UpCity is an inbound marketing platform for growing companies

10-second breakdown:

UpCity is an integrated inbound platform that helps you manage and improve your SEO strategy, build an online presence for your local business and manage social content. Recommended for companies who are just getting started with SEO marketing or who want to monitor their local business online.

UpCity is used in small (0-50 employees) and medium (51-1,000 employees) companies.

The good:

It offers valuable SEO improvement suggestions and helps you identify key optimizations. You can even use it as assessment tool for your prospects.

Great customer service and support as well.

The bad:

The UpCity platform is a little simple for advanced SEO campaigns and in-depth keyword research. However, for people with low SEO skills, this can be a great starter platform.

How it works:

This particular software solution is designed for agencies and small businesses who want to monitor and improve their online presence in order to generate new leads and convert them into customers.

As with any inbound platform, let’s start with content. UpCity enables you to create and curate social content. That means you can add RSS feeds from industry influencers and thought leaders, that you can use as inspiration and curation sources.

The software also recommends some feeds of its own, that it thinks might be appealing to you. This suggestions library is organized by topic and it can be a good place to get started or to look for inspiration.

If you’re actively looking for new sources or trending topics, you can search by keyword. Another way to do that is by using the app’s browser extension, which enables you to instantly share an interesting article, while browsing.

Existing content can be imported in bulk, using an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. Other useful features include an in-app photo editor, URL shortener and a hashtag helper. This hashtag helper will enable you to identify relevant hashtags, view detailed usage metrics, then drag and drop the ones you want directly into your message.

Posts can be scheduled for publishing at a later date and time. You can also choose to re-schedule a message that has performed well in the past.

The platform currently supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, App.net, and Tumblr.

You can choose to group your social profiles for easier management or for segmentation by brand, geography, customer or product line.

UpCity integrates with Google Analytics to import all your website traffic and conversion data and sort it by channel, popular pages and social media.

The platform provides you with on-page and off-page SEO capabilities. After analyzing your website’s raw HTML, meta tags, keyword use and word density, UpCity offers targeted recommendations that you can use to improve your strategy and increase your rankings.

UpCity also gives you an overview of your progress compared to that of up to three competitors.

Part of the SEO suite, the keyword search tool is a great resource in identifying top performing keywords to integrate in your content strategy. You can use it to analyze keyword rankings, search volumes and competitiveness.

The next SEO tool focuses on link analysis and is great for exploring unique domains, online authority, new backlinks and their anchor text.

For local businesses, UpCity enables listings in local directories and citations like Google My Business and Apple Maps. The software also monitors your website’s local SEO ranking and health.

After you input specific data such as location, vertical and competitors, UpCity will analyze, identify, and make recommendations to help elevate your local online presence.

UpCity includes a reputation management feature that helps you identify opportunities to build your online profile on review sites that are relevant to your industry. You can even set-up automated alerts that link directly to a review from the platform. Use this to monitor your brand’s reviews in all directories across the web or to discover new directories where you can list your company. You will be able to see every new review as soon as it’s live.

As for reporting, the SEO report card offers an analysis of  the overall health of a website’s SEO, pulling in key metrics and presenting them in an easy-to-understand format.

The tool allows you to generate reports on-demand, for specific timeframes and export into PDF or Excel for easy sharing.  You can monitor the progress of all your SEO-related tasks by generating an activity summary report, available for export as well.

Track and monitor campaign performance using the platform’s interactive reporting dashboards, that show you the overall campaign progress, tasks completed and the impact points accumulated.

Another useful report is the competitive rank snapshot that shows you how you rank against your competitors and identifies 20 keywords that you could be leveraging to push those rankings higher. You also have custom white label reports, insights on directories activity and review detail.

Part of the workflow function, UpCity offers a recommended tasks dashboard, that is essentially a step-by-step guide to help you increase your website’s visibility on search engines, social media, and local search sites. These tasks are bucketed into sections starting with the important and simple tasks and moving you up to more complex tasks as you move through the workflow process.

Team management features are in place, making it possible to assign tasks, give deadlines, invite fellow team members and collaborate on campaigns. Tasks can be sorted by assignee and due date. You can even assign, complete or reject tasks in bulk within your master view for all of your active campaigns.

UpCity is especially useful for a small business getting started with SEO marketing (not to be confused with email marketing). It gives you useful tips and recommendations as to how you can make the most out of its SEO tools. It also enables you to create, curate and schedule social content, to increase your online reach.

You can use this tool to develop a new search campaign, research new keywords, identify backlinks keep tabs on your competitors or to spot trending topics in your industry.

For complete rankings of all SEO tools and software, go here.

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