Search engine optimization is a kind of technique that involves increasing the amount of traffic that reaches your website by making sure that your website ranks highly on search engines like Google and Bing. Increased visibility directly correlates with more traffic to your website, which is why SEO is considered to be among the most important practices for modern website owners. If you don’t optimize your website for search engines, Google will rank your site lower in relevant search results, which can make it difficult for users to reach your website.
The first three results from a search query receive over 60 percent of all click-through traffic. It’s also important to note that around 90 percent of users won’t click past the first page of results. If you want your website to be visible to potential customers, it needs to be optimized. If you’re unsure of the quality of your current SEO, you can use a variety of online tools to measure your SEO score. These measurements can help you determine if further improvements need to be made.
In the event that you receive a low SEO score, there are numerous changes that you can make to your website that will enhance your SEO without requiring a significant amount of work. These changes include everything from using internal links to improving your content with videos and imagery. When you’re integrating keywords into your content, keep in mind that long-tail keywords are considerably more effective than short-tail ones at bringing in relevant traffic. If you’re trying to improve the SEO on your website, there are a variety of fantastic and completely free tools that you can use. This article talks more about eight of these tools and how they can benefit your website.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a wonderful tool that allows users to find questions that people ask on blogs, social media websites, and forums. This information can help you determine which keywords you should use in your website content. Answer the Public takes queries from Google autocomplete in bulk before dividing them into a variety of lists.
What Makes Answer the Public Great for SEO
Likely the most notable feature of Answer the Public is that it is able to categorize keywords by comparisons, propositions, questions, and related keywords. It also provides users with alphabetical organization, which can make it easier to find the exact keyword that you’re searching for. You can gain a better understanding of how this tool works by going to this link.
The keyword that you type in will provide you with visualizations of all related keywords. Under the questions category, you can view the keywords by phrases such as those that start with what, when, why, and who. If you would prefer to look at a list of the given keywords, you can switch over from visualization to a data list with the click of a button.
Seed Keyword
Seed Keyword is an intuitive keyword research tool that’s considered by many website owners to be much better than alternative options. While most of these tools will enter a keyword before being provided with a list of terms that are related to the seed keyword, this method becomes ineffective if website owners all enter similar keywords.
The Seed Keyword tool works differently by allowing you to create a search scenario that can be provided to your contacts. These contacts are asked to type in keywords that they would use in order to solve the scenario. The scenario you create could be something like “You want to go on vacation for several days, what would you search for?”. By posing this question to your customer base, they can help provide you with the keywords that they believe are relevant to this query.
Best Advantage of Using Seed Keyword for SEO
The top advantage of using Seed Keyword is that this tool is a direct way to gain in-depth insight into your users by sending them prompts that they are can answer in a flexible manner. The research that you perform with Seed Keyword can be invaluable towards helping you determine which keywords you should use with your website and in your marketing materials.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is among the more powerful free SEO tools that you can find. In fact, it provides users with some features that can otherwise only be found on premium SEO tools. When using this tool, you’ll be able to gain detailed insight into the various SEO strategies that are working for your competition, which will give you the information necessary to adopt these strategies, strengthen them, and gain a competitive edge. All you need to do is type in a domain or keyword to get started.
The Top SEO Features of Ubersuggest
There are a variety of features that are available with Ubersuggest, which include:
- Top SEO pages: The SEO pages report that you receive with this tool can help you discover which pages on your competitor’s website are ranking for the best keyword phrases and which are favored by websites like Facebook.
- Keyword suggestions: This free SEO tool will provide you with keyword suggestions that can be viewed by competition, volume, or seasonal trends.
- Content ideas: You can use this tool to identify other blog posts that your competition has placed on their website, which should help you determine which content is relevant to your own website.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an essential tool if you want to develop an effective SEO campaign. In fact, Google Analytics is currently the most popular and widely-used web analytics tool in the world. Even though Google Analytics is free to use, it’s a robust tool that works well with additional Google products and services like Search Console, Optimize, and Data Studio. Keep in mind that none of the data you enter in this tool is used for search rankings. When Google Analytics is integrated into your website, you can track how the site is performing.
