Search engine optimization (SEO) tools provide data and information about your website’s overall health and success. They help identify places where there are opportunities for improvement and single out weaknesses or issues that may inhibit your ability to rank and earn visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Learn about these five tools that every SEO must use!
Best 5 SEO Tools For Your Website
1. Google Analytics
Since you’re trying to make the search engines happy, it only makes sense to use tools provided by the largest search engine on the planet when you’re diving into the data of your SEO efforts.
Google Analytics gives you access to high-quality, detailed information that serves as the foundation for any other type of data tool you’re likely to find online. Although it’s completely free, many people don’t take advantage of the advanced tracking and reporting features offered in Google Analytics.
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Maybe it’s because they don’t understand how crucial the information it provides really is, or maybe it’s because the tool itself can seem overwhelming if you don’t know how to use it. Fortunately, it’s possible to overcome both of these obstacles with a little knowledge and effort. If you utilize Google Analytics Academy, you can start from the ground up, learn how to get your account set up, use the dashboards, and what the various reports are telling you.
When you access your Google Analytics, you can also learn more about your audiences’ behaviors, which can help you tweak your content in ways that benefit your SEO rankings. For example, you can track session duration, pages per session, and bounce rates, as well as information regarding how people arrived at your site.
Let’s say you discover your bounce rates are high. This can impact your site rankings because Google will assume your site is not valuable to its audience, and thereby you’ll likely see yourself fall in the rankings. How is this related to SEO? It’s possible that your content doesn’t match your users’ intent if you see high bounce rates or low session durations.
In other words, you might be sending people to pages using keywords that don’t ultimately send them to pages that are helpful to them. Knowing these types of insights can help you focus your content around intentional, valuable, and relevant phrases that offer true solutions to your future customers.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an often-recommended SEO tool that many experts across the world use. The Site Audit feature is an excellent SEO analysis tool, which gives you suggestions on how to improve your site so you can achieve better rankings with the search engines.
This tool is also notably used for competitor analysis. You can simply plug your competitors’ domains into the Site Explorer and utilize the Competing Domains report to see other sites ranking for the same keywords as your known competitors.
Among other features, Ahrefs is great for helping you check and fix broken links (which can affect your SEO ranking), getting an overview of your best-performing pages, and analyzing your site’s overall SEO health.
Read more: 5 Easy SEO Wins You Can Implement Today
3. SEMrush
SEMrush has been at the forefront of digital marketing for quite a while, and that’s because many experts swear by this SEO tool. It lets you easily access your rankings and identify possible changes you could make to your pages and content in ways that could result in new ranking opportunities.
One of the most coveted features of SEMrush is the Domain vs. Domain analysis tool. When you utilize this handy gadget, you can easily compare your website to your competitors’ websites, seeing how your keyword usage stacks up against other companies in your industry. Don’t know who your competitors are? No problem. SEMrush can help you identify them to compare your content with already-known and recently-identified competing brands.
SEMrush also helps companies supercharge their SEO efforts by:
- Identifying new ways for them to monetize their websites
- Finding top-ranking organic keywords
- Offering the breakdown of competitors’ behaviors and SEO information
- Seeking out high-quality link-building opportunities
4. Spyfu
Spyfu‘s search tool will give you analysis and insight into SEO research, pay-per-click (PPC) data, important keyword information, a SERP checker, and domain overviews. It features a beloved element known as Spyfu Kombat—a tool that’s said to be foolproof for all users’ levels as it offers up comparisons of keywords for up to three different domains.
The result? You’ll see the keywords that your site and competing sites are bidding on (and ranking for) while also learning about keywords you are not competing for. This information can be helpful as you decide which terms are “must-haves” during the content creation process and those that are best to avoid.
Besides being handed beneficial information about your competitors, you’ll also have access to learning kits so you can better understand how to connect with high-authority domains and optimize your ability to gain qualified leads.
5. Moz Pro
When it comes to finding a reputable, all-in-one SEO platform, many pros turn to Moz. This online tool offers users a robust array of features and solutions that can help ensure their SEO efforts are on the right track and moving beyond “acceptable” and into the world of “outstanding.”
Among the many elements you might enjoy when you use Moz, a lot of SEO gurus turn to this tool for things like:
- Site audits
- Audits that track rankings
- Site crawls
- Backlink analyses
- Keyword research
Your subscription to Moz Pro will also include full access to MozBar—an SEO toolbar for the Chrome browser.
Moz Pro offers you a full SEO software suite built with tools that help you analyze, investigate, and improve your visibility with the search engines. Not only is the software itself incredibly helpful, but the company also has a solid community of helpful folks and a huge library of text and video resources that can help you get started and understand how to best use the tool so you optimize your digital marketing efforts.
Read more: How to boost your business with SEO
In Summary
There are a lot of online SEO tools available these days. You could spend days searching and come up with seemingly endless different options everywhere you look. But, if you want tried-and-true tools that are backed by their reputation and an entire globe of professionals who rely on the data and insights they provide, these five SEO tools are a great place to start.
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