Many small to medium-sized businesses handle much of their marketing in-house. While this can save money over time, the vast majority of internal marketing departments are not SEO experts, and as such are stuck with using antiquated and well-meaning SEO methodologies that may not work anymore.
At Adapting Online, we realize that many companies handle certain aspects of SEO internally. This is why we’ve come up with a list of SEO tools that can benefit our clients and complement our suite of SEO services that we offer.
2019’s Top 5 Must-Have SEO Tools
If you’ve been tasked with handling the SEO for your company, here are a few tools that can not only make your life a whole lot easier but can help you figure out how to drive more leads, traffic, and ultimately sales.
#1 Ahrefs
There are countless SEO tools and software on the market. All claim to help drive new traffic, but only a few deliver on their promises. Ahrefs is one of those SEO tools that’s been around for a long time and is in use by professional SEO agencies throughout the world.
With it, you can view the backlinks of your competitors and find low-hanging fruit. For example, if you see that a specific website (that is both relevant and authoritative) has linked to a competitor of yours, there’s an excellent chance they will link to you if you reach out to them via email.
By keeping abreast of how many websites are linking to yours, you can get an idea of where to focus your SEO efforts.
#2 Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a stand-alone program that allows you to scrape information about any website. With it, you can see if there are any technical issues with your website such as:
- Broken internal links
- 404 pages
- Slow site speed
- Non-https images
There is a free and paid version of the tool. The free version only allows a fraction of the data the paid version offers. Screaming Frog SEO is a great resource that every webmaster and website owner should not be without. It can solve potential problems that could cause a drop in your organic Google ranking.
#3 Answer the Public
If you’ve been tasked with updating the content and keywords of your website, Answer the Public can help you find hidden keywords and long tail phrases that can help you drive additional traffic.
This free tool allows you to search for variations of keywords. For example, if you were to put in the words “Blue Nike Shoes” into the search bar, their search engine will return more keywords and commonly used phrases and questions that you can include in your copy and on your website. You can even use their keyword suggestions as inspiration for new content.
#4 Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
VWO gives you the tools to peek in on your website visitors and determine if there are any issues with your site. For example, you can record people on your website in real time. You’ll see precisely where their mouse is and the pages they visited. You can then use this information to see if there are any broken aspects to your website.
An eCommerce company set up VWO and recorded their visitors as they checked out. Google Analytics was reporting a huge bounce rate on the checkout page, but before installing VWO, they were unable to find it.
After reviewing 10 or so live recordings of their website visitors trying to check out, the eCommerce company determined that the shipping plugin they were using was broken. It would cause an error which would be shown to the customer. The customer would then have second thoughts, thinking something was amiss (and rightfully so).
The plugin did not report any errors and there was no way of the eCommerce company learning of this glitch unless a good Samaritan reported it.
By using VWO to find that error on the checkout page, the company started to see increased profits every month.
#5 Google Analytics
Last but not least on our top 5 list of must-have SEO tools is Google Analytics. The amount of information that this free tool shows make it one of the most valuable SEO tools out there. With Google Analytics, you can not only see what keywords people searched for when they landed on your site, but you can also see:
- Time spent on your site
- Bounce rate
- Social media performance
- Site speed
Google Analytics can also be highly customized to report on other tools and services that you use such as MailChimp or any number of SEO tools that use the Google Analytics API.
SEO for Small to Medium Sized Businesses
The above five tools should be in the stack of anyone optimizing their website for SEO. At Adapting Online, we realize that many businesses don’t have the time or knowledge to optimize their websites for SEO.
If you fall into this category, or you’d simply like a second opinion, give us a call at (512) 993-9993 or contact us via our website. We know how important marketing is and can help you create and execute the perfect SEO or marketing campaign that will result in both new leads and new traffic to your business!
Monica Thomason, Web Marketing Specialist
Monica Thomason has been involved in all aspects of internet marketing for over 15 years. She loves all things internet and truly appreciates what the internet can do for businesses. Whether you need help with content and SEO, ecommerce optimization, social media or reputation management she would love to help you!
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