Do you want your website to appear on the first pages of search results related to your industry? This is a desire for every online business owner and marketer. Search engine traffic tends to be very targeted and thus very high converting. It’s often considered the best source of traffic, but also one of the hardest to master. Both small, medium, and established businesses want to be visible online, however, this is a tough task as search engine ranking factors changes all the time.
In order to help you with your SEO efforts, here are some simple SEO tools that may be able to help you with the task of ranking your site.
What is SEO?
SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is a technique used by experts to improve website’s online reach and to rank in search engines like Google such that when a user searches the Web using terms relevant to the website, a link to your website is displayed among the top rankings. The goal of SEO is to enhance your site’s visibility and make it friendlier to search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google.
It is worth noting that search engine optimization comprises on site SEO which are the changes you can make to your site in order to rank better. Among these are factors like speed, readability, using H1/H2/H3 tags, while offsite SEO refers to things that happen outside of your website, such as links from other sites to your site, mentions of your brand on social media, and so on.
Why Is SEO Important For Businesses?
Why should you be concerned about SEO?
· Visitors want to read websites that provide them what they are looking for and an incredible user experience
· Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing therefore look for quality content when ranking sites within the first pages of search results.
Read below to know why SEO is important for your business.
1. SEO enhances your business visibility
A business that is visible has many leads. You must be visible to the world so that your audiences can see what you have to offer. This means that you must ensure that whenever shoppers, visitors and subscribers search for your business, they get to find it with ease and this can be achieved if you get higher ranking on search engines.
This is where SEO comes in. SEO will help you to optimize your website so it appears within the top pages of search results.
2. SEO gives your business optimal reach
Consumers trust search engine results. A site that appears in the top spot of search results is often seen as a good site. It’s a vote of trust in your business by the search engine. People who find your products and services at the top of Google will often spread the word telling their connections on social media about your business and more probably invite them to buy from you. This makes your business have an optimal reach.
3. SEO helps to drive Traffic
Driving traffic to your site is one of the difficult tasks that you can experience, however it is the single most important part when it comes to the success of your online business. If you don’t have visitors, then you will not have sales. SEO will help you to attract more traffic to your site as it will optimize your content, images and videos so that Google direct the traffic to your site through many keywords that your audience may be looking for and eventually these consumers will purchase your products and services.
4. SEO helps you get insights into your consumers
Tracking the keywords users are typing in the search engines to reach your site through Google Analytics is a fantastic method of getting insights when it comes to knowing the kind of audience your site is attracting and their wants and needs, so you can tweak your products or services to better serve them.
5. SEO helps you to stay ahead of the game
SEO helps you to know what your competitor is doing, how they are doing it and ways to stay ahead of them.
In this post, we have compiled a list of the best 12 simple and powerful SEO tools some are free and some a paid so if you want a tool with additional features you can easily upgrade to a paid version and increase your reach. Note that to get maximum results, you must use the tools effectively.
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Google Analytics is obviously the number one tool in any arsenal to understand how your site is doing in Google. If you are yet to use this free and simple to use tool, you are missing out the opportunity to get insights on how much visitors your site attracts and how your traffic interacts with your site. Google analytics is helpful when it comes to understanding your organic traffic, keywords and offers incredible analysis and overall business intelligence.
Google Search Console is a tool that will give you an overview of how your site comes up on search engines whenever a visitor searches keywords related to your site.
The good thing about this tool is that it is free and easy to use and very helpful when it comes to understanding how you are ranking on Google.
Having this tool connected to your site, will get you audits for errors, keyword ratings, and also alerts and opportunities to diagnose any problem on your site.
Google Trends is a keyword tool that you must not miss in your marketing efforts. Every marketer wants to know what’s happening in the World right now. Getting into the right trend at the right time is often key to success in online business. If you are a marketer and yearning to know where the market is right now, this Google SEO tool will help you.
Google Trends helps you to see how changes in search queries occur over time when visitors use terms related to your site while searching the Web. The good thing about this tool is that when used effectively it can help you to ensure your content is up-to-date and ahead of your competitors. Every marketer would want to get an analysis of the changes in search query behavior just the same way a blogger would want to get an insight of the trending topics and so this tool should not miss in your SEO toolkit.
Another freemium tool that acts as an alternative to Google Keyword Planner is the KeywordTool.io; however, the free version requires you to have a Google AdWords Account. This tool is great when you want to get more keywords faster and different keywords from Google Keyword Planner. It can help you obtain more than 750 keyword suggestions which include long-tailed keywords that won’t appear in the Google Keyword Planner as a result of low search volumes.
