Digital topography is becoming super competitive. Brands are battling for attention from search engines. Every brand wants to claim position #1 on the organic search results. This scenery is piling up pressure on brands to think beyond and above the basics. No one is taking chances. Rivals are fighting back with almost the same force to claim the top position.
As a business on an online platform. You can either hire an SEO professional or an SEO agency to keep your rivals in checks and balances. But, make sure whoever you settle for is equipped with the best SEO tools.
Best SEO tools are myriads of online resources and strategies a business undertakes to attain higher rankings in organic search results.
Imagine a farmer preparing for a planting season devoid of farming equipment!
Perhaps the much-awaited season will lapse with nothing to show off worthy of his or her effort. In an ideal world, this doesn’t happen!
From an SEO standpoint, the best SEO tools will streamline all your efforts by pointing out your SEO inefficiencies in your strategy. Fixing inefficiencies will not only improve your site’s visibility but also rankings. In essence, the primary role of SEO tools is to point out issues and fix them immediately they arise.
The Best SEO Tools for grabs
Check this list for the best SEO tools for not only beginners but also veterans who are earnestly ready to scale up their SEO careers.
Google Analytics is one of the best SEO Tool
This is immensely a must-have tool. It’s a database that stores infinite data about your site. The magic tool will trail, collect, and measure every activity and condenses it into simple reports. The reports are key in decision-making processes.
Let’s have a quick look at a few reports
Acquisition Report
This report will map out the means with which your users are using to get entry into your website. They will gain access to your site using the four channels available for them; organic, direct, referral, and others.
Behavior Report
This a very critical report because it will tell you how your audience is engaging and interacting with various pages. Every activity is recorded on how they navigate from one point to the next.
Here is what will be captured by GA;
- The number of views for various pages
- The duration they hung on a page
- The number that bounced back
The red flag for underperforming pages
A high bouncing rate can happen when visitors exit your website without taking another activity. This can be partly be explained by inefficiencies in your site such as;
- Your site isn’t mobile responsive
- Slow loading speed
- Poor content
Solution
Entice and pull your target audience with a top-notch curated copy. Exceptional content can significantly reduce high bouncing rates. Secondly, redesign your website by improving user experience by making it mobile responsive, Finally, Improve the loading speed of your website.
Conversion report
Every website has a goal and the goal is to convert. A high conversion rate is a good metric for a good-performing website. Keep your eye on the overall traffic. Your site might be attracting large amounts of traffic that hardly convert. This an indicator, that your website doesn’t have call-to-action buttons at the top of the page.
Therefore, guide your visitors at the beginning of your page on the next course of action. Web visitors don’t have the patience to read to the bottom of your page. If you don’t guide them at the top of the page, they will dump you without taking an intended action.
Google Search Console
This tool will give you an overall aerial view of your search performance. Without much ado, set it up and use it to monitor the growth of your organic traffic. Data generated by GSC can be used to fix on-page, off-page, and technical SEOs. The search engine will have a field day in crawling and indexing your site.
This move will sustain your dominance by ranking your site at top results. Therefore, monitor your search performance regularly. Fix errors limiting your appearance on the search results. Use every insight as a means of beating and outranking your competitors.
Areas of interest when using GSC
- Revamp underperforming keywords by boosting their clickthrough rate
- Push underperforming keywords to maybe position #1 or #2 of SERPs
- Ensure that the clickthrough rate correlates with the position of the keyword in the SERPs
- Check and fix pages the technical errors
Limitations
- No 3rd party information. They only cover data from your own site
- They are void of crucial data such as keyword volume
Yoast SEO is a Best SEO Tool
Yoast SEO plugin plays a pivotal role similar to a Tour guide who offers walking guides to tourists. The plugin will point out the grey areas in your copy that require optimization. This will pave way for crawlers to crawl and index your copy quite easily.
Yoast SEO plugin is akin to traffic lights controlled-junction. When motorists approach the traffic lights, they play by the traffic rules. They observe the sequence of traffic lights very keenly. When those buttons turn red, they all stop. But, when they turn orange, they are expected to be ready to move. Lastly, when they turn green, they are required to proceed with their journey.
The same traffic concept is applicable here. Yoast SEO will make suggestions depending on the number of issues that need fixing in your content. This tool will guide you through three buttons respectively. The red buttons will highlight areas that haven’t been optimized. The orange buttons will highlight areas that require further improvement. Lastly, the green buttons are a vote for well-optimized copy or pages.
Two unique features about this tool
- Readability Analysis; The goal is to produce a copy that is simple to read and understand. A score of above 60 is considered easy to read and to understand. This is in regards to humans and search engines. However, a score between (0-60) is considered difficult to read and to understand.
2.SEO Analysis; This will grant you an opportunity to set up your focus keyphrase, meta descriptions, internal links, outbound links among others in your content.
Google Data Studio
SEO professionals are burdened by data that keeps on accumulating from different platforms. This then poses a challenge of data processing and data analysis. However, Google Data Studio will save time that could otherwise be wasted without it. This tool integrates and consolidates all data sets into one dashboard.
Therefore, google data studio can pull data from various data sources and condense them into simple visual reports. These reports can be presented in different formats. For instance, bar graphs, infographics, babble clouds, and so forth. The visual presentation will break a complicated mass of data into simple reports that you can understand.
This tool is in high demand because it can pull large amounts of data from different data sources and displays them in a single dashboard.
Paid-up keyword tools
Supplement the above 4 tools with paid-up tools. Your competitors are not taking your dominance on the search engines lightly. Perhaps, they have set aside a budget for the paid-up tools to tap at any opportunity to rank at position #1. To be on the same level you must replicate their moves very swiftly.
Let’s elucidate the following tools. Right?
SEMrush is among the Best SEO Tools
This is the most preferable competition-based tool you can use to spy on your rivals. The tool will spy on their strategies especially;
- The keywords they are targeting
- The sites where they are guest blogging
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- How they are building their backlinks
- How their articles are performing
This a benchmark tool. You can replicate what is giving desired results. Consequently, you could target similar keywords as a way of outperforming them.
Ahrefs is the Best SEO Tool for Backlinks
This another irresistible SEO tool you can’t afford to ignore. In my view, it’s an authentic backlink tool. Ahrefs is the fastest backlink crawler so far. By the time of writing this blog post, no one has contested this claim.
SEO professionals are burning the midnight oil to have their sites rank at position #1 of the top results. When your site ranks at position #1 of SERPs, it equally drives organic traffic to your site. This is an enviable position for any site owner.
Ahref tool estimates the number of backlinks you will need to rank at position #1 of SERPs. Therefore, SEO is a continuous and gradual process. As an SEO professional keep learning new things because the digital landscape is very dynamic.
The Takeaways from the Best SEO Tools
Breaking the search engines isn’t a cakewalk. Unless you are ready and prepared. Competition is getting tougher and smarter. You must learn new methods of getting attention from the search engines. Experiment with various SEO tools you can use to cushion competition. Use data and insights generated by these best SEO tools to dominate your niche.
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