What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the practice of optimizing a website to achieve a higher ranking in search engines in order to increase quality traffic to the site.
Why is Search Engine Optimization Important?
Search Engine Optimization is important for a whole host of reasons.
Good SEO is a long term strategy that ensures a website will be user-friendly, with easily accessible content.
Creating a positive user experience means providing key information in fewer clicks, which leads to higher engagement, increased dwell time and better rankings This in turn improves your website’s authority and chances of showing up on page 1.
In terms of results, it can take up to a year to see the full effect of your SEO efforts.
However, when utilising fast-growth, white-hat SEO strategies; it can take as little as 90 days to begin generating quality traffic, leads and sales.
Where can I find Tools for Search Engine Optimization?
There are lots of tools out there to help you optimize your website for SEO. Here are a mix of some free and paid SEO tools we recommend.
1. AnswerThePublic - Keyword Research
AnswerThePublic is a keyword research tool that pulls queries from giant search engines like Google and Bing and presents them in a categorized keyword image.
Once a topic, keyword, brand or product is put into the search bar, AnswerThePublic immediately gathers all the data about that keyword in a visualized form. This image contains questions people ask using your keyword.
This tool provides you with multiple forms of data based on: questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical and related keyword combinations.
This gives writers credible insights into the kind of questions people ask about certain topics, and how to answer those questions satisfactorily.
2. AccuRanker - Ranking Tracker
AccuRanker is a keyword ranking tool that helps users track keywords daily and on-demand, and sends them regular updates of all their rankings in SERPs.
With this tool, you can upload and monitor the SERP positions of thousands of search queries that drive traffic to their sites.
You can also measure and optimize their organic search programs based on the insights on keyword performance on search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex and YouTube.
You can also use the Competitor Monitoring feature to compare your SEO performance to your competitors'.
Despite its rich feature suite, AccuRanker has a sleek, intuitive interface that is easy to use, even for beginners.
You can also import data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console for advanced, valuable metrics.
If you work with clients, the premium plans of this tool will allow you to create professional white-label reports that you can send to clients automatically.
3. SEO SpyGlass - Backlink Analysis
SEO SpyGlass is the competitive analysis tool featured in SEO PowerSuite, a desktop-based software that helps website owners improve their online search visibility.
This tool helps you identify link-building opportunities based on your competitors’ backlink profiles.
It also analyses newly-discovered backlinks for spam signals and lets you clean up spammy backlinks that carry the risk of a Google penalty.
With SEO SpyGlass, you’ll be able to quickly identify all the areas you need to improve on to get an edge over your competitors.
4. Netpeak Software - Technical Optimization
Netpeak Software is a company that develops tools for webmasters and SEO experts to help solve various SEO tasks easily and effectively.
The two major tools produced by this company are Netpeak Checker and Netpeak Spider.
Netpeak Checker is a robust tool that helps users analyze the SEO status of hundreds of web pages based on over 400 parameters. With this tool, you can find potential customers, ideas for articles, sites for placing links and link building donors.
Netpeak Spider is a website crawler that detects technical SEO issues that reduce a website's visibility/ranking in SERPs.
This software combs through web pages to ensure that there are no SEO errors that can affect the site's ranking on the web.
If there are any problems, the webmaster can resolve them to make sure that the website becomes more accessible to its target audience.
5. SEMrush - All-In-One SEO Tool
SEMrush is a full-featured marketing toolkit that helps SEO professionals carry out important marketing processes like keyword research, content optimization, content audits, advertising research, backlink research and competitor analysis, among others.
This tool makes it easy for you to measure how visible your business and content are on the internet. With it, you can see your traffic and the keywords you rank for compared to your competitors.
You can also see the keywords you can compete for across different channels.
SEMrush offers more than 20 billion keywords, which makes it the largest keyword database on the market today.
With this database, you can conduct keyword searches to help you build your SEO and PPC campaigns.
Some other visibility tools in this suite are on-page SEO checker, CPC map, backlink audit tool, organic traffic insights, and domain comparisons, among many others.
There is also an SEO Writing Assistant feature that can help you optimize your content based on your Top 10 competitors on Google.
Other tools include: SE Ranking, Mangools, ClickFlow, Google Search Console, Seobility, Ubersuggest, etc.
