What are SEO tools and why are they important?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an essential marketing tool for business owners to improve their online visibility, organic search ranking and traffic. But how do you know if your SEO strategy is working?
There are a huge variety of handy tools available online, to let you delve deep into your company’s SEO ranking. They can also help you to identify what is working and which parts of your strategy need improving.
A number of SEO tools also offer comprehensive competitor benchmarking, including detailed reports on your current performance against your competitors.
Additionally, keyword research features also help businesses identify new and trending relevant keywords or phrases. This offers you an insight into what your target audience is searching for so that you can optimise your website accordingly.
Below are our 5 favourite SEO tools, including free SEO tools and some more advanced paid SEO softwares.
Google Search Console
Google search console is a free SEO tool that helps you monitor and track your website’s organic search ranking. The tool shows you everything you need to know about your website, including how often it is appearing in search results, and what keywords it is ranking for. Google search console also helps users to spot technical issues on your site, which could be harming your SEO score and check where your site’s backlinks are coming from.
It is a fairly simple tool to integrate, requiring users to verify their website by adding a code to the backend, or connecting it through your Google analytics account. This all-in-one SEO tool will help you understand how customers are interacting with your website and give you a good idea of how to optimise it for better performance.
It’s also really helpful for new business owners who are just starting their online presence, as it allows owners to submit their web pages for indexing – increasing your chance of being found by Google for relevant search queries.
Google Analytics
There is a free version of Google Analytics available, although some of its advanced features are only available in paid plans (GA 360). Nonetheless, the free version of Google Analytics will almost certainly cover your insight needs if you are a small to medium sized business, especially if paired with Google Search console.
All of your website’s SEO data will be compiled together, allowing you to identify which of your pages are driving the most organic traffic for your keywords and improve your content where necessary.
This handy tool will also help you to compare organic traffic against non-organic traffic, allowing you to track improvements in your SERPS. This also means that you can see which of your traffic sources or keywords are most valuable for your business by comparing their conversion rates.
Advanced features include Site Content Reports which will help you to understand your customers’ behaviour on your site. This feature indicates engagement metrics for each web page, including page exits, on-page behaviour and conversion of landing pages. Having this data on customer acquisition helps business owners to continually improve the design and layout, as well as optimising the content on a web page for SEO performance.
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the best SEO tracking tools, used widely by many marketing professionals. Most popular for its SEO Toolkit feature, this tool allows users to monitor a website’s ranking performance over time and identify any keywords that it is ranking for. It also lets you find out where you rank for each keyword, and how many times per month the key phrase is searched for.
The handy tool also audits your on-page SEO and suggests ways that your site’s content could be improved, helping to optimise your pages for better conversion rates.
It’s also a great way to identify trends that are occurring in your industry and can help you find which keywords are bringing in the most traffic for your competitors.
However, it’s not free. Businesses who are serious about their SEO performance will have to invest; plans start at $119.95 per month and increase depending on your company’s goal.
SEMrush certainly offers good value for money with more robust features than other SEO tracking tools, such as keyword research, backlink opportunity spotter, detailed competitor analytics and even the ability to track your social media performance.
Ubersuggest
Designed and developed by SEO guru, Neil Patel, this powerful tool is a free keyword finder. In fact, it requires no payments, registrations, signups, or installs – making it extremely favourable and easy to use amongst small businesses who are just starting out on their SEO journey.
It helps users identify niche keywords and the intent behind them, showing the top ranking SERPs for each keyword and longtail phrases.
Ubersuggest also offers their users important SEO data such as keyword volume, the CPC, and how competitive each keyword is to rank for. With this information, you are able to tailor your SEO strategy to target high performing keywords that have low competition, meaning you can give your competitors a run for their money!
SerpFox
As one of the most popular SEO tools, Serpfox provides its users with real time and in-depth data about their website and keyword rankings.
Although SERPfox only focuses on one main feature, which is rank tracking, it does it extremely well.
The tool is very easy to navigate around and displays the results in a very easy-to-understand manner which is great for beginners who may feel overwhelmed on some of the bigger, more advanced tools.
You are able to choose any keyword or phrase that you want to monitor, and SERPfox will automatically generate a detailed report ranking your keywords against thousands of other similar websites across the internet.
The simple and easy to use interface is a great way for businesses to track their website’s performance, with options to track keywords daily, weekly or monthly.
Serpfox offers multiple monthly plans, differentiated by the number of keywords that you can track each month. The prices range from $10 – $50.
