Behind every successful business, there is a strong website that marks the online presence of that business. To be active online, businesses use different types of digital marketing strategies, which not only help them promote their products and services, but also turn leads into active customers. One such digital marketing strategy is SEO optimization. Although it is common for businesses to hire SEO consultants or agencies to improve their website rankings and boost their visibility, many small businesses with limited budget prefer to do all the digital marketing tasks themselves.
If you think you are capable of executing all the SEO tasks for your website by yourself, then there are several SEO tools available in the market that will help you, from website optimization to monitoring and analysing the performance of your website. Apart from evaluating and examining your website, these tools will also help you with monotonous tasks, such as backlink analysis and rank tracking, all while giving you an insight into your competitor’s website. Furthermore, these tools will assist you by highlighting critical issues that need attention and will provide detailed reports on areas of improvement.
As different search engines like Google and Bing keep on updating their algorithms, it becomes greatly important for websites to keep up with current SEO developments to stay at the top of the competition. Thus, with the implementation of the right SEO tools, you will be able to acquire higher visibility, get a good ranking on search engine page results and gain more attention from targeted traffic. The stronger your digital presence, the better your chances to get a higher return on investment and increase sales profit in the long term. To help you ace your digital marketing game, here is a list of the 5 best SEO instruments that will assist you in optimizing and monitoring your website.
Google Search Console
One of the most efficient SEO tools, Google Search Console is widely used by businesses to get their website indexed and attain the highest ranking without any performance issues. This instrument comes along with a collection of resources that give users a deeper understanding of various Google search fundamentals. Some of these fundamentals include Google’s crawl rate, internal and external links associated with a website, trending keywords used by visitors, website statistics and click-through-rate. As this single tool helps users maintain, monitor and troubleshoot their website’s presence on Google search results, it has formed an essential part of numerous SEO strategies for small businesses. Moreover, Google Search Console greatly focuses on the search-engine and thus provides dedicated tools and insights to website owners to enhance their presence and visibility in search engine rankings.
From monitoring the site’s position to keeping a check on its organic traffic, page speed and troubleshooting, Google Search Console is a handy tool to track the overall performance of your website. Additionally, this instrument acts as a communication channel that notifies site owners about errors in the website. It also allows users to observe XML sitemaps, which are essential in the re-evaluation and fixing of errors. Using Google Search Console, users can also extract the data into different analytical tools, such as Google Analytics.
SEMrush
Another popularly used instrument to optimize and monitor a website is SEMrush. As SEMrush greatly focuses on keywords, it helps users in shortlisting the keywords they will need to get a higher rank on search engine results. Furthermore, with SEMrush users can also examine a site’s performance, analyze its internal linking, improve organic traffic, trace lost or broken backlinks, etc. It also comes with an elaborate dashboard that provides different reports on the performance of specific pages, as well as the complete domains.
SEMrush also offers its flagship toolkit, known as SEO toolkit. This toolkit allows site owners to plug in a website page and monitor the keywords which enhance its ranking, the page ranks based on every keyword and the monthly search volume of every keyword. It helps site owners analyse and compare their page performance, along with the performance of their competitor’s websites. Using this tool, you can learn about the backlinks of your competitors and see how much traffic they are getting and whether it is coming from any paid ads.
BuzzStream
An all-in-one instrument, BuzzStream offers users a collection of various tools, which can be used for domain research, project management and email marketing. It helps site owners in collecting a list of different keywords and provides them with details of websites using similar keywords, their overall rankings, domain age, authority and corresponding social media accounts. You can use these features to analyze your SEO strategy and research about your competitors and the content they are publishing. This tool also lets users create a list of authors who write for their competitors’ websites and closely follow their work. BuzzStream also helps websites owners in reducing the amount of time spent on research and outreach. Based on your website content, it automatically suggests contact information and website details of rich profiles which you can use for creating backlinks or for the promotion of your website. Overall, BuzzStream makes it easier for digital marketers to discover potential audience, create unique and effective email messages and check who all have accepted your link request. Additionally, it comes with an option of fully customizable reports which makes the process of monitoring all the website activities easier.
Ahrefs
This instrument offers numerous optimization and data analysis tools in its package. These tools give users up-to-date information on broken, lost and live backlinks. With a crawling speed of 4.1 million pages per minute, Ahrefs can successfully crawl JavaScript sources, along with links from traditional HTML pages. To get an accurate analysis of their website, site owners can select a time frame, filter the data based on type, language and platform, analyze anchor texts and track lost or gained backlinks. It is also equipped with some significant features that allow users to analyze the competitor’s organic search rankings, access a comprehensive database of information and collect valuable insights using a competitive analysis tool.
For users who do not have much experience in optimization and monitoring of a website, Ahrefs comprehensive toolset comes with free learning materials and constant community support. Using these learning materials and by getting instant support from Ahrefs community you can optimize your website based on the latest trends. Moreover, you can find all tips and tricks from the industry’s top performers to rank your website higher and increase your online visibility.
MozPro
Moz Pro is a collection of SEO tools that use a data-driven approach. These tools not only help users in optimization but also provide strategic assistance for increasing website traffic, visibility and rankings across different search engines. The keyword research tool helps users in determining the ideal keywords and keyword combinations that might be the best for attracting the target audience. The Moz Pro platform comes with a Chrome extension that helps in collecting the domain information of every domain you visit. It also consists of a backlink analysis tool that uses a combination of metrics for link building and estimating domain authority. Once you have optimized your website, you can audit your site using the Moz Pro spider to detect any potential issues and get actionable insights for your website. Apart from tracking your site rankings for different keywords, you can also get alerts for crawling errors by using Moz Pro. Its Crawl Test Tool is ideal for users who want to identify various factors influencing the SEO and performance of a website.
