If you own a small business, then you know how important it is to establish a strong brand presence in your local community. Making sure that your business can be found in the search engines, especially Google is crucial. But to get your website to show up on the first page of Google every time a user searches for services related to what you offer is not easy.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation plays a big role in achieving such a goal and it involves a combination of many different tasks to be successful. It includes everything from website optimisation for search, researching the right, ranking keywords for targeting through to making sure that your website is mobile-friendly. And the result doesn’t happen overnight. You have to spend some time and dedication monitoring your SEO strategies to remain relevant with search engines especially Google. We all know that Google is constantly updating its algorithm and this means that you need to keep up with the phase for you to outpace the competition.
Related article: Tips on how to improve your local SEO listings
The good news is there are plenty of valuable tools available today that you can use to tackle SEO and get the data you need to improve your rankings.
To make it simple, we’ve gathered a list of the best SEO tools that can help you jump start your website’s ranking.
- Screaming Frog
- SEMrush
- Quora
- Google Analytics
- Ubersuggest by Neil Patel
- WooRank
Screaming Frog is a downloadable app that you can use to detect potential SEO problems in your website that can affect your ranking. That includes broken links, faulty redirects, missing metadata, duplicate content, and more. By entering your URL, the app will crawl all of your pages and it will generate the result or data for possible issues. Screaming Frog offers a free version but the downside is you can only crawl 500 pages of your site. The paid version, however, lets you crawl an unlimited number of web pages.
The pro’s include’s easy to understand interface and it can be integrated with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. It also crawls website quickly, has easy to export data, a configure crawling option and it’s inexpensive.
SEMrush is a keyword tool that allows you to search for ranking keywords and get the data of people who are searching for that particular phrase. It can also provide keywords that are relevant to your chosen keyword, related ads, product listings and a lot more.
Apart from being an excellent tool for searching keywords, SEMrush also offers information about your competitor’s strategies. It can provide you with information about your competitor’s traffic numbers, how much of their traffic comes from paid ads and their backlinks resources.
If you love doing keyword research, it definitely the right tool for you. The app can give you the exact keyword that will get the best results and at the same time, check which terms your competitors are ranking for.
Quora has been the best weapon so far when it comes to keyword research. It is an online question and answer platform that lets you see what your audience is searching for online. It is a great place to start if your planning to generate a long tail keyword for your website.
Quora is completely free. Simply type in your search term and watch as questions appear that are being asked by individuals in your audience. You can then use their insights to further your keyword research. It contains a wealth of information and access to industry-relevant stats, latest news, competitors and expert opinions which is essential for business owners.
You can contribute by answering questions from other business owners and also attach a link from your blog that is relevant to the topic. If you answered a question on something someone searches in Google, your response could appear in the search engine results. People will click on it and read it. If they think that your answer provides value, they may click on the link contained within your response and be redirected to your website or blog. This method creates backlinks and traffic to your website. It’s also a great place to get ideas for a new blog based on what people are asking and what’s trending.
Have you been asking yourself how much traffic your website is getting and where It’s coming from? And the most important question of all is where your conversions are coming from. If you have been asking these questions, you definitely need to have Google Analytics for your website.
Google Analytics is a free site tracking tool that gives you a great deal of information about the visitors to your site and their behaviour once they arrived. You can see how much traffic your getting, where it’s coming from and how long visitors are staying on your site. You can also see which of your pages performs best in terms of a number of visits and how much time the visitor stayed on a specific page, which visitors convert into buyers and which keywords are driving the most traffic.
It also provides vital information such as how much traffic you are getting from your social media channels and bounce rate. Knowing the bounce rate of certain pages can help you come up with a strategy to engage visitors before they hit the back button.
We all know that keyword research plays a big role in SEO to help improve your search engine ranking and your website traffic. In fact, performing keyword research regularly is extremely important to be successful online.
So why you need to perform keyword research?
The first and most well-known use of keyword research is for SEO purposes. IF you want to rank high in search engines, drive more traffic to your website and generate more sales, you need to rank the right keywords. And that makes keyword research one of the most important aspects of an SEO strategy. It is also imperative if your planning to set up a PPC(pay per click) campaign. You need to go straight to the source and find out exactly what keywords and longtail keywords your target audience is using.
And this is where Ubersuggest comes in handy. It is a keyword research tool that was recently revamped and relaunched by Neil Patel. The relaunched comes in with new features and an improved interface that makes it super easy to understand and quick to use. With Ubersuggest, you can visualise your keyword and its strength. It also provides additional keywords that are not available in the Google Keyword Planner. Ubersuggest can help in the selection of better keywords by extending its feature of trends. In a nutshell, Ubersuggest is a free tool that can help you optimise your website by providing reliable data and researched results.
If you’re looking for a quality tool that can help monitor your website’s performance, Woorank is the key. Woorank is the tool that helps you keep your website on top of the game with powerful, effective features. It can analyse your website’s overall status, including SEO, usability, performance and backlinks. Analyse your domain’s authority and you will be provided with tips on how to improve your website and tackle SEO tasks.
You can do a competitive analysis by having a sneak look at your competitor’s ranking keywords. Know what keywords they are ranking for so you can come up with your own strategy, monitor the performance of your keywords while tracking down your competitor’s website ranking, search volume and historical performance.
It provides such as simple and actionable insights that can help you increase your search rankings, the website traffic and audience engagement.
Overall, this is an excellent tool if you want a quick rundown of what you’re doing right and wrong on your website including how you are dealing with SEO
To help boost your ranking you need to be aware of the anatomy of the search engine results. So the time to take advantage of these SEO tools to drive more organic traffic to your site and increase conversion rate is now. All the tools in the world won’t help a bad website, so it’s important to have a website with outstanding content and sleek performance so you can stand out from your competition.
Related article: 5 SEO improvement tips to increase organic search rankings