You will be provided with analytics reports on a regular basis, which can be used to improve your website. Before you use this tool, you should learn how it works. The Google Analytics tool tracks a wide range of user actions on your website, which should help you identify problem areas that are causing visitors to leave earlier than you would like.
Highlighted SEO Feature of Google Analytics: Audience Reports
Among the more beneficial aspects of Google Analytics is the audience reports feature. This feature provides a better picture of who your customers are. When using this feature, you can view the demographics of your user base, geo-location data, key browsing behaviors that customers exhibit, and the interests that these customers have. Audience reports provide you with insights into your customers that are more direct and actionable, which is much better than what you would receive with server data.
Detailed
Detailed is a simple SEO tool that is fantastic for competitor research. When you select the industry that your website works in, you’ll be provided with a curated list of the most popular websites in the given industry. You can then use this list to perform research on your primary competition.
Best Feature of Detailed for SEO: Mentions
The best feature of the Detailed tool would likely be Mentions, which allows users to identify who tweeted about and linked to your competition. With this information, you should be able to identify individuals and other websites that you should target for backlinks.
The Mobile Moxie SERPerator
SERPerator is a powerful and unique tool that allows you to look at Search Engine Results Pages by various locations. You can choose to view these results by different devices in regional, international, zip-code, suburb, and city locations. You can also select various languages and search engines. While the majority of SEO tools display rankings that are specific to a certain state, country, or city, the SERPerator tool is much more specific and can be viewed down to an exact street address or latitude/longitude coordinates.
The Great Thing About SERPerator for SEO
Likely the best thing about SERPerator is that it allows you to compare different devices that may access your website along with the locations that visitors access your website from. It’s possible to compare the search results on two different phones at the same time. When you’re using this tool, you’ll notice that they have 35 separate mobile devices and models that you can choose from when making a comparison.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a tool that gives you the ability to quickly identify and correct SEO issues on your website. When the tool is in operation, it will crawl through your website just like the Google crawler. Once it has traveled through your entire site, it will create a detailed report of possible SEO problems. While this tool is free, there is a paid version that provides numerous additional features. The problems that this tool can find include:
- JavaScript rendering issues
- HTTP header errors
- Bloated HTML
- Crawl errors
- Duplicate pages
Spotlight Feature for SEO: Duplication Detection
Before you use the Screaming Frog tool for your site SEO, you should know more about the duplication detection feature that they provide. It’s important to understand that Google doesn’t like it when there is repeated content on a website. This is because duplicate content will look like spam to Google which makes a website look less trustworthy. The algorithm that the Screaming Frog tool uses to discover duplicate URLs is called an md5 algorithmic check. It can also identify elements in your content that are partially duplicated, which can include descriptions, page titles, or headings. Finally, this feature can help you find pages on your website that have a low amount of content on them.
Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is a fantastic plugin that’s practically essential for any WordPress website. If you currently have a WordPress site, you should download and install this plugin immediately. This tool provides an SEO analysis of all of the content that you would like to post on your website, which can help you write content that’s SEO-friendly and is outfitted with the right keywords. You can also use this tool to obtain a readability analysis of the content, which ensures that your writing is easy-to-read and engaging for visitors and search engines alike.
Top Advantage of Yoast SEO
The most notable feature of the Yoast SEO plugin is that it provides users with an XML sitemap, which can be highly beneficial for your SEO efforts. When you have an XML sitemap, Google is able to retrieve the important pages from your website very quickly, which is true even in the event that the internal linking on your website isn’t perfect. If you want to obtain a high ranking on the Google search engine, this feature can help you with this goal.
Bryan Miller
Bryt Designs
Bryan Miller is an entrepreneur and web tech enthusiast specializing in web design, development and digital marketing. Bryan is a recent graduate of the MBA program at the University of California, Irvine and continues to pursue tools and technologies to find success for clients across a varieties of industries.
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