Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that helps your website rank higher in search engines. This can increase the number of visitors to your site and drive conversions.
To get started with SEO, you need to understand what it is and how it works. In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of SEO so that you can start ranking higher in search engines.
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Seo Tools For Digital Marketers
1. Ahrefs: SEO Keyword Tool
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature as it’s the best SEO analysis tool around. The tool highlights what parts of your website need improvements to rank better in search engines. From a competitor analysis perspective, you’ll likely use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks to use them as a starting point for your own brand. You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, check and fix broken links on your website,and get an overview of your best-performing pages (so you can see what information is drawing in the visitors).
Syed Irfan Ajmal, a Growth Marketing Manager at Ridester, loves the SEO keyword tool Ahrefs. He shares, “Ahrefs is surely our most favorite tool when it comes to various facets of SEO such as keyword research, rank tracking, competitor research, SEO audit, viral content research and much more. We add our site and those of our competitors to it. The tool then shows us the sites which have backlinked to our competitors but not us. This helps us find great link opportunities. But this wouldn’t have been so easy if Ahrefs didn’t have the largest database of backlinks. Ahrefs has been instrumental in getting our site ranked for several major keywords, and getting us to 350,000 visitors per month.”
2. Google Search Console: Top SEO Tool
Offered for free to everyone with a website, Google Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERP. All you need to do is verify your website by adding a code to your website or going through Google Analytics and you can submit your sitemap for indexing. Although you don’t need a Search Console account to appear in Google’s search results, you can control what gets indexed and how your website is represented with this account. As an SEO checker tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results. It’s especially useful for new websites as it lets site owners submit web pages for search indexing.
3. SEMRush: Marketing SEO Tools
Marketing SEO tools like SEMRush tend to be fan favorites in the SEO community. Experts love that they let you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities. One of the most popular features of this SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to easily compare your website to your competitors. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains. The On-Page SEO Checker tool allows you to easily monitor your rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s performance.
Liraz Postan, Senior SEO & Content Manager at Outbrain, recommends SEMRush as one of the best SEO tools. She says, “My favorite SEO tool is SEMrush with the feature of “organic traffic insights”. This feature lets me see all my leading articles with one dashboard, along with related keywords, social shares and word count. This gives me a quick overview of what’s working and where to optimize. I generally use SEMrush on my daily work, love this tool, and love using its site audit to optimize our site health. We improved our site health by 100% more since we started using SEMrush, and we increased conversions by 15% more from our content pages.”
4. KWFinder: SEO Keyword Tool
An SEO keyword tool like KWFinder helps you find long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition. The experts use this SEO tool to find the best keywords and run analysis reports on backlinks and SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Their Rank Tracker tool helps you easily determine your ranking while tracking your improvement based on one key metric. Plus, if that’s not enough, you’ll get a ton of new keyword ideas to help you rank your website even higher.
George Perry, an SEM Specialist at Bandwidth, raves about KWFinder. “I like that not only does it show me information on the keyword that I was searching for, but pulls in good suggestions for related terms, and how they compare (volume, CPC, difficulty, etc.) to the term I originally looked at. I’ve been able to help my clients target not only those big, pie in the sky vanity terms, but to better target those terms that are lower in the funnel and more likely to convert, allowing me to target them through focused content that answers the questions they’re actually asking.”
5. Moz Pro: SEO Software
SEO software Moz Pro keeps popping up as one of the best SEO tools that experts actually use. Some specialists raved about how Moz was always up to date despite Google’s regular algorithm changes. Others praised Moz’s chat portal that allows them always to get an insightful response to every question asked. Whether you’re looking for keyword recommendations or a site crawl, Moz is a full-service powerhouse. You can get great insights into how your website is performing but also how to improve it. They also have a free MozBar toolbar that you can download to see your website’s metrics while browsing any page. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, you should also consider checking out MozCon, their annual conference.
Keri Lindenmuth’s, Marketing Manager at Kyle David Group, go-to SEO tool is none other than Moz Pro. She says, “My favorite feature of the tool is its ‘page optimization feature.’ It tells you exactly what steps you can take to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. For example, it will tell you to ‘Include your keyword in this page title’ or ‘Add an image with a keyword alt tag.’ This tool has substantially improved our client’s business simply by the fact that it gives increased transparency. We can compare their site’s traffic and optimization to that of their competitors. We can see which pages and search terms their competitors perform well in and alter our web practices to compete against theirs. Without a tool like Moz, SEO really becomes a guessing game. You have no idea where you’re doing well and where you can use improvement.”