SpyFu
If you are new to the industry and are not sure about how to outshine your competitors then SpyFu is the tool for you. With the help of SpyFu, you can easily find your competitors are and get a complete list of the keywords they use. Not only this, but SpyFu will also give you a detailed insight about the number of organic keywords your competitors use, number of monthly clicks they are able to generate, the paid and organic strategies your competitors use to boost their SEO, every ad variation they have implemented in the last 14 days, the number of ads they have created using Google Adwords, etc. Once you understand the strategies your competitors are using, you can implement the ones that are suitable for your website and improve the ones that have not yielded the desired results for your competitors.
Furthermore, SpyFu also helps users in connecting with different domains and getting detailed information about their social media accounts, email addresses, listed phone numbers and address. You can create your customised domain list and filter it based on location, industry, social media, ad spend and search traffic. Additonally you can use SpyFu as a keyword tool for and generate targeted keyword ideas, generate quality backlinks to rank your keywords, organise keywords into groups and much more.
Majestic
An ultimate SEO tool generating backlinks, Majestic helps users in significantly improving their SEO performance. Majestic is known for its large database of backlinks which can be used for developing a long-term link building strategy. This tool uses data gathered by robots to discover and audit backlinks. By using its latest feature, ‘Link Context’ you can also find out if the link is a part of a directory or an editorial link, the position of the links and the sites having a nearby link. It also comes with additional tools, using which users can integrate Majestic with their own dashboard or third-party apps and generate an in-depth analysis for the success of their SEO strategy. Its additional features such as ‘Site Explore allows users to get a general overview of their online store and the number of backlinks they have. You can even use Majestic as a keyword tool to search and generate the best keywords and improve your website rankings. Using its keyword generator, you can explore the link context of sites and get useful content ideas as well as advertising terms which you can target to boost your website’s visibility.
HubSpot’s Website Grader
Website Grader by HubSpot is one of the most user-friendly and effective tools to improve the performance of a website. By measuring the marketing efficiency of a website, this tool will generate a personalised report for your website. To calculating the efficiency of your website, HubSpot’s Website Grader will consider different website metrics such as performance, SEO, website traffic, mobile-readiness, social media and blog outreach, security, etc. In addition to generating a performance report, this tool will also give you feedback on how you can boost your website’s performance, increase its visibility and generate more traffic. Since this tool gives a separate score on the scale of 0 to 100 for every website metric, it generates a comprehensive report which is ideal for website optimisation and for improving a website’s effectiveness. To get a free and detailed performance report of your website, all you have to do is open Website Grader and enter your website URL and email address. As soon as you enter the required details, your comprehensive website report will be ready in seconds.
Pingdom
Pingdom is an extraordinary tool to get instant insights into a website’s efficiency and performance. This website monitoring tool comes with complete monitoring and real user monitoring options to gain a complete understanding of the website performance and accordingly create strategies to optimise the website. With the help of synthetic monitoring, you can get an alert whenever the important pages of your website stop working correctly. It also helps users in monitoring site availability for more than 100 worldwide locations. By conducting a page speed analysis you can find out every time your website is slow and can immediately troubleshoot to keep it up and running.
Additionally, by using Pingdom’s transaction monitoring you can test all you online shopping website’s transactions and get details about new user registrations, login, search history, shopping cart and checkout details, etc. On the other hand, the real user monitoring option allows users to get insights from real users to analyse the performance of the website in real-time. By getting insights from your website visitors you can understand their experience based on their demographics, device and browser and improve your website performance to offer a seamless experience to all your users. Furthermore, this tool also allows users to identify website improvements, compare annual data and check the performance of important metrics such as most visited pages, widely used browsers, active sessions and bounce rates.
Woorank
One of the most efficient SEO tools, Woorank helps users in instantly monitoring and auditing their website for SEO performance. Due to its user-friendly nature, Woorank makes it easier for users to analyse a website by linking and tracking its marketing data. Its in-depth site analysis assists digital marketers in finding new opportunities for website optimisation and improvement. To monitor the performance of a website, Woorank analyses its various SEO initiatives, usability and social media. Once you will enter the link of your website, Woorank will instantly analyse it and give you a comprehensive report card of your website. Instead of ranking every metric with different scores, this tool provides a single score for the entire website. Once you get a website score, the tool will also give provide you detailed feedback on how to improve your website performance, usability and SEO.
In addition to this, it also gives a performance report for backlinks and will help you in analysing your website’s domain authority. Apart from checking the performance of your website, Woorank can also be used as a keyword tool to discover new keywords depending on your website’s content. The keyword tool can be of great help in understanding how your website ranks for your target keywords in comparison with your competitors. As the keyword search which Woorank conducts is based on the traffic potential your website holds, it significantly improves the website visibility and search engine rankings.
Conclusion
Website optimisation and monitoring are the most crucial factors that determine a website’s success. While there are several SEO instruments and tools available in the market, picking up an ideal tool plays an important role in enhancing the performance of a website. Before selecting an SEO tool, digitial marketers must analyse their business needs, type of audience and website expectations. Based on these factors, you can shortlist different SEO tools and select the one that will fulfil all your needs. Moreover, website optimization and monitoring is a continuous process. Thus, after optimizing your website, you must continuously keep yourself aware about the changing SEO trends in your industry. This will help you stay ahead of the competition and will ensure that your website meets the growing demands of your target audience. Constantly conducting website audits and monitoring its different metrics will help you in instantly addressing and troubleshooting all your website issues. Hence, you can not only improve the overall health of your website by implementing SEO best practices, but also can improve your website ranking, visibility and traffic.
Author bio
Laura Butler is co-owner at Outreach Lab, who specialize in providing content writing and SEO services to businesses around the world. Having worked in multiple start-ups over the years, she has experience in building businesses from the ground up.
