To run a successful online business, you need a clear understanding of how SEO works and its benefits. Getting this knowledge can be a time-consuming affair and sometimes hard to master. Also, hiring an SEO expert to work for you can be costly for your small business. What do you do? Consider the use of free and paid SEO tools.
These tools are easily and readily available on the internet, and they do not require you to have that in-depth knowledge about SEO. Some come with a rank checker that show your site ranking in different search engines. All you need is to master how they work, and you will be on the success bandwagon. It is impossible to analyze competitors, track traffic, track rankings and implement the best content marketing strategies without these tools.
How do you know which SEO tools serve your business? Below are top tools to use in 2018
- Google package
Google itself provides you with free tools that can come in handy to help you with matters SEO. Most of these tools are easy to use and are a valuable asset to your business. They collect data about the performance of your site. They include;
- Google Analytics
It is a free and potent tool. It provides you with information about the performance of your site by giving a report on which marketing tactics are driving traffic to your site, how visitors find and use your site, information about the audience, which tactics are bringing more traffic, and much more.
- Google Search Console
The tool helps your site become discoverable on Google. It does lots of analysis that gives you insights about some technical errors in your website. It will also provide you with stats such as ranking of keywords, the number of clicks per keyword, and much more.
- PageSpeed Insights
It gives you information on how faster your site loads on desktops and mobile devices. It does this by doing a speed analysis and providing you with the best strategies to speed up loading of your site on these devices.
- Moz Pro
Moz Pro provides an excellent platform to learn about SEO and also understand how to analyze trends in the market. Most experts refer to it as an all-rounded tool that offers many services. A feature such as Keyword Explorer generates keyword suggestions for you and also provide you with estimated search volume. Another important feature is the Site Crawl, which will continually analyze your site and alert you on any technical hitch, which can hinder your site from proper indexing by search engines.
Most tools will provide you with information about the difficulty of ranking of specific keywords, but for Moz Pro, it will not only gauge click-thru rates per keyword but also tell you what is being paid by your competitors for these keywords
- Optimizely
Optimizely is an A/B testing tool. It can be used by businesses to improve their websites. A/B testing is a method used by web designers and digital marketers to analyze two different sets of landing pages, web pages, and sites to determine which one received by target audiences. It can provide valuable insights into the most fundamental changes such as adjusting colors or divergent design elements.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This must have tool analyzes your site and determines whether there is any broken link. It can be used to determine whether there are any missing or duplicated pages on your site by analyzing metadata and page titles. It offers a free and a paid package with each having different features.
The ease of using this tool is that you don’t have to do the editing manually. All you have to do is typing your website’s URL, and it will do the audit giving you results on error status and also Meta tags.
- Majestic
Majestic is a backlink tracker that when used to search for a URL, it will provide you with all the backlinks and referrals which include all URLs for the last five years. Developers have added a campaign feature that lets you track a specific number of URLs over a particular span of time along given metrics. Doing this gives you detailed information about your competitor’s backlinks and therefore offering a comparison between yours and theirs gauging your performance over time.
Conclusion
As a small business owner, it is essential to use these tools to better your rankings in search engines. Doing so will see your site get an increase in traffic, conversion rates and ultimately, sales will spur high. As mentioned you don’t need to be an SEO professional to benefit from them. Choose the right tools, familiarize yourself with how they operate, and you are good to go.
