These SEO tools can help boost your visibility on search engines and social channels, driving website traffic and conversions.
Drive more and better traffic to your website. This is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization (SEO), a holistic digital marketing process designed to help businesses improve their rankings on search engines’ unpaid or organic results pages.
There are a growing number of SEO tools available to help brands find the right keywords to attract their target audiences, optimize their websites, create engaging content and boost rankings on search engines like Google.
Fast fact: More than 92 percent of all global searches happen on Google. Landing as close to the top of the first page of search results as possible will get you noticed and open the door to more visitors and more sales.
What are SEO tools?
SEO tools provide insights into the performance and effectiveness of your website. They will help uncover opportunities, areas for improvement and problems that are minimizing your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are hundreds of free and subscription-based software as a service SEO tools available online. These tools can play different roles. Analytics, keyword research, rank checking, backlink analysis, and local, mobile and on-page SEO are among the functions SEO tools can conduct.
Benefits of using SEO tools
As a marketer, having a range of SEO tools can help ensure the health of your website and increase your ability to drive greater high-intent user traffic. SEO tools can:
- Provide a window into your competitors’ SEO strategy;
- Generate thousands of effective keyword ideas;
- Conduct deep SEO audits on your website efficiently and cost effectively;
- Identify high-converting keywords;
- Track SEO progress and metrics; and
- Visualize data.
Here are Postmedia’s six top SEO tools to use in 2023
Google Search Console (GSC)
This free tool can help you identify the keywords that are already earning you good visibility on SERPs, the pages that are ranking for specific keywords, and will alert you to website issues that may be preventing you from ranking on organic Google searches. Google will also offer ideas on how you can optimize content to rank higher. To boost website traffic, use Google Search Console keyword data with common question modifiers to address your customers’ most common questions and concerns. Create a FAQ page and provide concise, accurate responses. This will show Google’s algorithm you’re doing your best to provide a great customer experience.
Tip: Google Trends, another free tool, collects and presents data from actual Google searches. The data is anonymized, categorized by topic and aggregated so users can understand interest in a particular topic by region. Use this real time, big picture data to help generate an effective keyword library.
Semrush
More than 10 million marketers and 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies have used Semrush. This comprehensive marketing platform offers feature rich SEO tools that will allow you to discover millions of national and local keywords. (Semrush has indexed more than 20 billion keywords.) It will also let you conduct in-depth SEO audits of your website, analyze backlink profiles of any domain (it has indexed more than 800 million domains), and track and improve search engine rankings. Semrush’s more than 50 tools span SEO, content marketing, market research, advertising, and social media and agency tools. There are add-ons that can help you analyze your competitors’ website traffic to uncover their marketing tactics and conduct deep dives into your content strategy by buyer journey stages. Monthly and annual paid plans are available. Add-ons cost extra and can be expensive.
Ahrefs
Over the past decade, easy navigation and effectiveness has propelled Ahrefs into a hugely popular all-in-one SEO tool for marketers looking to get their websites to rank higher on Google and grow traffic. You can use it to find the keywords your customers are using, track keyword rankings (and progress) on SERPs, learn from top-performing content in your space and monitor the sites linking back to your site. Ahrefs has more than 16 trillion backlinks – the biggest backlink index of the leading SEO tools. It’s a powerful resource to optimize your online presence regardless of your brand’s size or level of sophistication in digital marketing. It offers a range of tiered paid plans.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a comprehensive paid customer relationship management platform with software and resources designed to connect marketing, sales, content management and customer service. Its SEO marketing software and tools are integrated with its content strategy tool and conversion rate optimization tools, including landing pages, A/B testing and calls to action. This integration allows you to easily determine and prioritize the topics your clients are most interested in and boost conversion rates.
BuzzSumo
Designed for content marketers, Buzzsumo is a powerful paid online tool that allows users to discover emerging trends, identify popular content by topic and see which social media influencers are gaining traction. It has an index of 8 billion articles – a great resource for story ideas. It can also help you find and connect with influencers most likely to share your content on their social channels. In a nutshell, BuzzSumo can help marketers create, evaluate and amplify content.
SEOquake
This free browser plug-in, or extension, gives you an SEO toolbar and toolkit that: provides insights on SERP rankings and backlinks; runs complete SEO audits of webpages; reviews core customized metrics; determines a keyword’s density and generates keyword analysis reports; analyzes internal and external links and social metrics; and more. It’s currently compatible with Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera. SEO tools provide valuable insights well beyond keyword research and tracking of your SERP rankings. The right tools can help you build an effective SEO strategy that will boost visibility, engagement and conversions with your target audience.
