SEO tools

Why You Need To Use SEO Analysis Tools

One of the great things about SEO is all the awesome tools that are available for you to take advantage of. No matter what area of SEO you are currently working on, there is probably a tool that can help you along your way. These tools are here to make your job easier and help save you time.

It doesn’t matter about your knowledge of SEO, these types of tools should be used by all. There are lots of different ways SEO tools can make your strategy better, and even provide ideas and guidance of things you haven’t even thought of yet!

In this current hyper competitive environment, even the nichest of markets have competition, so it imperative that you are doing all you can to give your website and business an advantage. SEO tools are here to give you that advantage and take your campaign to the next level.

All tools are, however, not created equal and some are certainly better than others. Along with researching the reasons why you need SEO tools, it is also a good idea to have a better understanding of the actual tools themselves and which ones are the best.

SEO free tool analysis

Some tools are completely free to use, which is great if you just need a more basic outline. Some are only free for your first search or for a certain amount of time. While other tools cost money, but can provide you with the most detailed information across a number of different areas, meaning you’ll probably only ever need the one (or a couple) tool for your SEO campaign.

Have a read on below at some of the best reasons why people use SEO tools (and why you should too!):

Save Money and Time

As touched on in the introduction, using tools can save you time, but it can actually also save you a bit of money. In the busy world of running your business/ website your time IS money, so you don’t really want to be wasting it on performing actions manually for something that can be pretty much completely automated.

Within your SEO campaign, it is vital that you run comprehensive SEO audits semi-regularly to provide guidance of issues on your website that could be the reason why your rankings in search engines aren’t improving they way you would have liked them to.

SEO audits can take a significant chunk of your time, especially if you have a big website with lots of pages and you are trying to do it manually. Performing an SEO audit manually isn’t recommended, not only due to the time it takes, but it is also easier for issues to fall through the cracks as you might miss something because you don’t really know what you are looking for.

A lot of SEO tools offer comprehensive audits and you will find all the issues of your website within a couple of hours. If you are on a tight budget, then a great place to start is Screaming Frog. There is a free version of Screaming Frog, which can be helpful to get the ball rolling.

If you have a little bit more cash to splash, then you cannot go past a tool like SEMRush or Moz. The detail of these reports are simply amazing, and they even provide additional guidance of how to fix an of the issues that are present on your website. Performing SEO audits is also a small sliver of what these tools offer, so it is certainly worth checking them out!

Tracking your SEO Progress

So you have been performing SEO for a while now, what’s one of the most important things to look at? Your progress! Now manually plugging in every single one of your chosen keywords into Google to see how you are ranking is the most time consuming and boring job.

However, with SEO tools this task is made easy and exciting. The data is usually provided in an easy to consume way and can also provide quick insights. Also, it’s not just your keyword rankings that you should be tracking to progress of, but other things as well like your domain authority, internal and external links, organic traffic, conversions, and so much more.

With an SEO tool, you can find all that in the one place. That way you can easily see if the tactics you are deploying for your campaign are actually working or not, by measuring them to your key performance indicators (KPIs). Think about what your KPIs are and you can usually set up specific goals through your SEO tools.

Also, the data is usually kept on your website for however long you have been using the tool (if it is a paid tool), so you can look back at your progress historically and (hopefully) see just how far you have come. Most these tools also allow you to download or share the data so you can showcase to others in the business the progress of SEO.

Google analytics SEO tool

Discovering the Best Keywords

If you have ever performed keyword research you would understand just how time consuming the process is, and you may not even be sure about how successful you are going to be chasing those keywords. Well, SEO tools help take the guesswork out of performing keyword research.

Keyword research is vital because it helps to shape the content you actually put on your website. People are searching for a lot of different things on Google and other search engines, so it can make it difficult to know which keywords are right for your website.

There are a lot of different categories of keywords these days as well. You have competitive and non-competitive, long tail and short tail, keywords based on differing intent, and the list goes on. Targeting the wrong type of keywords can be really detrimental to your website as it could mean you are not visible in search engines, or you are getting the wrong type of people onto your site.

One of the ultimate goals of most websites is to get a visitor to convert. Now this conversion will look different, depending on the type of website you run. So for example, a conversion may be getting someone to purchase a product from your website, or it could also mean getting someone to sign up to your newsletter.

Whatever conversion means specifically to your website, you will need to rank well for the right type of keywords to help get you there. This is where great SEO and digital marketing tools can help you when conducting keyword research.

They can assist you by giving you facts and data such as the search volume of a keyword, keyword difficulty, keyword competitiveness, other related keywords and more. Different tools have slightly different offerings when it comes to keyword research, so you should certainly explore a number of different options to see what works best for you.

With all this data and information at your fingertips, it becomes significantly easier to not only identify the right keywords but also find keywords that offer great intent for your business as well as being easy to rank. This low hanging fruit is perfect to give your website the quick boost it needs.

Detailed Analysis on Competitors

No matter what industry you are in, or how niche you think the market is, you will always have competitors. Therefore it is important that you do competitor analysis to get a better idea of how you compare to those you are competing against.

Not only can you compare yourself to others but you can also take a look at what your competitors are doing. Unfortunately, there are a number of shady people and businesses operating in the world of SEO that can, through no fault of your own, have an impact on you.

Also, because Google or other search engines don’t know that you aren’t doing those things yourself, then it could be your own website that gets slapped with a penalty or manual action. These can have lasting impacts on your website, so you should have a pretty good idea as to what SEO actions your competitors are undertaking.

Tools like SEMRush can provide a pretty clear idea of how your competitors are tracking and what they are up to. They might be doing something awesome and innovative that could give to an idea and you could put your own individual spin on!

When it comes to analysing your competitors, a great place to start is their backlink profile, it provides some great insights as to what is going on. A tool like Moz can provide details like what backlinks your competitors are getting, the domain authority of those links, what the anchor text is, what page the backlink is targeting among other details.

With this information at your disposal you can identify themes and trends to make an educated guess on what your competitor is working on. So for example, if you see a lot of backlinks pointing to the one page, or pages with similar topics/ information on them, then you know they are trying to improve their ranking of those specific pages.

Along with getting a better idea of their backlinks, another aspect SEO tools can provide guidance on is additional keyword opportunities. You can see what keywords your competitors are ranking well for, examine those pages on their website, comparing them to your own and get a better idea of why they are ranking higher.

This can help for improving existing keywords as well as finding new opportunities that you can take advantage of. Think about what new keywords they are targeting and see if it is beneficial for your own website if you start targeting them as well.

In Summary

There’s a lot of information in here to digest! But the key thing to remember is just how useful SEO tools can actually be for your business. While some of the good tools cost money, you will find that the insights you pull from them will be worth their weight in gold.

In this highly competitive SEO space, you need to be looking down every different avenue and leave no stone unturned to ensure you get your competitive advantage and stand out from the crowd. In SEO, tools are certainly one of the best ways you can do this.

So make sure your next step is to do some research on different tools in the SEO space and what they have to offer. Some of these tools can be confusing at first, especially if you are new to SEO. But the good thing is that many offer tutorials on how to get the most out of the tool.

Also, many tools don’t just focus on the one area; they offer a truly comprehensive outlook on SEO. This means you can pretty much find all the information you need in the one place!