Our Favorite Things for Conducting SEO Research
As an agency, we are often asked about our favorite tools for the work we do on behalf of our clients. From content creation to social media engagement to website development to search engine optimization, the tools we use are a huge part of the work we do each day.
We’ve decided to provide a few of our favorite tools in a series we’re calling “Our Favorite Things”. As we prepare for the holiday season, we’re listing our favorite things, a few of which you may want to put on your wish lists too.
We start with Search Engine Optimization. As you are probably aware, SEO is the driving force behind your website’s performance. You need SEO to get the traffic to your site and create great conversion rate opportunities to generate customers once you get eyeballs on your site.
But how do you get the right people to your site? SEO is a complex combination of tools, resources, and strategies, both on your site and off. While hiring a dedicated SEO manager can lead to great results, there are a few tools and resources you can implement on your own to improve your website’s performance and search engine optimization performance.
We’ve compiled a list of four of our favorite tools for managing the SEO of your site on your own. Utilizing these tools will give you an understanding of your site’s performance, as well as help you identify opportunities for growth.
Our 4 Favorite SEO Tools:
Google Search Console allows you to gain a deep understanding of what Google thinks of your website. You start using Google Search Console by verifying your website. There are a number of ways this can be completed.
Once verified, you can submit your XML sitemap and index pages with Google. GSC will also inform you of search queries that you rank for, backlinks to your website, errors on website, validate structure data, missing pages that are linked by other websites, techniques for additional optimization with Google, and fetch/render to see blocked resources.
BuzzSumo is a great resource to understand what type of content is ranking well across the Internet. You can simply search for a topic that you are interested in ranking for and see the top ranking content related to this topic. BuzzSumo helps you understand the type of content your audience is interested in to provide you suggestions for similar content you can create for your own site. You can also scout these ranking page’s comments to understand additional content that your audience is looking for. Craft content around these gaps in the high ranking content for your specific audience.
SEMRush will help audit the portions of your website that are less visible. Quickly view reports on where your SEO is lacking. Are you missing backlinks? What about unique Meta Descriptions and Titles for your pages? SEMRush will quickly point this out and highlight the opportunities for improvement on your site. Reduce the number of SEO errors on your website quickly, using SEMRush. This robust tool also provides insights into competitors’ sites as well, allowing you to measure yourself against your biggest competition.
Soovle is a simple tool that utilizes Google to suggest API and other search engines’ search suggestions. Start typing a search query into Soovle and view the suggested keywords that follow in all major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more). This will help you understand popular searches and insight to your audience’s questions. The next step is to further research high-ranking content based on popular searches using BuzzSumo. You can find additional opportunities to make your content better–and more targeted–with this research.
With this list in hand, you are ready to get started managing your SEO tactics and optimizing your efforts.
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