6. Ubersuggest: Keyword Tracking Tool
Ubersuggest, developed by Neil Patel, is a free keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and also the search intent behind them by showing the top ranking SERPsFrom short to long-tail phrases, you can find the right terms to use on your website with hundreds of suggestions from this free great keyword tool. Metrics Ubersuggest includes in its reports are keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. Great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
7. Answer The Public: Free SEO Tools
Free SEO tools like Answer The Public allow you to easily find topics to write about for your blog. I’ve used this tool in the past to create content around specific keywords to better rank online. Say you’re in the ‘fitness’ niche. You can use this free SEO tool to create content around keywords like fitness, yoga, running, Crossfit, exercise and cover the entire spectrum. It’s great for finding featured snippet opportunities. Say you hire a freelancer to create content for you, all you need to do is download this list and send it over to them. And it would only take you five minutes, making it one of the most efficient ways to come up with SEO topics for new websites.
Matt Jackson, Head of Content at Wild Shark, loves free SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. He shares, “One of my favorite tools when compiling SEO content for a site is AnswerThePublic.com. The best feature of the tool is that it presents a list of the questions that web users are asking about a particular keyword. If I’m running out of genuinely useful content ideas, or if I’m compiling an FAQ page, it provides invaluable guidance as to what, exactly, people are searching for. It is not only useful for SEO content, it means that our clients can answer questions on their site, minimizing the number of customer service calls they receive and giving greater authority to a page and the overall business. And here’s a quick tip: prevent neckache by hitting the Data button, rather than straining to read the question wheel.”
8. SpyFu: Free SEO Tools
While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, many of our experts raved about its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start succeeding. You can easily view the number of times a keyword gets searched each month while easily determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword. You can also do some research on your competitors to determine which keywords they use. Additionally, you can search your competitor’s, or your own, website to easily see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads, and more. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.
Adele Stewart, Senior Project Manager at Sparq Designs, can’t get enough of SEO software SpyFu. She shares, “I have used SEMrush and Agency Analytics in the past, but SpyFu has the one-up on my client’s competitors. All of SpyFu’s features are great, but my absolute favorite is the SEO Research feature. You’re able to plug in a competitor’s domain and pull up information on their own SEO strategy. You can see what keywords they pay for vs. their organic standings, review their core keywords, and even assess their keyword groups. Using SpyFu has been integral to my client’s SEO successes. There’s so much more to track and report on, plus I don’t have to put in as much effort in research as I did with other SEO software. SpyFu pulls the information I need and organizes reports in a way that is presentable and understandable to my clients. I’ve already seen increases in indexing and rank for keywords that we didn’t even think of.”
9. Woorank: SEO Ranking Tool
As a top SEO analysis tool, Woorank offers free and paid options to track and report your marketing data. You can plug in your competitors to discover which keywords they are targeting so you can overlap with theirs. Try understanding how keywords perform over time to optimize for users and search engines in the best way possible. And most importantly, understand the things your website is lacking from both a technical and content perspective. Woorank can help you identify duplicate content, downtime, and security issues and provide guidelines on how to fix them.
10. Majestic: Marketing SEO Tools
Majestic is one of the best marketing SEO tools according to experts. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have. It also works as an SEO keyword tool to find the best keywords to target while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank.
Ryan Scollon, SEO Consultant at RyanScollon.co.uk recommends the SEO tool Majestic. He says, “My favorite SEO tool is Majestic, with its main feature allowing you to check the backlinks of a website that you specify. My favorite feature is the ability to add your own client’s site and a bunch of competitors, allowing you to easily compare a variety of SEO metrics such as trust flow, referring domain count, and external backlinks count. Not only does it help us understand the [client’s optimization] weaknesses, but it also provides a simple table that we share with our clients, so they too can understand the problems and how they stack up to their competitors. We also use Majestic to audit competitors’ backlinks, as we can sometimes find a handful of easy opportunities to tackle before moving onto other link building tactics.”
best seo tools for wordpress
1. HubSpot
Without good data, it’s hard to build a quality SEO strategy. That’s where HubSpot’s free WordPress Plugin can help. HubSpot provides built-in analytics about all of your marketing performance in easy-to-read dashboards.
Monitor the quantity and quality of your traffic on a page-by-page basis, or zoom out to get an overview of your entire site. With the plugin, you can start discovering where to focus your attention — all without leaving WordPress.
An added bonus? The plugin comes with live chat, email marketing, forms, and more to help you grow your business.
Ideal for: Small and scaling businesses benefit from this plugin because it’s free and it works seamlessly with HubSpot’s suite of products including its CRM.
2. All In One SEO
With over 2,000,000 professionals using All in One SEO (AIOSEO), this plugin is another popular choice for those who want to perform on-page SEO. The plugin’s SEO audit checklist will analyze your entire WordPress site to detect errors and provide actionable recommendations to improve your SEO and boost traffic.
AIOSEO can also automatically generate and submit sitemaps to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other popular search engines, maximizing your presence on the web. Other important features include schema, knowledge graph, AMP, local SEO, and more.
