Introduction
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. Everything is now being searched on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, and you want to have your business, product, or service listed on these search queries and at the top/front page. Similar to how roads connect people to brick and mortar businesses, search engines connect users to online businesses.
One of the biggest advantages of SEO is that it’s an inbound marketing strategy, hyper-targeted, and customer-centric. Organic visibility drives high-quality traffic to your website by creating helpful resources and making helpful information more easily accessible.
You do not need to pay a single penny when it comes to SEO, but researching and writing high-quality content requires an investment. SEO offers amazing ROI, improves credibility and trust, helps PR, and you can move ahead of the competition or stay competitive within your industry.
Top SEO Tools
1) Yoast SEO
Every website needs an SEO plugin and Yoast SEO is the one for me. Yoast SEO not only handles titles and meta descriptions for websites, but also provides a SEO and readability analysis that ranks your content before you even get crawled/ranked by Google or other search engines.
One of the best things about Yoast SEO is that it makes managing sitemaps very easy. When you enable XML sitemap functionality, Yoast SEO automatically generates a sitemap, updates it as you add new content, and pings search engines when it’s updated.
There is also a very simple system created for rating a page where green dot means good, red dot means there are problems, and orange dot means there’s room for improvement. This can be very helpful when you are sorting your posts based on the colors, making it easy to identify which post needs attention and further optimization.
2) Google Keyword Planner
Discover and research new search keywords by seeing the average monthly search number for keywords and forecasts through Google Keyword Planner. It is completely free to use and Keyword Planner can provide suggestions for related keywords as well.
This is a wonderful tool for niche marketers, and people looking for more topics to blog about. You can also easily learn more about keywords that are relevant to your website and your particular location (local or national).
3) SEMrush
SEMrush is an SEO tool that does your keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition, runs an SEO audit of your blog, looks for backlinking opportunities and lots more.
Many digital marketing professionals use SEMrush because it provides key data on competitors paid and search strategies, offer keyword and link building suggestions which helps with SEO, and generates relevant site audits with critical issues that need attention.
You can easily monitor and manage your organic rankings, take your content marketing to the next level by showing which keywords are doing well and bringing traffic to your site, and track your ranking position on Google.
