Despite the tight competition that exists to be in the first 3 results of Google, preparing a website containing valuable and helpful information that can encourage the audience to click and buy is a difficult task. Generating valuable content is only the beginning. To compete with the most prominent sites, you need to optimize your site for a search engine like Google using SEO tools. Considering the importance of SEO in ranking sites, in this article on smart strategy, we introduce all essential SEO tools, such as SEO keywords tools, SEO analytics and competitors tools, and other helpful tools, that will bring you one step closer to the first rank of SERP.
Types of SEO tools in different sectors
The SEO tools currently used by marketing teams of small and large businesses are diverse. According to some people, knowing and using the facilities and features of all these tools is not necessary, but getting acquainted with the most useful ones is essential. Therefore, Google tools for SEO will be introduced and evaluated first, followed by site review, keyword research, and ranking tools.
Google SEO tools
As the world’s largest search engine, Google offers a variety of helpful SEO tools that will significantly impact your site’s ranking.
1. Google search console
Google Search Console is one of Google’s SEO tools that started working as Webmaster Tools. Google changed the name of this tool on May 20, 2015, and it is now known as Google Search Console. The most important use of Google Search Console is helping to optimize the site for better crawling of Google search engines, indexing the site, and displaying the results related to the query searched by the user in the search box. As a result, Google has a better understanding of the nature and efficiency of the site’s content, and as a result, it can provide the user with the best results on the SERP page.
With Google Search Console, you can check the site’s problems and get a better rank in the Google search engine results list by fixing them. Therefore, the most important use of this tool will be checking the correct display of website pages and the site’s performance.
Google Search Console is one of the essential SEO tools, and its uses are as follows.
- Check the site map
- Receive alerts from Google for indexing, spam, and other problems related to the site
- The number of times your site is displayed in SERP
- Ensuring that the site is indexed in Google results
- Statistics related to the access time of a particular website or the time a site is indexed
- Checking and fixing the indexing problems of the site
- Request to re-index the site pages
- Check and adjust the creep rate
- Discover blocked pages with robots.txt
- Improving the efficiency and quality of the site for users
- List internal and external pages linked to the website
- Troubleshoot AMP and usability issues on mobile
- Checking the technical health of the site
2. Google page speed insight or PSI
As another SEO analytics tool, Google Page Speed Insight, as the name suggests, evaluates a site’s speed on mobile devices and desktops and provides suggestions for improving page speed. In addition, PSI includes lab and field information to debug issues related to the page’s functional performance by examining a site’s page. This field data is entirely based on actual user experience but may be limited in some cases.
In PSI, a score will indicate the site’s speed by checking the site’s performance. Your site speed will be considered good if the received score is 90 or higher. A score of 50 to 90 indicated that your site needs improvements for better performance and increased loading speed, and a score below 50 indicates poor site performance. For each page of the site you check in Google Page Speed Insight, you will be shown strategies to increase the speed of the page, implementing which you can significantly increase the speed of your site. Page speed will be critical in ranking your site in search engine results. If your website is not on par with the top 10 organic pages on the first page of Google, you have no chance of being on the first page of results.
Remember to check both mobile and desktop display modes when checking your site with the Google Page Speed Insight tool to create a better user experience. Also, remember that the faster your website loads, the lower the bounce rate. As a result, you will have a better chance of ranking in Google.
The most critical and fundamental PSI solutions to increase site speed are as follows:
- Compress site images. You can use the WP SMUSH tool for this.
- Clear the browser cache. For this, you can use the W3 Total Cache tool.
- Minimize HTML coding space. You can use the Minify HTML tool for this.
- Improve AMP. One of the most popular plugins to enhance AMP is AMP for WP.
3. Google mobile-friendly testing tool
You can use Google Mobile Friendly Testing Tool to evaluate the performance and display of your site pages on mobile. In the sense of whether your site pages are optimized for display on mobile devices.
A mobile-friendly website is vital to your brand’s number of visits and presence in search results. As you know, smartphone traffic is increasing every day and is now even more than desktop traffic. Therefore, you should be aware of the importance of site pages being compatible with how they are displayed on mobile.