The best part about this SEO tool is that you can search for keyword based on a country, language and on a platform. This means that you can decide to choose keywords on Google, YouTube, App Store, and Amazon among other platforms. With this tool in your arsenal, you can obtain those specific keywords that your visitors are using to find you. With that info, you can then plan what keywords you should be targeting in your posts and your landing pages.
A website that takes ages to load is a nuisance to visitors and in fact, it can lead to a high bounce rate and negatively affect the chances of a website ranking higher in search engines. The speed of your website is key when it comes to the success of any online business. Site speed and page speed play an important role that the enables Google algorithm to rank website/blog pages. Google PageSpeed Insights is an easy to use tool that measures your page speed as the name suggests.
The process of using this user-friendly tool is easy. You just type in your suite or blog’s URL and then hit the “Analyze” button and the tool will display your page speed and the complete user-experience of your site. The best part about this tool is that it will also provide a score. A green score shows that your page speed is great and it must be 85 on other devices like mobile and tablets. If you get a score with a red, orange or both indicators you must check and fix the error. But thankfully, this tool will also highlight the necessary fixes that need to be worked on.
Google Keyword Planner
Although keywords are not the only the determinant factor when it comes to the success of every online business, it is worth having a tool to help in keyword research. The Google keyword planner is an incredible keyword research tool for beginners.
Just enter a search phrase and the tool will display a ton of keyword suggestion and an estimate of average monthly searches. The best part about this tool is that it lets you obtain the popular and search phrases used in your niche.
Links are still the number one factor when it comes to ranking a website. The Open Site Explorer is an all-inclusive link analysis tool created by Moz. This tool helps to make a comparison of your Domain Authority and your competitor’s and research backlinks to your website and your competitors. Use this tool to identify pages that can be linking to your competitors and that you maybe could try to hijack and get them to link to you, or get ideas of where you could get more links back to your website.
While the other tools can be accessed online, Screaming Frog is a website crawler that can be installed locally on any desktop machine. If you are experiencing SEO problems on your website but you aren’t sure what the problems is this tool can help to identify those SEO roadblocks. It is free for the first 500 URLs. The best thing about Screaming Frog is that it also provides you with a complete report of where the SEO problems originate from.
This tool helps in identifying
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Meta description errors
- Internal links
- Blocked URLs and more.
This tool can be called a SEO audit tool since it helps you to audit your site thus making it easier for you to improve your site and SEO. Screaming Frog’s free version limits the number of URLs you can crawl but you can purchase a license to enable you to get unlimited ability to crawl. The license can cost you about $150, paid yearly.
A must-have research and SEO analytic tool, the Ahrefs is one of the incredible tools for backlinks and SEO analysis. This tool is the most preferred by SEO experts as it helps users when it comes to growing search traffic.
Ahrefs is an essential SEO checker tool currently as it is an all-inclusive tool. The best part of this freemium tool is that you can research your competitors, tackle link building, analyze your content and also monitor your industry.
Not sure whether your site is mobile-responsive? Mobile-Friendly Test will help you in that so you don’t have to worry! Type in your site’s URL and then click the “run test” button and within a few seconds the tool will let you know whether your site is mobile-responsive or not.
The good thing about this tool is that it can even help you with suggestions on how to optimize your site further to enable mobile users to view it.
With the rising number of people using mobile devices today to surf the web, you should test your site to ensure it is mobile friendly so that you don’t get left out.
Wondering how your Web Pages are performing with their keywords? Don’t look further; get the SERPs Rank Checker to help you. This tool will let you search for the keyword and domain or the keyword only on Google and Yahoo. The good thing about this tool is that it will let you get a view of the current ranking of your site depending on the device used. SERPs let you access other free tools such as Keyword Research Database and Google Location Changer.
What is the look of your site on mobile devices? If your site looks awkward on most devices, you are losing a lot since search engines favor sites that look superb on all devices without checking on their size or orientation. A responsive website design that looks sharp on all devices has high chances of getting a better ranking on search engines.
If you are not sure whether your site is responsive in all devices, use the Responsive Design Test to find out. If you find that your site is unresponsive to certain devices, you need to consider doing some updates or obtain help from web design experts.
The Wrap up
You must take into account all the necessary steps required to optimize your website for search engines. A website that appears on the first pages of search results is more likely to attract more traffic than one that appears at the bottom. With the right SEO tools in your arsenal, you can achieve this. In any case, if you need further help you can always look into hiring an SEO expert.
The list above is not comprehensive as there are other free and paid search engine optimization tools. However, it is good to use the free version to get the right tool for your needs and then consider upgrading to a paid plan.
Feel free to comment with the best SEO tool you know or you have/are used (using) in the comment section below.
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