient and ineffective SEO practitioners.
No SEO software; using manual methods.
Changing SEO technology and search engine algorithms.
Lack of understanding of the best-in-class SEO techniques.
Lack of a sustainable plan to manage the strategy and invest in SEO practices and software.

"SEO is helpful when applied to people-first content. However, content created primarily for search engine traffic strongly correlates with what content searchers find unsatisfying."

Source: Google Search Central Blog, 2022

Info-Tech's methodology for selecting an appropriate SEO solution

	1. Understand Search and SEO Software Capabilities and Trends	2. Define Your Requirements	3. Select Your Vendor
Phase Steps	Define search and SEO software Review table stakes & differentiating capabilities Explore Market trends	Streamline requirements gathering Build your vendor evaluation workbook	Discover key players in the software landscape Make your selection Prepare for implementation
Phase Outcomes	Consensus on SEO software scope and key capabilities	Top-level use cases and requirements Vendor evaluation workbook	Vendor shortlist Implementation considerations

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

SEO Research Requirements	SEO Research & Vendor Selection
Call #1 Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges. Call #2: Review your documented scope and objectives against your internal interview questions, answers against resources, and budget. Call #3 Assess your company's SEO capabilities and budget. Modify or add any requirements as needed.	Call #4 Develop an SEO research framework and best practices. Call #5 Review SEO vendor analysis for testing candidates against framework.	Call #6 Review findings from the software test to make any adjustments for selection. Call #7 Identify the vendor relationship between current capabilities and automation.

SEO Research Requirements

SEO Research & Vendor Selection

Call #1 Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

Call #2: Review your documented scope and objectives against your internal interview questions, answers against resources, and budget.

Call #3 Assess your company's SEO capabilities and budget. Modify or add any requirements as needed.

Call #4 Develop an SEO research framework and best practices.

Call #5 Review SEO vendor analysis for testing candidates against framework.

Call #6 Review findings from the software test to make any adjustments for selection.

Call #7 Identify the vendor relationship between current capabilities and automation.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 5 to 8 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit	Guided Implementation	Workshop	Executive & Technical Counseling	Consulting
"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."	"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."	"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team can take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."	"Our team and processes are maturing; however, to expedite the journey we'll need a seasoned practitioner to coach and validate approaches, deliverables, and opportunities."	"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.

Search Engine Optimization Software Selection Guide visualization

Unlocking the future of search and SEO.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 2-phase advisory process. You'll receive 7 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: SEO Research Requirements

Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
Call 2: Review your documented scope and objectives against your internal interview questions, answers against resources, and budget.
Call 3: Assess your company’s SEO capabilities and budget. Modify or add any requirements as needed.
Call 4: Develop an SEO research framework and best practices.

Guided Implementation 2: SEO Research & Vendor Selection

Call 1: Review SEO vendor analysis for testing candidates against framework.
Call 2: Review findings from the software test to make any adjustments for selection.
Call 3: Identify the vendor relationship between current capabilities and automation.