The critical items in Google Mobile Friendly Testing are:
- Lack of Flash support: Most mobile browsers do not support Flash. Therefore, since mobile phone users cannot see the desired content, they will not have full access to the site.
- Viewport issues: If the site content display is not set for the mobile screen size or has a fixed width, the content of each page will not be displayed correctly on all mobile devices.
- Horizontal scrolling: vertical scrolling is defined as a standard method on mobile phones, so horizontal scrolling of site pages will annoy the user.
- Content Scale: When you open a site on your mobile phone, it shouldn’t look the same as on your desktop. Instead, it should be smaller, and on the other hand, the content should be adjusted to the mobile screen size.
- Appropriate font or text: The text must be readable on the mobile screen without zooming.
- Close touch elements: Buttons and links should be far apart so users can easily click on them without zooming in on their mobile screen.
4. Google structured data testing tool.
Google Structured Data Testing Tool is one of the most straightforward and useful SEO analytics tools to test your site’s structured data. Structured data is one of the methods of providing information about the pages of the site and its content. Google currently supports 3 different schema markup formats, whose other characteristics and features help Google learn about the structured data of a website. In short, structured data helps Google understand the content presented on the website more accurately and thus provides users with more valuable and relevant content.
Structured data is an essential factor in improving the user experience. However, despite this feature, users can transfer structured data to different websites and applications so that, in addition to the user, Google also has a correct understanding of the presented content. To use data structure markups, you must follow the steps below.
- Choose the appropriate schemas. The most used schemas include Organization, Person, Place, Local Business, Restaurant, Offer, Product, etc.
- Mark up your site’s data structure. For this, you can use the Structured Data Markup Helper tool.
- Test the markings. For this, you must use the Structured Data Testing Tool.
- Identify possible problems using the Google Search Console tool.
The following can be mentioned among this tool’s most important uses and features.
- Check URLs or structured data codes of the site
- Check for warnings or errors in site codes
- Checking the validity of site codes
- The ability to see a preview of how the Rich Snippet will appear in search results
5. Google AMP testing tool
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page as one of the SEO tools, a joint project between Google and Twitter designed to create fast mobile pages. In simpler words, AMP is a simple and optimized HTML designed for mobile versions of a web page, and as a result, the pages displayed on mobile with this tool are lighter, and their loading speed is higher. Some experts believe that AMP cannot directly affect the site’s SEO, but as a rule, the user experience of using this tool for websites can be an essential factor in improving the site’s SEO. Considering that about one-third of internet users prefer the phone instead of the desktop, the display versions of the website on the phone will be of particular importance.
6. Internal site review tools
After Google tools for SEO, to evaluate the site’s internal items such as content, links, and codes, you need tools to get a complete report, including problems and solutions.
Screaming frog
As one of the most helpful SEO analytics tools, Screaming Frog crawls all website pages and internal and external links and reports possible problems. Using this tool, you can identify some of the most common site problems and improve your SEO by improving and fixing them. The following can be mentioned among the features of the Screaming Frog tool.
- Identify broken links, errors, and redirects on the site.
- Analyzing page titles and metadata
- Check grammar and spelling
- Structured data review and validation
- Create XML Sitemaps
- Discover duplicate pages
- Configuration of creeps
- Ability to integrate with Google Analytics
- Ability to integrate with Page Speed Insight
7. Competitor review tools
The tools we will introduce and review in the following are SEO tools, specifically tools for competitor analysis and keyword research.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most practical SEO analytics tools in which you can access dedicated tools such as link building, competitor analysis, keyword research, rank evaluation, and many more. Most of the features of this tool are defined and designed for marketing professionals. Still, SEO experts also use this tool to analyze competitors, check the site’s SEO, and rank keywords.
Among the most critical capabilities and features of Ahrefs are as following:
- It supports top search engines like Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), Daum & Naver (South Korea), and Seznam (Czech Republic).
- It’s the only keyword research tool that goes beyond Search Volume and shows the estimated number of clicks for each search result.
- With Ahrefs, you can evaluate the keywords that get the most clicks in a specific geographic area.
- Most SEO experts check the keyword’s search volume to predict the organic traffic potential of a page on their site. You can check the monthly organic search traffic of the top SERP pages by searching for a keyword on Ahrefs.
