The digital marketing world is a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. There’s always a new platform to learn about, new ways to connect with your audience, and new techniques for managing your data. And even if you’re able to keep up with the latest trends in your industry, it can be challenging to understand the jargon that marketers often use–especially when it comes to using SEO tools for website optimization.
But if you are going to invest your time and energy into improving your website traffic, you need to know what SEO is as well as how it works.
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the practice of increasing the amount of traffic you get from search engines like Google or Bing by optimizing your website. This process involves making changes to both on-page and off-page factors in order to improve a website’s rankings in search engines.
How To Use Seo Tools For Website
Having a top rank in SERPs (search engine result pages) is crucial for businesses – it’s no wonder why SEO is considered a crucial strategy for many companies.
In the last few years, SEO has evolved as a technique like never before. It is implemented at a highlevel to gain the required traction of the target audience. With the changes in algorithms, the way people tend to search has updated a lot. Whether it is being mobile first or the growing popularity of voice searches, these SEO trends have emerged in such a way that they decide the factors that impact the website rankings directly.
But SEO is often mistaken for being a one-time hack. On the contrary, it’s a long term strategy. To ensure that you are able to attract customers organically, you need to work on optimizing your site continuously. Search engine algorithms are always changing, so you need to have a smart approach to be able to adapt to those changes quickly.
I know, it sounds like a lot of work. However, there are several SEO tools that can help you with this and get your site optimized. In this post, we’ll take a look at 8 such easy-to-use SEO tools to help you improve your website rankings.
#1. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a site analyzer and optimizing tool. It tells you everything you want to know about the performance of your website. It is a very effective tool to gauge the loading speed of a website.
Image via GTmetrix
You can test the loading speed of your website from different locations. GTmetrix has 28 servers located in 7 regions across the globe.
It tells you everything about the loading time, or the total number of requests being handled at different times. You can also set up alerts that’ll be triggered by your page if it faces certain conditions. GTMetrix displays a video of your page while it’s loading which helps you to identify any bottlenecks.
#2. SEMrush
SEMrush is another great SEO tool for businesses. It helps digital marketers to do keyword research and analyze keyword strategies used by their competitors. What’s more, it helps you run SEO audits of your content, find backlink opportunities, optimize landing pages, and more. With the free trial version, it has become quite popular among the masses.
Image via SEMrush
SEMrush also helps you track the kind of traffic your website gets, in terms of paid and organic. The tool allows you to identify new keywords and their potential. SEMrush helps you craft better content and learn effective content marketing strategies as well.
#3. Majestic
Auditing your backlinks can be a hefty task, but Majestic makes it all very easy. It is a great tool to analyze how trustworthy your backlinks and referrals are. With the help of its site explorer tool, you can analyze a domain or URL in depth.
Image via Majestic
The backlink history checker enables marketers to audit backlinks detected by Majestic’s sophisticated web robots. You can compare backlink histories of competitors too. In a nutshell, Majestic provides you with an advanced link intelligence map with plenty of useful data.
#4. SpyFu
SpyFu is a very important tool to gather information about your competitors. Simply by entering a domain name, you can find out all the keywords your competitors are using. In fact, all the ad variations they’ve used by far will be shown as well.
Image via SpyFu
This can prove to be immensely valuable in gaining an edge over your competitors. You can also increase your web traffic with the help of useful recommendations.
Additionally, the tool enables you to connect and build important partnerships. SpyFu keeps you informed about every domain that bids on your AdWords, and suggests the AdWords you should be bidding on. It even tells you the ranking history of a website or web page using a keyword.
#5. Pro Rank Tracker
Pro Rank Tracker is a free cloud-based keyword rank tracking and reporting solution. It can prepare and provide advanced reports for your website by providing you with information on the keywords your website is ranking for, and suggest the keywords you must target.
Image via PRT
Pro Rank Tracker is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It is one of the best rank tracking tools available today. Its state-of-the-art algorithm gives you the latest, most accurate results about the ranking of your website.
The tool automatically tracks the ranks of your web pages. You can specify the search engines you want to track. It even allows you to track the ranks of your videos on YouTube and other video channels.
#6. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-inclusive tool which takes care of all your SEO requirements. With a simple and easy-to-use interface, the tool provides you with analytics and insights to give your search engine rankings a boost. Its free add-ons such as Open Site Explorer and Keyword Explorer are also particularly useful.
Image via Moz
Their popular Chrome extension called Mozbar provides information about a page’s Domain Authority and Page authority directly on the browser. This is pretty handy for a basic competitor analysis.
Moz Pro helps with rank tracking, site crawling to uncover issues, on-page SEO optimization, link profile analysis and much more. Lastly, it can also assist with content management to ensure that businesses are able to promote the right kind of content.
#7. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a very popular tool for click-tracking and heatmap generation. This tool is quite different from most of the SEO tools available today as it helps you track the behavior of your visitors on your web pages.
Image via Crazy Egg
You need to embed a small code on the pages of your website and this code will help track visitors that come to your pages.
Who are clicking on your pages? What are they avoiding? Are there any bottlenecks because of which they abandon the website? Which portion of the web page is most beneficial for conversions? Crazy Egg helps you answer all these questions with the help of heatmaps they generate.
#8. Copyscape
If your website content is a copy of some other page, it hurts your credibility and SEO. As Google is known to penalize duplicate content, your search engine ranking can be negatively impacted as a result.
Image via Copyscape
Copyscape helps you avoid any issues with duplicacy. It is a tool that helps you to check for plagiarized content by scanning and monitoring web pages with ease.
