Regardless of your industry, you need a good, solid SEO strategy to ensure that your company is competitive and relevant in the modern business environment. To execute your strategy effectively, you need to have the right tools to help you.
You can find many ways to improve your SEO for your website, but there are five essential tools that you need in your toolkit to ensure that you are doing things right. Along with such, you can use these tools all the time or when you hit a plateau.
Rank Tracking
It is critical that you know how you stand up to the competition. Site rankings are affected heavily by algorithms and their changes, which are constantly changing and shifting to become more sophisticated.
Therefore, you need a rank tracking tool to help you determine how well you are ranking in search engines. However, it must do more than that. It should tell you where you can improve and what you’re doing incorrectly.
You can find a variety of tools that offer their services for free, but it usually comes with basic functions and lacks the advanced functionality you may require. Premium tools are a newer addition to the arsenal, but they can help with monitoring the site ranking at a greater depth and give you more flexibility. Tools like Moz Rank Tracker, Pro Rank Tracker, GeoRanker, and SEMrush can all be helpful options.
For example, Pro Rank Tracker helps you track the site rankings in individual cities. This is suitable for local companies that don’t have to worry much about global rankings if it ranks well in its community. Those who use YouTube can also use this tool to track rankings and monitor the performance of their channel beyond the analytical suite offered by YouTube.
Keyword Analysis
It is essential that your website uses the best keywords for your industry and niche. It’s an art form to find the right keywords because you have to focus on driving the most search traffic organically while utilizing keywords that are low for the competition. If you and the competition use the same keywords, you fight for top ranks in Google and other search engines. It’s important to have keyword analysis tools at your disposal to help you determine the right ones to focus on and prevent you from having to guess.
While most search engine optimizers are happy with their current Google Keyword Planner, you may want to consider using an additional tool and possibly many additional tools. Options like Ubersuggest, KWFinder, Keyword Tool, and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer are easy to use and finds alternatives that are not located in the Google Keyword Planner.
Site Crawlers
If you have had your website up and running for a bit, you know that site crawlers are essential. These tools allow you to audit your website internally to help things run smoothly. You can locate page load errors, broken links, duplicate information, unreachable pages, and other technical issues.
You can find a variety of site crawlers available, and most of them offer similar features. Moz Pro includes a site crawler with its package. Other options can include JetOctopus, OnCrawl, Dead Link Checker, and Screaming Frog.
For example, JetOctopus includes everything you need in a site crawler. A unique feature is that they use a cloud service rather than a desktop application to perform the crawl. Therefore, you get faster crawl times, which is helpful if you have hundreds or millions of pages.
Link Builders
It is essential to have many high-quality inbound links so that search engine crawlers easily discover your site’s newer content. However, it is a time-consuming task to link-build. Using a link-building tool can help you save time and effort.
You can find many link-building tools, including BuzzStream, which helps you determine the best sites to consider building links. It also helps you track many concurrent campaigns at their various stages. This allows you to have a clearer idea of what should be followed up on and why. Other link builders that can help include ontolo, Majestic, and SoloSEO Links Manager.
Content Optimization
You must create high-quality content that’s designed to deliver value to the reader while still promoting long-term growth. While keyword selection helps, it doesn’t go very far.
Content optimization tools can help you find trending topics across a variety of industries so that you can guide the development efforts better. These tools are essential for influencers and bloggers that find it challenging to develop relevant, fresh content all the time.
Many platforms, such as BuzzSumo, offer assistance for content curation and discovery. They can also give you in-depth insight into your content to help you determine what’s on trend and why it’s trending. Other content optimization options can include Social Animal, EpicBeat, or ContentStudio. Along with such, you may want to ensure that you’ve got updated content with Visio Spark, which is free.