Your Complete Guide to the Must-have SEO tools and Their Benefits

Search Engine Optimization is something to be done tactically and strategically. It means that you must not do the donkey work of extensive research of a lot of online market trends and the entire statistical data, but instead, you must play smart and adapt to certain significant SEO tools available in the world of digital marketing. You must explore the use of different SEO tools and then determine which of them are useful for the digital marketing campaign of your business.

In a generic view, different tools of SEO include Digital Analytics tools, Keyword Research and Analysis, Search Engine Rank tracking, User experience analysis, Link building which involves backlink monitoring and analysis, technical SEO tools, etc. These tools provide a wide range of benefits such as tracking and improving your online search ranking, analyzing and enhancing the organic traffic to your website, creating and maintaining backlinks to and from your website, analyzing and improving the User experience of a website, etc.

Some of these tools are free, some are Freemium, (i.e., part services are permanently free while additional features are provided of cost) and others are paid tools. Your mix of SEO tools must be created after a proper cost-benefit analysis of all these tools.

Let us have a look at a more detailed explanation of some of the SEO tools with one significant example in each type as follows.

Digital Analytics Tools – Useful for Keyword Research & Reviewing User Experience

Digital or web analytics tools provide you with a lot of important benefits. These tools enable you to know:

• The search patterns of users – It means that Digital Analytics tools help you to know the search behavior of users and on the basis of that you can identify certain significant keywords to be used in your website content to increase your organic traffic. These tools are thus also useful for Keyword Research and Analysis.

• What type of content the users are interested in – Using these tools you can be aware of the type and quality of content users are interested in, and on the basis of that, you can optimize the content on your website.

• Why users are leaving your website – Digital Analytics tools also help you in understanding which elements of your website are putting users off and inducing them to abandon your website more often. This helps you to rectify your website in those areas instantly.

• What are the different locations from which website has been accessed – This is the most important benefit of these tools because you can directly know which country has a maximum number of visiting users to your website and on the basis of this data, you can do “Geo-Targeting.“

• Which type of device is mostly used to visit your website – That is, whether your website has been accessed more from mobile phones or desktops. The knowledge of which device type has more access to your website mandates you to optimize your website accordingly, e., if your website has been majorly accessed using mobile phones, then you must optimize it to provide best possible compatibility with mobile phones.

Google Analytics

An Example of Digital Analytics tools is “Google Analytics.” Google Analytics has a huge array of options to assist your digital marketing. It has a brilliant feature called “Real-Time Analytics,“ which enables you to review the behavior of visitors on your website in real time, i.e., live.

It also has a separate menu dedicated to review and analyses user behavior, called as “Audience.” This menu helps you to get a complete understanding of the various demographic aspects of your target audience. For instance, if you want to know from which country does the majority of your organic traffic come, then you can simply click on the location option from the Geo submenu. This directly assists you in Geo Targeting.

Google Analytics has a Funnel Visualization technology that assesses whether your website is poorly performing or not and helps you to act accordingly.

Link Building – With Backlink Monitoring and Analysis

Link building refers to building backlinks. Backlinks are links present on other websites which direct users to your website (also known as outbound backlinks) and also refers to the links present on your website which direct your users to other websites (also known as inbound backlinks).

Backlinks are very crucial for your SEO because Google or any other search engine determines the importance of a website on the basis of the frequency of that website being cited on other websites, and this in turn also affects your Search engine results rankings.

Link building can be done using fairways as well as unfair ways. Fairways include earning backlinks on other websites to increase organic traffic to your website by way of creating and promoting quality content, using reviews and promotion websites, taking the assistance of friends and partners to promote your website links on other websites, etc. While unfair ways also known as Blackhat SEO, include buying backlinks instead of building them, spamming your backlinks in comments, plagiarism, etc. Link building services are effectively provided by private players like Ahrefs, Enovarius, Majestic, etc.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a paid link building tool available at around $99 per user per month. It helps you not only in building backlinks but also replicating certain significant backline for your website.

With the help of Ahrefs, you can easily compete with the competitors having significant backlinks. These competitors include your direct competitors, i.e., competitors present on each of your search engine results pages (SERPs), which areal domain level competitors. And indirect competitors only present on the SERPs of your particular pages, are aka page level competitors.

Search Engine and Keywords Rank Tracking

Search engine ranking is probably the crux of Search engine optimization. Obtaining the highest ranking on Search engine results pages is the very purpose of SEO activities. But this can be done only if your digital marketing campaign includes regular use of the Search Engine Rank Tracking tool.

Search engine rank tracking tool provides you with the number of indexed pages of your website that appear on an average SERP. Apart from Tracking search engine rankings, it is also important to be aware of the latest rankings of keywords, i.e., which keywords are the most popularly and frequently used at present. This is very helpful for you in keyword optimization on your website content.

Google Webmasters renamed as Google search console service

Google Webmasters tools are all supporting tools for the development of your website, SEO assistance, search engine rank tracking, etc. Google Search Console is now the new name of these Google webmasters tools.

Google Search console tool helps you to analyze your sitemap, i.e., list of all the pages on your website. Analysis of sitemap involves elimination of all the relevant errors if any.

Google Search console services also check your inbound and outbound backlinks, check the security and integrity of your website, determine which keywords led to the majority of users visiting your website, etc.

Conclusion

Thus, you have now become familiar with some of the essential tools of SEO like Digital Analytics, SERP rank tracking, keyword research and analysis, enhancing the user experience, Link building, and optimization, etc. All you have to do now is conducting an internal assessment of your digital marketing campaign and determine which of these tools can be effectively used for your best benefit.