It can send alerts if your content is copied and or if it is being used elsewhere. Its sister site Siteliner can detect duplicate content within a website. What’s more, it also checks broken links and more.
seo tools for content writing
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is Google’s own tool that helps you improve your rankings in the search engine results pages. The console includes tools that measure the performance of your website, including page load times that impact SEO. You can monitor your website’s position on Google search results, including which of your pages are ranking for specific keywords. You can also see how many impressions and how many clicks your pages have gotten in the search engine results pages.
Google Search Console is a critical tool for all webmasters. It provides much-needed transparency into how your pages are performing and can help determine which content you should optimize or what keywords you should target next.
Pricing: Free for all website owners.
Google Keyword Planner
Most digital marketers use either the Google Keyword Planner or a paid version with better features for keyword research. Still, this is one of the best free tools for doing basic keyword targeting research. The keyword planner offers two main features:
- Discover new or related keywords – You can type in any keyword to see a list of related keywords along with their search volume and other related metrics. This makes it easy to find new keywords to target for SEO.
- Get search volume and forecasts – You can monitor trends to identify search terms or keywords that are becoming more popular.
Pricing: Free for anyone with a Google Ads account. If you need a quick guide, you can check out this resource: How to Create a Google Ads Account.
WordStream
WordStream offers a stripped-down version of Google’s keyword planner that’s free and easy to use. Just type in a keyword of your choice, pick an industry and type in your location. Then click the big orange button and you’ll get a list of keywords along with their search volumes on Google and Bing, and the average CPC for each keyword on each ad network.
Pricing: WordStream’s keyword research tool is free to use.
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular and useful tools for digital marketers of all stripes. Their monthly subscription package includes 40 different tools that help with SEO, PPC and social media management. Marketers can use SEMrush to analyze backlinks, conduct keyword research, analyze the performance and traffic of their own website or those of their competitors and discover new markets, niches and opportunities. There’s also a site auditing utility that can help with some of the more technical aspects of website SEO.
Pricing: Some features available for free, paid subscriptions start at $99.95 monthly.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an analytical tool that helps marketers find out what kind of content people are sharing across many different platforms. You can enter a website to easily identify their most successful pieces of content. You can analyze trends over the past day, the past month, or the past year. You can filter by author or by platform and Buzz Sumo even supports negative keywords to help you pinpoint the data you’re looking for.
BuzzSumo helps you efficiently analyze and benchmark your content against the competition while staying on top of new trends.
Pricing: Starts at $79 per month for unlimited searches.
Answer the Public
Type any keyword into this free online tool and you’ll get an extensive visualization of questions people have asked on Google using your keyword. This tool connects with one of the biggest recent additions to the Google search pages: Snippets.
On some search results pages, Google now displays Snippets. A snippet is a tab near the top of the page that highlights a common question related to the target keyword. When a user clicks on the snippet, Google connects them to a web page that answers that question explicitly. Being featured in a Snippet is a great way to generate organic traffic because Snippets are always near the top of the page.
With Answer the Public, marketers can write highly targeted articles that directly address questions that they know are being typed into search. This makes it more likely that their articles will be featured in Google Snippets.
Pricing: Three searches per day for free, unlimited searches starting at $99 monthly.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plug-in that gives you real-time feedback as you optimize your blog posts using WordPress. The plug-in acts like a built-in checklist tool that prompts you to complete on-page SEO tasks for each blog post that you create. Yoast SEO provides feedback on your page optimizations in real-time, makes suggestions for improvement and helps you manage all the details when doing on-page SEO with WordPress.
Image Source: https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/yoast-seo-configuration-wizard.png
Pricing: The basic version of Yoast SEO is free. Yoast SEO premium starts at $89 monthly for a single-website license, but you can save money by purchasing multiple licenses for multiple sites at the same time.
Keyword Density Checker
Keyword density is an important factor that search engines like Google use to rank web pages. Digital marketers know that the Google Search algorithm looks at the density of keywords to understand the relevance of each piece of content. For each blog post, it is important to ensure that the target keyword is mentioned a sufficient number of times within the text. At the same time, excessive mentions of the keyword (a practice known as keyword stuffing) are discouraged.
This simple keyword density checker makes it easy to figure out how many times each keyword is mentioned in your article. You can paste in the text of your article and you’ll receive a list of the most frequently occurring one-word, two-word and three-word keywords in your article. For most content pieces, digital marketers aim for a keyword density of 2-5% for the target keyword.
Pricing: The keyword density checker is just one of over 75 free SEO tools offered by the team at PrePostSEO. Visitors to the website can perform a total of 500 queries per month across all tools. To unlock more searches, users can purchase a premium plan starting at $50/year for 50,000 annual searches.
Read-Able
Read-able is a useful tool for ensuring that your content is accessible for your target audience. When you paste your article into Read-able, it uses a proprietary algorithm to assign your content a grade level that corresponds to how easy it is to read and understand.
The average North American reads at an around an eighth-grade level, so if that’s your target audience, Read-Able will help you write clear and concise sentences that are easier for a wide range of readers to understand. If your target audience is college-educated, it’s okay to use longer words and complex sentences to convey meaning. Read-Able is all about matching the level of your writing with the reading level of your target audience to provide the best experience for readers.
Pricing: Read-able offers a free version of its tool that checks reading level, grammar and spelling. The PRO version is available starting at $4/month and includes features like edit suggestions, error highlighting, additional reports and the ability to score emails and additional file formats.
Grammarly Premium
Google checks your website for spelling and grammar. A website whose content contains many spelling errors is less likely to rank highly on search engines. Grammarly makes it easy to create content that is grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. You can add the tool to your browser and use it when composing emails, social media updates or a blog post.
Pricing: Grammarly Premium starts at just $11.66 per month when you purchase a one-year subscription. The premium version offers more corrections and an anti-plagiarism feature to help ensure your content is truly unique.
Conclusion
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