SEO software is a tool that helps you optimize your website for good SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of making your site more visible to search engines like Google so that people can find it when they look up something related to the subject of your website.
You’ll need to optimize your site’s keywords, content, HTML, and images in order to ensure that it ranks as well as possible in searches. This can be a long and tedious process. That’s where SEO software comes in! It automates these processes for you so that you can spend less time on them, freeing up time for other parts of growing your business.
In this post we’ll cover what exactly an SEO software is and why you should use one. We’ll also give some tips on how to choose which program will work best for your business needs!
How To Use Seo Software
1. Research Keywords
Keyword research has dual benefits. First, by discovering and organizing relevant search queries, you’ll understand the words and phrases consumers use to find your products and services. You can then use those keywords in product descriptions, titles, and blog posts — all improve your organic search rankings.
But keyword research is not just for SEO. Knowing how consumers search for their wants and needs uncovers competitors (that rank for those keywords) and generates ideas for new or improved products.
There are quite a few free and freemium keyword research tools. Organizing keywords by a common intent can be challenging (and time-consuming), but it’s doable with spreadsheets.
2. Identify Keyword Gaps
A keyword gap is a search query that two or more of your competitors rank for, but your site does not. Premium tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush can identify those missing keywords, which represent opportunities for your brand.
The entire analysis takes no more than 30 minutes. You’ll end up with new content ideas, new pages to create, and popular informational queries to address.
Premium SEO tools, such as Semrush, can quickly identify keyword gaps.
3. Build Internal Links
Internal linking is key to the organic visibility of important pages. Google crawls websites using links. Its algorithm assigns equity to each page based on how many internal links point to it.
Google offers no guidance on internal links or where they should reside. But over the years Google personnel have hinted at the priority:
- Main navigation.
- In-content, such as the body of blog posts.
- Footer.
- Above-the-fold (top of page).
- Sidebar.
An internal linking strategy should include all these locations for diversity. Use “Related,” “Top,” and “Popular” content widgets, and ensure that your key pages are linked directly from the main navigation or only a click or two away.
4. Improve Click-throughs
While keyword research identifies ranking opportunities, click-through optimization generates more traffic from existing positions.
My favorite click-through strategy is rich and structured snippets. Both stand out on search engine result pages. They require minimum coding using Schema.org markup or similar. Third-party plugins make the job easier.
Rich snippets (such as stars ratings in this example) and structured snippets (such as product specifications) enhance the appearance of organic rankings and improve click-throughs.
5. Optimize Title Tags
Title tags are slowly losing organic ranking power, but they remain important. Including keywords in the title informs Google of the page’s purpose. Moreover, a well-crafted title will likely be the most visible portion of a standard search-result snippet. Thus it can impact click-throughs, too.
Title tags are often the most visible portion of a standard search-result snippet, such as these examples for the query “buy watches online.”
6. Create Useful Content
Knowing a page’s primary keyword and including it in the title (and body, if it makes sense) is a key component of optimized content. But the most important tactic is creating genuinely useful info that consumers want to consume. It’s ultimately impossible to optimize content that no one wants to read or view.
Google now understands searchers’ intent and the relevancy and value of content. But it all starts with useful content that serves your target consumers and answers their questions as revealed in search queries.
7. Update Old Content
Most content slowly loses organic traffic. Older content produces fewer clicks from organic results, mainly due to the date in the search snippet. Moreover, Google strives to surface newer content.
Yet you can recover much of that loss by updating content with fresh data, new references, contemporary descriptions, and more.
Older content produces fewer clicks from organic results, mainly due to the date in the search snippet.
8. Monitor Analytics
Google Analytics and Search Console are critical for understanding organic search performance. They report the pages with the most organic traffic, the keywords that drive that traffic, and engagement and conversions from the traffic, among many other metrics.
In the absence of viewing detailed reports, at least check your analytics regularly for traffic declines or site performance glitches. Both require immediate attention.
9. Build Link Equity
Link building is the most challenging SEO task. The job is never done. Google uses backlinks to inform whether your content can be trusted. Links from reputable news sources, for example, drive trust.
The good news is link building can be done in-house.
The best link-building tactic comes, again, from quality content that folks want to share. Participate in niche communities, meet like-mind people, and reach out to journalists — all are legit and doable.
Never pay for a link, hire someone who pays for links, or manually insert self-serving links on another site. If it’s easy to obtain, the link is likely useless or worse.
10. Educate Yourself
Finally, there’s no substitute for knowledge. Learn SEO. There are many terrific, free resources.
Search Engine Roundtable is my favorite source of curated SEO news and advice. Moz’s blog is a good, clutter-free resource. My weekly column here focuses on ecommerce.
Beyond DIY
Every online merchant should perform some level of DIY SEO. It saves money and puts you in control of organic rankings. Yet some tasks likely require professional help. Examples include coding changes, structured data, and site speed (including Core Web Vitals)
what is seo software
The definition of SEO software is an online platform that helps you monitor, organize, and analyze data relating to your website’s performance in search engines. This data can include everything from keyword rankings and trends to backlinks and even website speed. The result is a snapshot of how your website is performing in search engines for your top-priority key phrases, and (depending on the software) opportunities for improvement.
REMIND ME—HOW DOES SEO WORK?
Here’s how SEO actually works: Google and other search engines crawl pages on the web, indexing and categorizing them in what would be the universe’s biggest library. When you search for something online, you’re putting in a request to the library. Google’s search crawlers then analyze your search term and spit out web pages that are most relevant to what it thinks you want.
However, search crawlers speak a different language than we do—HTML. So, they need some extra help to determine what a web page is about so they can correctly index it.
Think of it like this: You’ve gone to the world’s biggest library, but the librarian speaks Russian, and all the books are in English. By optimizing your website for search, you’re adding in extra bits of code and structuring your website a specific way that helps crawlers understand, categorize, and index each web page.
What Does SEO Software Do?
While there are many different SEO software platforms, for the most part, the software measures:
- How well your site is currently optimized for search engines based on a number of ranking factors—some tools also allow you to evaluate how well individual pages of your site are optimized for certain keywords
- How well your site ranks for your designated allotment of keywords
TYPES OF SEO TOOLS
From there, it gets more granular into the types of SEO software available, and each piece serves a different purpose:
- Keyword software – SEO was built on keywords, and it remains true today. The very basic application of SEO includes picking the right keywords and key phrases, and keyword software only monitors keyword volume and opportunity. Examples include: Google Ads Keyword Planner, Keywords Everywhere, Google Trends, Wordtracker
- Website audit software – If you’ve got your keywords covered by one of the tools above, the next thing you might need is website audit software. This type of software looks at all the technical aspects of your website—like site speed, mobile-friendliness, robot.txt files, etc.—and spits out a summary of data that can help you pinpoint places that are hurting your SEO strategy. Examples include: Screaming Frog, Google Webmaster Tools
- Local SEO software – While regular SEO focuses on organic search results, Local SEO focuses on local search results, including the local pack and map listing. Local SEO software monitors and analyzes data relating to ranking factors for the local and map listings, including consistent NAP (name-address-phone number) across online directories, presence of reviews, etc. Examples include: Moz Local
- Content SEO software – Are people sharing your content on social media? Where are the content opportunities you’re missing? Is your website content scraped from another site? Content SEO software will tell you all the above. Examples include: BuzzSumo, Copyscape
- Full-suite SEO software – Full-suite SEO software does all the above, and there aren’t that many good ones. Examples include: Ahrefs, SEMRush, Search Console by Google,
Conclusion
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