Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization, commonly called SEO, is a vital part of your website marketing strategy. Having your website optimized correctly will ensure your target audience is finding you, ultimately resulting in more conversions. Companies often invest a lot of money into the perfect SEO strategy to ensure their consumers are finding them before their competitors.
Search Engine Optimization is a very tedious, and often times very frustrating process. Results aren’t noticed over night. SEO strategy takes time, commitment and research. Fortunately, there are some great tools available to help you. We’ve come up with a list of the five best tools for search engine optimization.
1. Ahrefs
One of the most important factors search engines consider when ranking a website is the amount of quality backlinks (or inbound links) a particular URL has throughout the rest of the web. Backlinks or Inbound Links are hyperlinks on other sites that point to a particular page or website. The more quality backlinks a site or page has, the more credibility the search engines assign to the site.
The quantity of of backlinks is important, but the quality of those links is essential. Low quality backlinks can be way more hurtful to your Search Engine Optimization than you think. Being linked on an untrustworthy website can, by association, decrease your credibility. It’s important to continuously monitor your backlinks and their quality.
Ahrefs offers a free 14-Day Trial to help you track your backlinks. Ahrefs crawls 60,000 web pages per second, calculates the quantity and quality of a website’s backlinks, and stores the results in a easy to read and review index for its users. After the 14-Day Trial, Ahrefs offers different pricing plans for its users starting at $79/mo. It may seem like a steep price tag, but the insight and tools this resource offers can be extremely beneficial to your Search Engine Optimization.
2. Google Analytics
One of the most important tools in optimizing your website is Google Analytics. We could easily write several blog posts that just talk about the features and benefits of Google Analytics. This is one of the most robust and detailed tools any web manager can use to get to know its users and their behaviors.
With a quick overview, know your visitor’s demographics, interests, locations, how they interact with your site, the technology they’re using to view your website (browsers, devices, etc.), and how they came across your site (backlinks, search engines, and keywords used to find you).
Google Analytics is a completely free service and one of the strongest tools you can use to help analyze your website’s traffic. For larger businesses, Google offers Analytics Premium which will help you gain more value from your data, and is fully supported by expert account management and training teams available to help you.
3. Yoast
Another important factor for your Search Engine Optimization strategy is keyword optimization. Keywords are a set of words or phrases that users enter into search engine to find what they’re looking for. Once you have used tools like Google Analytics to identify the keywords that people are using to find your site, you should start optimizing your content to better rank for those keywords.
Yoast is a free and extremely easy to use plugin for WordPress websites. Once installed, you can enter your target keyword into the Yoast section of the page and it will analyze your page content, giving you suggestions and explanations of how to better optimize your page for each given keyword.
At a glance in your pages overview, you can see green, yellow, and gray lights indicating how well the page has been optimized for their assigned keywords. Yoast is a completely free wordpress plugin, but they also offer a premium version for users looking for more features and functionality.
4. Moz Local
Correct and consistent information is extremely important to your local search engine optimization strategy. With so many different places to list your business online, it can be extremely painful to update your business information manually. You may also find yourself in a situation where there are duplicate listings of your business, maybe from another business partner/employee or just some other deceitful business competitor.
With Moz Local, you simply enter your location information one time and they will push your data to all the major data aggregators and top online directories. Accurate and consistent information about your local business will make it much easier for new customers to discover you.
In addition to this single platform updater, Moz will provide you with reports to help you monitor your listing’s status and track the results of ranking, reviews, and traffic. For only $84 per year, this is a very convenient and easy to use tool that can save you many hours of updates.
5. WooRank
It’s a good idea to periodically review the overall optimization for your website. With WooRank, you can do just that for free. Simply input your website URL, and it will analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly things about your site. WooRank will crawl your site and analyze your title tags, meta descriptions, headings, keywords and keyword consistency, look for broken links, indexed pages, mobile friendliness, load time (and tips on how to improve), backlinks, and your social media presence.
There are several other things WooRank analyzes for you as well, and they also offer premium services with a free trial for those looking for more features and in depth analysis. WooRank is a great tool for search engine optimization and their interactive interface makes it fun to use.
There is more to Search Engine Optimization than plugging keywords in your page titles and giving every image on your website a crafty alt tag and meta description. A strong search engine presence takes time, commitment and a full understanding of how websites are ranked on search engines. It’s not an impossible task for people to rank well on their own, but the services of SEO experts can be very beneficial to your business and online conversions. For more information about Search Engine Optimization services, feel free to contact us for a free consultation!
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