5 Tools To Help Grow Your SEO
Like I talked about in my first blog covering SEO, it is a very wide field which has countless ways to approach it. Depending on the size of your organization or your personal goals, there are a lot options open to you. Maybe you want to just focus on tracking and analytics, avoiding all the other complex additions, then Google Search Console may be the best for you. That and its the easiest tool, in my humble opinion, to learn which also has a large impact on your SEO operations. I mean your using a tool from the beast itself, Google.
To make life a little easier for you, and because I love talking SEO, lets go over 5 tools that will help you or your organization’s online visibility grow.
Note: I will not be listing every single thing each software does since they all have huge feature sets. Instead I am listing what I find to be the most important from each tool. 1: Ubersuggest
I have used Ubersuggest extensively for my day job and its at the top of the list because this is where I started in my own SEO journey. Its easy to use and even easier to read and understand the data it’s giving you. Further, the data you get is quite powerful.
Benefits of Ubersuggest -
Keyword Research: Keyword research is the seed of SEO that sprouts as a flower does in your garden. Simply put keyword research is understanding the types of search terms that users put into search engines. If your in a tech company that focuses on stuff like endpoint protection and your job is to write content for the blog page, some keywords that may interest you could be: cyber security (high competition), endpoint security (high competition), Advanced Endpoint Protection (likely a little lower), and so on. If your wondering why I added a competition level you have a keen eye! Some words are hard to rank for others are not. Tip: try to use long-tail keywords!
Content Ideas: Have AI generate content ideas and templates for you.
Rank Tracking: See how you are currently doing in your keyword groups
SEO Optimization: Ubersuggest will help you optimize your content so it can rank the best it can.
Pricing -
Using a plan based system which allows a good amount of flexibility you have a few options: business: $20 per month, individual: $29 per month, Enterprise: $40 per month
2: Semrush
Semrush is a step up from Ubersuggest. Firstly it is considered a more advance and professional tool which means its more costly. Though this tool packs quite the punch and also is a nice tool for beginners with a clean layout making everything digestible. As well as tooltips where ever you look making sure you know what your looking at.
Benefits of Semrush -
Competitor Analysis: In the battle for the highest ranks on SERPs, knowing what your competition is doing is key. Semrush allows you to look into how your competitors are doing so you can make actionable decisions quickly.
Site Audit and SEO Health Check: If you have a large site it can be quite daunting or near impossible in some cases to find what’s broken and sending your SEO health dropping fast. The site audit tool comes quite in handy.
Backlink Analysis: When another site links to a page on yours, that’s called backlinking! Semrush allows you to see who is backlinking to you as well as the quality or ‘health’ of that backlink. If a spamy sits is backlinking to you, it can actually be bad. So knowing this info is important.
Mobile SEO Optimization: This tool will even help you build rankable content for the mobile ecosystem.
Pricing -
Because this is a higher level tool the pricing is likely out of scope for most individuals, but for teams or companies Semrush is not something to completely ignore: Pro (129$), Guru (249$), Business (499$)
3. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is something everyone who has a website should be using. It’s free, easy, and made/managed by Google who hold the book of rules for how their unknowable algorithm ranks sites and content. While the other entries on the list are feature rich, G.S.C. is all about monitoring and submitting your site to be ranked. Most SEO journeys start here.
Benefits of Google Search Console -
Sitemap Submission: Submitting your sitemap to G.S.C. helps Google discover and crawl your website’s pages. This allows you to get indexed and start showing up in searches.
URL Inspection: Inspect a specific URL to see how Googlebot crawls and renders it as well as viewing any indexing issues and errors.
Security Insights: With Google Search Console you are able to get insights into possible security issues on your website. Also it helps you stay ‘in the know’ with new malware, hacks, and breaches among others.
Native Integration With The Google Suite: G.S.C. is able to be connected to other tools such as Google Analytics allowing for an even deeper view into your website.
Pricing -
Google Search Console stands out as a robust and indispensable tool offered by Google itself. And it comes with a price tag of absolutely nothing.
4. ScreamingFrog
Moving on to a new type of SEO tool, and one that is more technical, we have ScreamingFrog. This is a crawler (or spider) that will crawl everything on your site and give you deep and comprehensive reports on what it finds. This tool deals mostly with technical SEO. So things like how the HTML works, title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, sitemap issues, and some more in-depth backend aspects. Having a tool like this in your command is a really good way to stay ahead of Googlebot as best you can and be proactive with your SEO.
Benefits of ScreamingFrog -
Comprehensive Website Crawling: Like mentioned above this tool will do a full crawl of your site and give you a lot of information. Matter of fact, you can have this bot act like Googlebot would if it was crawling your pages. Using data visualization, ScreamingFrog will even present some graphs for you to look over.
XML Sitemap Generation: ScreamingFrog can make your sitemaps for you making it easy to keep things updated in Google Search Console.
Hreflang Analysis: Check and analyze hreflang tags to ensure proper language and regional targeting. Avoid international SEO issues by maintaining accurate hreflang annotations.
JavaScript Rendering: Render JavaScript-driven content to analyze pages that rely on client-side rendering. Ensure accurate SEO analysis for websites using modern JavaScript frameworks.
It is really hard to only pick a few things to talk about when discussing ScreamingFrog. Its a personal favorite and there are so many great benefits to using this tool. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.
Pricing -
ScreamingFrog offers a free version to try it out, but the only other plan is 259$ a year. Sadly there is less flexibility in the plans on offering.
5. Google Trends
We end with one more tool from Google. Google Trends is a web based application that tracks trends and what people are currently searching for. It is a good place to start when you are collecting keywords that fit your business or for a piece of content you are writing.
Benefits of Google Trends -
Seasonal Trends: Uncover seasonal patterns in search behavior to better optimize your content and marketing strategies to align with seasonal trends.
Geographical Insights: Analyze regional variations in search interest for specific topics. Something can be searched for quite heavily in one place, but hardly in another.
Content Calendar Planning: Plan your content calendar based on upcoming trends and events.
Ease of Use: With little to no complexity this is one of the rare tools you can pick up and run with in seconds.
Pricing -
Similar to Google Search Console, Google Trends is a free and publicly accessible tool with no downloads needed.
Conclusion
SEO can be scary if your brand new to it and you may not know how to approach it or how to succeed. The good news is that there are countless tools to help you along the way. Some are harder then others and they vary in price, but for whatever you are trying to achieve there is a tool to help. If this helped out check out my first post on SEO: “What Is SEO? - An Introduction To Optimization” where I give a good overview of SEO for beginners.
