The Business Inside: Search Engine Optimization Tools and Why to use them in 2020

We all witnessed the change and evolution in modern technologies over the last two decades, which will keep-on advancing in the coming future also. As the current situation for both small and medium businesses is worrisome due to COVID-19, they are doing everything they can to keep themselves in the competition. The trust level of consumers for a company will play a vital role right now. The enterprises having loyal customers will surely make a great comeback in their business.

If you don’t have adequate customer reach, don’t worry. You can still increase it by incorporating digital marketing strategies into your business. It will help you to promote your brand product or services to a wider audience. But to implement a digital marketing strategy successfully, you will need a set of tools that can help you in your quest.

And today, in this article, we are going to talk about some of the tools that you can use for Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization tools

There is an abundance of paid and free tools available for Organic Search or Search Engine Optimization. If you are focusing on SEO, you certainly need a reliable platform to do so. The following list contains some of the SEO tools that can come in handy:

• SEMRush
• Google Search Console (Free)
• Google Keyword Planner
• MOZ (Free Trial Version)
• ScreamingFrog
• ahrefs
• Majestic

Why you should use these tools?

Let’s have a look and understand why it is beneficial to use these tools:

• You can easily search for the relevant keywords related to your brand, product, or service. Not only the relevant keywords, but you will also need keywords with high volume and low competition. Google Keyword Planner is the right choice for this. It can help you to select the keywords you may be interested in and are easy to optimize.
• The tools allow you to search for keywords with high volume and low competition, or low volume and high competition. You can check monthly search volume, suggested keywords, competitive level, and can even place your bid if you want to. As an alternate, you can also use Moz Keyword Explorer.
• When you are optimizing a website, you are certainly going to use more than one keyword. So, when you have a good portfolio of primary and secondary keywords, things will be easy for you.
• You can easily identify the keywords that your competitors are using to optimize their ranking. Moz can deliver that information to you.
• Search engine bots can easily crawl, identify, and  index your website. SEO tools allow you to check the correct format of the sitemap structure. You can also perform a competitor analysis to check how your website is performing compared to others. ScreamingFrog and Moz are suitable tools for this.
• You can monitor the quantity and quality of backlinks. It allows you to analyze the strongest links of your webpage. Majestic and ahrefs are the perfect choices for this.

Google search console

It is a free tool and if you want to work in SEO, then you should probably use Google Search Console. The whole scenario behind Google Search Console is that you have a website and you need to get it verified. Once Google recognizes your website, you will be able to see some more important information. To understand it better, let’s take a look at Google Search Console features and how you can use it:

1. Coverage: You need to understand how Google is crawling and indexing your website pages. What Google does, it let know if there are any issues in your webpages through Google Search Console. In the Coverage section, you can see the no. of issues if there are any in your webpages. So, if you want Google to index the web-page, then you have to address the errors in it first. You can also check the total no. of valid and excluded pages.
2. Sitemaps: In this section, you can submit a sitemap. It is a formatted file that contains all the information related to your website URLs. The file is located in the root directory and you can probably call it by the name ‘sitemap.xml‘. You need to type the sitemap URL and submit it. Once it is submitted, you can see the discovered URLs. The whole point of the sitemap is to push the URLs to Google, not the other way around. It is a quicker and efficient way to communicate with Google.
3. Speed: Nowadays, most of the users are using mobiles. So, the next thing you need to do is to analyze how well your website will perform on mobile devices. Whether its page-speed, content visibility, website interface, etc., you need to consider all these factors. You can check the mobile usability report in the Speed section to see if there are any issues in your site pages that could affect its mobile-friendliness. After you address these issues, you can ask Google to validate them.
4. Links Report: In this section, you can check the no. of external and internal links associated with your website. You can also see top linked pages (external and internal), top linking sites, top linking texts.
5. Performance Report: It is a report that you can link with Google Analytics. It means the analytics tool will show the same performance report that’s shown in the search console. You can do so by inserting the same email address in search console and analytics, linking both with each other. In this report, you can see how many clicks and impressions your keywords and queries received. You can adjust the time period according to your choice.

Other Reasons to use SEO Tools

Search Engine Optimization tools can allow you to:

• Measure the ratio of referring domains to backlinks. By doing so, you can easily identify and disapprove of poor backlinks. You can use ahrefs or Google Search Console for this.
• Keep track of the number of dofollow and nofollow links.
• Track the ranking of your website on search engines.
• Measures average click-through impressions and rates.
• Keep track of the keyword ranking for mobile and desktop across different locations. You can also identify top-performing, losing, and gaining keywords.

If you work on a platform like Moz, you can certainly expect more from the data available. You can check the ranking of the keywords that you choose, and can also use it for on-page and off-page optimization. It gives you good insights about domain authority, linking domains, inbound links, ranking keywords, etc.. So, if you find a domain that doesn’t have great domain authority, or there’s a scam website, then you can disapprove them. Moz also gives you details about the website spam score.

So, this is it from my side about the search engine optimization tools and why you should use them for your website. There are also free SEO tools available that you can utilize with minimum functionality. I hope you find this article interesting. Give a like if you liked my post and leave a comment describing your viewpoints. I always welcome new ideas.