Ideal for: This is a time and money-saver for local and small business owners who rely on online searches for sales and revenue.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most widely used SEO plugins for WordPress. It’s a free plugin that offers nearly every feature you’ll need to optimize your website. SERP previews, XML sitemap creation, meta description rating, and more are all included.
The on-page SEO insights feature is one of the key highlights: It will tell you how to best incorporate your target keyword, whether you’ve used the keyword enough times (or too many times) on the page, and how to best optimize your title, meta description, and URL for the keyword. It’s meant to be a guide for managing each element based on SEO best practices.
Ideal for: If you have a team of writers who work in-house, they’ll love that this plugin prioritizes the reader experience and provides actionable tips for optimizing content. With Yoast, they can delight readers and search engines without having to memorize every SEO best practice.
4. MonsterInsights
There’s no SEO without tracking analytics and performance, and that’s what MonsterInsights helps you do. With its WordPress plugin, it brings Google Analytics right to your WordPress dashboard and provides you with actionable insights on how to improve.
You won’t have to use any code to install your Google Analytics tracking script, you’ll be able to see exactly how people find and use your website, and it has a content report that shows which pages on your site are visited the most. If you think Google Analytics is too complicated, MonsterInsights provides a simplified and streamlined way to look at your data without ever logging into the Google Analytics platform.
Ideal for: Marketers and other stakeholders who want to optimize their site for conversions. If you’re looking for a “trail” to see how people are finding your website and why, this tool can help you enhance that experience for the visitor.
5. Rank Math
Rank Math helps you optimize your site as you write content, providing real-time insights about your posts without you having to leave the WordPress interface. You’ll also be able to optimize titles and meta descriptions with a snippet preview, reducing the likelihood of SERP display errors in Google. The best part is that this plugin has been optimized for speed — it’s fast so that your site’s speed doesn’t impact your SEO efforts. It also offers additional SEO features such as redirections, 404 monitoring, and SEO for WooCommerce sites.
Ideal for: Working on content, SEO, and managing the health of your website as a one-person team? RankMath keeps all the pertinent data you need for these tasks at your fingertips using the advanced SEO analytics module.
6. Premium SEO Pack
What makes the Premium SEO Pack unique is its advanced features that handle SEO elements that other plugins don’t. While it has some of the foundational features available such as sitemap generation and Google Analytics monitoring, it also includes unique features for monitoring page speed, rich snippets, 404 checking, and link building. It also provides you with insights about your internal linking structure.
Ideal for: Creatives who host their portfolios on the web are usually finding themselves in a constant tradeoff between the appearance and performance of their websites. With notifications about how SEO-friendly the images are and minifying CSS and javascript for speed, Premium SEO Pack makes both a priority.
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7. WP Meta SEO
Working through a website redesign? Don’t forget to optimize those new pages for the search engine. WP Meta SEO offers a meta information bulk editor, making it easy to perform optimization across the site at once (without having to go in and out of each individual page), saving you an incredible amount of time.
It also integrates with Google Search Console to power its keyword suggestion features so that you can use accurate data directly from Google to make informed decisions about your keyword strategy. There are also additional SEO features built in such as a redirections manager and a sitemap generator.
Ideal for: The jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur or marketer who handles website, SEO, and content. The bulk editor feature can help speed up your workflow so you can spend more time crafting content to reach your audience.
8. W3 Total Cache
Site speed is so important because the goal of every search engine is to retrieve sites that satisfy the searcher’s query while providing a delightful user experience. W3 Total Cache improves site speed through caching, minifying, and CDN integrations which make it easier to manage all the benefits in one place on your website.
Ideal for: Website owners who manage lots of content on their site like gifs, videos, and images can benefit from this type of plugin because it directly impacts a major aspect of SEO ranking — site speed.
9. Rankie
Your SEO strategy is only as good as its data. Rankie provides you more data with which to make the smartest SEO decisions for your site. By helping you track your rankings and create powerful reports, Rankie offers the insights you need to make modifications to your pages without needing to open up a new tab for Google Analytics, and WordPress, and a random excel spreadsheet you use to track every keyword you plan to target.
With this plugin, you can track your target keywords to monitor your ongoing performance as well as add new keywords that visitors are using to discover your content.
Ideal for: The SEO or marketing data analyst that wants to understand how their site is performing in the SERP and in the eyes of the reader.
10. SEO 2021 by SQUIRRLY
Using machine learning algorithms that have analyzed over 600,000 sites over 7 years, Squirrly audits websites based on internal architecture, keyword utilization, backlinks, web authority, and more.
Its artificial intelligence enables it to identify the gaps that are keeping your site from ranking as well as you’d like so that you can focus on the activities that will give you the fastest results. The idea is to achieve big breakthroughs from fewer activities, saving you time and money.
Ideal for: Professionals looking for a tool that can assist you in an SEO audit for your website. If you’re taking over an existing site that needs a new SEO strategy, SEO by SQUIRRLY could be the right tool to get you started.
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