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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a marketing strategy that focuses on optimizing elements of your website to improve your brand’s presence online. Luckily, there are various SEO tools that can help leverage data and scale implementation efforts, even for beginners. In this article we’ll review helpful websites, apps and Chrome extensions to enhance your SEO strategy under the following umbrellas:
In order to publish great content and improve your organic visibility on search engines, you need to have a keyword research tool. What should you look for in a keyword tool? The best tools allow you to see metrics like:
Another helpful metric these platforms often include is cost-per-click. This metric helps you visualize how much it would cost to get immediate visibility for your chosen keywords through a pay-per-click strategy. Many of the best keyword research tools also include data on backlinks and other local key SEO elements.
There are many options you can choose from, but we narrowed down our list to the three most informative SEO keyword tools our team uses.
When working through your on-page SEO strategy, you’ll be updating signals like title tags, meta descriptions, headers and more. You can use certain tools to pinpoint which pages should be updated and what they need. Afterwards, there are additional SEO tools that can help you implement these changes.
WordPress sites can utilize plugins like Yoast SEO to add in elements like title tags and meta descriptions. Streamline your workload when you’re optimizing a page by being able to optimize your meta data all within the same framework.
SEO should not be a guessing game. Search engines like Google have put recommendations into place for pixel limits and character counts, so it's important you stick to them. SEOMofo can help you remain within pixel limits so your meta data is optimized. This tool also lets you visualize what your meta data will look like on the search engine results page (SERP).
Auditing a page can take precious time out of your day. Thankfully, there are platforms that allow you to easily view meta-data and other SEO elements without having to log in to your CMS or view the source code. SEO Meta in 1 Click is a Google Chrome extension that you can easily add to your browser to view quick information like:
Off-page SEO has a lot of moving parts. Unfortunately, off-page tactics are often forgotten about, as marketers are usually referring to on-page efforts when discussing strategy. Don't let your off-page SEO strategy sit on the back burner. You can leverage these tools to analyze your authority against the competition and implement updates to improve your visibility.
Brick and mortar businesses looking to scale their local SEO should utilize a free Google My Business (GMB) listing. This is how you can rank in Google’s local 3 pack results. GMB has fields that allow you to optimize and add in your keywords like:
The Hunter Chrome extension allows you to analyze a potential link-building prospect and view email addresses that are otherwise hidden from their website content. If you can’t find contact information on the About Us page, Contact Us page or any ancillary pages, the Hunter Chrome extension will provide you verified email addresses to use. This is crucial to gaining more backlinks as you'll know who to talk to.
Part of off-page SEO includes making sure your business information like your brand name, address and phone number are accurate and consistent across the world wide web. Moz Local is a tool that streamlines a list of which directories your business is missing information or which sites have inaccurate business details. With a subscription, you can use Moz Local to automate changes and update listings like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and more.
Technical SEO encompasses improvements to the crawling and indexing experience of your website. In order for your site pages to rank, your website needs to be crawled and indexed, making technical SEO an important factor in improving overall performance. For larger websites, tools become necessary to easily view all of the information for each page of your site.
Screaming Frog is a web crawler that can help you audit the SEO health of your site. The free version allows crawls for up to 500 pages. A paid license is available for larger websites. This tool allows you to view any broken links, server errors or redirects on your site and also allows you to diagnose gaps in missing meta-data.
Luckily, Google provides a free webmasters tool called Google Search Console to analyze the crawling and indexing of your site. There are various reports included in this tool, such as:
Google introduced speed as a ranking factor back in 2018. In May of 2021, Google introduced page experience and speed broken down into three metrics known as the Core Web Vitals. They refer to this algorithm change as the Page Experience Update.
SEOs can use the Page Speed Insights report to diagnose Core Web Vitals and view areas of opportunities to improve load times and page experience.
Part of having an on-going SEO strategy is constantly monitoring performance and adjusting strategy as changes happen in search volume, user behavior, and search engine algorithm changes. There are two free tools that can help analyze data to help guide your strategy.
Adding a Google Analytics tracking code to your site will give you insight on data like traffic, page views, user behavior, engagement metrics, conversions and more. This helps you understand how pages are performing or contributing to your ROI. You can also evaluate how your SEO efforts are contributing to your overall revenue or lead generation goals by cross-referencing traffic and conversion performance.
Google Data Studio is a free tool that allows you to pull in Google Analytics data to interactive dashboards to make reporting on the most important KPIs visually appealing and easy to interpret. Utilizing these dashboards is especially useful for client conversations and key stakeholder presentations.
With a mix of free and paid SEO tools, you can certainly get bogged down in the plethora of reports and capabilities of each tool. Our SEO agency team members are experts in the tools mentioned above.
Reach out to us to chat if you’re looking for recommendations on which tools are best for your business.
