Search engine optimization (SEO) can be an overwhelming undertaking if you don’t know where to start, and the wealth of information out there can feel like too much to take in at once. Luckily, there are plenty of SEO tools available to help guide you along the way and make it easier to find the best approach for your business and website. This article will explain each of the five types of SEO tools that you absolutely must have in your SEO toolkit, and provide some links to resources that contain more information about each one as well as where to get them if they aren’t free.
1) Audience Insights
What are your prospective customers reading, watching, saying, and thinking? Keyword research: Which keywords do your potential customers type into Google or Bing when they search for products like yours? SEO tools can help you find them. Rank Checking: Are people finding your content through organic search results or are you getting direct traffic from clicks on an ad? Crawling: Do all of your landing pages load quickly and render as expected so visitors don’t bounce back to Google’s results page (aka search results)? Backlink Analysis: Are other websites actively linking back to your content so that their readers will be more likely to stay on their site longer? The goal is for them to go from your website > reader's site >reader's site. SEO rankings reflect how valuable a piece of content is based on its popularity. The ranking has nothing to do with relevance or quality. That being said, you'll want your SEO campaign to rank highly so people see your stuff! Writing good content isn't enough—you have to make sure it gets seen too. Every business owner should use SEO tools because these days search engine optimization (SEO) impacts every business. If there was no such thing as SEO our choices would significantly decrease every time we wanted a new product/service in our lives! Think about it...Google has become essential in nearly every transaction in our lives.
2) Analytical Tools
Google Analytics- Google Analytics is probably one of my favorite tools of all time. I use it for tracking clients' websites, analyzing traffic patterns, and finding trends in search results. Their dashboards are beautiful and user-friendly. The only downside is that Google won’t let you have access to your own analytics data unless you pay for a premium account, which can get pretty expensive but also worth it if done correctly. Webmaster tools- This is an SEO tool from Google that will help track all things search-related on your website, from links building to backlinks and even page speed load times. Link Checker - This free SEO tool allows you to analyze internal and external links on any site that you choose. It doesn’t give as much information as paid SEO tools but it does show link juice (Google PageRank) numbers and analysis (broken or unbroken links).
Ahrefs - This is a paid SEO tool that has recently become one of my favorites due to its extensive content research capabilities. It tracks keyword rankings, estimated traffic, backlink profile metrics, content research statistics, social media metrics, and much more. Moz Keyword Explorer - Another great free SEO tool by Moz offers keyword ideas based on keywords that already rank well on Google's first page along with suggested negative keywords. Buzzsumo BuzzSumo helps you find influencers based off-topic/keyword searches using Facebook shares/likes/shares or Twitter followers/retweets/mentions throughout their database.
3) Keyword Analysis
The first step in any SEO strategy is understanding what keywords you want to target, then finding out how competitive those terms are. Whether you're looking for ideas for your next content campaign or want to make sure no one else has already taken them, there are numerous SEO tools that can help. Many SEO software programs like Moz and Ahrefs include a free keyword analysis tool so it's likely you'll be able to find everything you need with just one program. If not, head over to Google's Keyword Planner tool, enter some basic details about your site, and begin digging into search volume data (be aware though, these are estimated numbers). Note: It's probably best not to use any single source as your only source of information – use them all!
4) Rank Checking
If you’re just getting started with SEO, then Google Search Console is a must-have. With Search Console (or Webmaster Tools), you can: check what your site looks like in Google search results; identify possible issues on your site that may be affecting your rankings; and much more. If you’re using an alternate search engine (like Bing), then use their equivalent service instead. But if you’re not doing these three things – setting up Search Console, checking rankings, and auditing for issues – then there’s no point in moving on from beginner status.
Find out which keywords people are using to find your website or webpages by going to Google Keyword Planner. If you’re ranking well for any of those keywords, it means someone is searching for those terms and finding your content. This will give you information about how you should structure or update your content going forward. For example, let's say that I own a construction company website focused on residential remodeling jobs. I want my business to grow, so one of my goals would be to get more traffic on my website through organic searches/rankings in Google.
5) Site Crawling
When you set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll have access to your website's crawling reports. From there, it will tell you which pages of your site need work. If a page has too many broken links or if its title tag is long overdue for a change, now you know where to focus your energy. It’s also worth using a dedicated crawler tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu Link Sleuth. These sorts of tools give you so much more information about why individual pages are being crawled. They also allow you to export data into excel sheets that can be further analyzed by Excel's Pivot Table function. If a lot of people come through your doors from search engines but don’t spend any time on your site, you may want to look at fixing up your most popular landing pages before diving deeper. Search Engines send robots out to 'crawl' your site regularly, notes Mike King in an Inc post. They take snapshots of each web page and index them. His advice: Check those snapshots regularly with an SEO spider (also called a search engine crawler) that analyzes common issues such as duplicate content, pagination, broken links or meta tags. Again, Screaming Frog is one good example here — though note that some professional SEO specialists prefer commercial products (such as DeepCrawl, Moz Pro Site Crawl, etc.) over free open source options.
6)Backlink Analysis
The idea of backlinks is simple enough: If other sites are mentioning your site, they must like it, right? But finding quality backlinks that help boost your search ranking isn’t quite as easy. Many automated tools claim to find backlinks for you but often return irrelevant or even malicious results.
The most reliable backlink checkers will:
identify links coming from pages outside of your site that refer specifically to one or more of your web pages and determine whether those links are relevant by checking things like context and keywords used in the link text. Backlink analysis can provide valuable insight into what people think about your company or brand online. It can also be a way to uncover prospective partners who may want to work with you on specific projects.
Keyword research plays an integral role in modern content marketing campaigns, yet few understand its complexities -- both organic and paid. This post explores common misconceptions related to keyword research, offers a handful of awesome free keyword research tools that might surprise you, and finally shares my secret SEO nugget — how I target certain words organically simply because my audience does not appear until AFTER I've already mentioned them within my content!
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