- Ahrefs is one of the most powerful SEO tools that provides a daily updated backlinks chart.
- With the Ahrefs tool, in addition to getting to know your competitors better, you can see the parts of their site that have the most search traffic from a specific country.
- You can check the click distribution of keywords individually.
- You can analyze the history of SERP pages.
- You can instantly analyze the internal backlinks of any website.
- Identify the content gap between your competitors’ sites and yours. This way, you can determine the keywords your competitor ranks on and plan to produce content that includes that keyword or do SEO optimization.
- Ahrefs is one of the best tools through which you can access the original website domain rank, number of referring domains, organic search traffic, word count, number of publications, updated date, and many more related to content analysis of your site and competitors.
Semrush
Semrush is one of the popular SEO analytics tools for competitor analysis, keyword research, search engine optimization or SEO, and Google Ads optimization. Semrush is a versatile software for digital marketers and SEO professionals. semrush provides features in various fields, including SEO, Content, Market Research, Advertising, SMM, and SERM. Among the features of this tool, the following can be mentioned.
- Estimated Traffic: Estimated traffic is the share of traffic directed to a website by a specific keyword.
- Top keywords by position: Using this feature, you can identify top keywords by position and monitor keyword ranking fluctuations on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
- Keywords in Top Results: Access all keywords in the top 3 Google search results and evaluate the percentage of top keywords.
- Ranking Distribution: If you want to see and analyze all the top metrics, including keywords in the top 10 SERP results, keywords in the first 100 results, and relative traffic of each, and get a comparative view of the position of each word, Semrush is the right choice as one of the SEO tools.
- Average Competitor Position: With Semrush, you can access the overall average ranking for keywords across different campaigns.
- Link building: With the semrush tool, you can identify substantial external and internal linking opportunities.
- Interestingly, you can also use semrush for content optimization and marketing toolbox.
8. Keyword ranking tools
Let us introduce two new tools to check the keywords’ rank.
Night watch
Nightwatch is one of the SEO analytics tools used to check keyword rankings locally and to increase reach and sales. In addition, Nightwatch claims to be the most accurate geolocation tracker on the market right now. Because most ranking trackers only use a random data center, Nightwatch gives you access to Google’s data center.
Nightwatch has a Chrome extension, and as a result, by adding and activating it on the Chrome browser, you can check the keyword rank in the SERP results and all searches from different regions of the world among the top 100 Google results. The following can be mentioned among the other features of Night Watch as one of the SEO tools.
- Ability to connect to Google Search Console and Google Analytics
- Provide a graph of the average and overall SEO position and SERP results compared to competitors’ websites.
- Get detailed word ranking reports.
- Track and send notifications for keywords and offer suggestions
9. Keyword research tools
We need keyword research to launch advertising campaigns, rank on different keywords, increase CTR, and many more. In this regard, tools have been designed specifically to search for keywords.
Keyword planner
Keyword Planner is one of Google’s powerful tools for searching and choosing suitable keywords. One of the essential advantages of this tool is the addition of a Chrome extension and real-time keyword analysis. One of the most used features of Keyword Planner is to check the search volume of a keyword to launch a Google Ads campaign.
Kwfinder
Kwfinder is another SEO analytics tool used for keyword research. Working with this tool is very simple, and by inserting the keyword you want, you can get all the keywords related to it in one file.
Keyword tool
The keyword tool is one of those SEO tools that will provide comprehensive and complete information about keywords in its free version. It is enough to enter the Keywordtool website. After selecting the search engine, enter the desired keyword and choose the geographical area so that the best and most relevant keywords are available.
conclusion
As you read in this article, SEO tools are the most important means to be among the first Google search results. You need to optimize the site pages to expect to get a high ranking in Google. The SEO tools introduced in this article are among the best SEO tools for powerful search engines like Google. If you use another tool as an SEO expert, comment its name to us.
In this article on the smart strategy, we dive deep into different SEO analytics tools.
Smart strategy as a leading digital marketing agency providing SEO services in Canada. Please contact us to have a free consultation with our SEO strategist and get more information about smart strategy’s keyword research services and other SEO services
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