6 Types Of SEO Tools You Need To Use
SEO tools are an absolute necessity anymore if you're going to nurture a website and blog to the top of search engine rankings.
And yet, most of my students have never even considered the need. It used to be you could create a site, optimize the tags for each page, and maybe touch up your SEO efforts a couple times per year.
Now, the internet has matured and there is so much competition, so many reasons why websites are built and launched, that you need to set a regular schedule for search engine marketing, and you need multiple tools to measure how well your SEO efforts are doing.
With that being said, here's six types of SEO tools you'll need to use on a regular basis.
- Keyword Research - Even with Google's "not provided," there's still a huge need to do keyword research. You need to find those topics of interest that your prospects need information on. You can create web pages, blog posts, videos and podcasts from your keyword research results to create content that's useful to your target audience.
- Website Audits - On a regular basis, you'll want to audit your site as it grows with pages and posts. Audits uncover things like duplicate and/or missing meta data; robots.txt files; broken links and duplicate content. Keeping up with on-page SEO will help all of your content show up higher in search results.
- Link Analysis - One of the biggest reasons why a site gets dropped from search rankings is because spammers and black hat SEOers create junk sites with toxic, poisonous links and they link to thousands of innocent websites, all in the name of ranking better. Link analysis tools are necessary to wade through all the links that point to your site. Getting rid of those troublesome links early and often will keep you off Google's Penguin algorithmic penalty.
- Keyword Ranking - While this is starting to fall out of favor, you do still need to be at or near the top of search results to get meaningful web searcher traffic to your pages. You can't expect targeted traffic and conversions if your pages are buried deep (page 2 and beyond) in search results. Yes, rankings constantly changed and are shuffled, but if you periodically monitor how your pages are doing, this will help you prioritize your content marketing strategies. I am not a huge fan of ranking reports, but they are helpful, if they are looked at in context with all the website data you can collect and analyze.
- Website Analytics - Typically this is Google Analytics, the free and incredibly in-depth web data service you view via dashboards. You will absolutely want to have this installed before you launch a site, to collect valuable data such as number of visitors, bounce rate, number of sessions, top pages visited, top exit pages, etc., to help you see which parts of your web site are performing well, vs. those that are not. Again, this information helps you prioritize what you need to do for your site on an ongoing basis.
- Website Issues - Again, Google Webmaster Tools is a free service you can use to spot issues and troubles with your site that will impact your pages ranking and visibility. If you wake up one morning and discover overnight that your web site traffic has tanked, this should be the first place you go to to methodically get to the bottom of the issue.
NOTE: You can use Google Search Console for doing website audits, link analysis and troubleshooting. You can even see some rudimentary ranking values, but you should take those with a grain of salt, as they are relative rankings for your keywords. You can use Google Trends for keyword research, a free tool, to do some great keyword research. Otherwise, there are paid tools you can use for all of these functions.
Want to know more about using SEO tools? Invenio offers a one day SEO tools familiarization workshop. Check it out and register for an upcoming day. Contact us at 202-725-1422 to learn more.
Would you rather learn SEO online? Take a look at our online training here.
If you're using SEO Powersuite, here's a training option for you to master all four!
Until next, stay safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
