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3 Essential Search Engine Optimisation Tools Your SEO Strategy Needs to Succeed

20 Aug

Navigating the world of SEO can be like trying to navigate yourself up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

If you want your business’s website to go up the search engine ranks, you need to maximise your SEO efforts. That means ensuring your SEO strategy and the content to go with it are:

  1. Increasing your ranking on search engines
  2. Getting people to choose your business over your competitors

While the most important outcomes (read: more leads and more sales) are fairly self-evident, they don’t give you a complete picture.

To get that, you’ll have to think about online marketing and Melbourne search engine optimisation tools, and how they can help you measure your digital strategy.

There’s a variety of competing SEO tools out there, each promising the world. Some can cost a fortune. Luckily, there are plenty of free (or low-cost) options out there that cover all the essentials!

To help you accurately measure your strategy, this Melbourne SEO agency recommends starting with these valuable SEO tools.

google analytics

An introduction to Google Analytics

If you have a Google account, you can access Google Analytics.

A free add-on for business users, Google Analytics packs a lot of punch.

This SEO tool gives business owners like you the power to:

  • Generate reports on your organic traffic
  • Evaluate whether your SEO strategy is paying off
  • Identify low-performing pages

Don’t be fooled by its free status – Google Analytics offers everything most businesses need to evaluate their SEO success.

Analyse your overall organic traffic

For starters, Google Analytics provides data regarding overall organic traffic.

It will tell you:

  • How much traffic you’re getting from search engines
  • What percentage of total traffic is organic
  • How long they’re staying on your site
  • How many pages they’re clicking on
  • Which pages are most popular

If you ask us, organic leads should make up the lion’s share for most businesses. If it doesn’t, you might need to rethink your SEO strategy!

Organic traffic by page

Overall traffic isn’t the only thing Google Analytics can reveal to you. You can also use Google Analytics to dig deeper and look at how individual pages are performing.

It can provide data for all the landing pages on your site. These are the pages your visitors first find your site through.

Looking at the most popular landing pages tells you which pages are ranking the best in search engines. Using this information, you can identify what parts of your SEO strategy are working, and importantly, which ones aren’t.

Google Search Console

Here’s another freebie from Google!

Google Search Console is an SEO tool that checks the indexing status and visibility of your website. Unlike Analytics, Search Console focuses more on the nitty-gritty details.

For example, this SEO tool identifies:

  • Keyword rankings
  • Clicks per keyword
  • Click through rate
  • Dwell time
  • …and many more!

Not only that, but it’s also a valuable source of information regarding any mistakes, inaccuracies or optimisation errors in your website.

Search Console helps identify all sorts of issues that might affect your rankings like:

  • Site-wide errors (server errors, DNS errors)
  • URL errors (incorrect links, missing pages, failed redirects)

Find your keywords with Google Search Console

Without a doubt, the best use for Google Search Console is planning and tweaking your SEO strategy.

If you ask us, the most effective SEO strategies aren’t the ones that go for broke right off the bat, but instead target keywords relevant to the client’s niche or area.

The keyword-specific data offered by this SEO tool is perfect for identifying keywords for your organic marketing strategy.

Search Console lists keywords your website currently ranks for, as well as data relating to:

  • What position your pages rank in
  • How much competition you’ll face for each phrase
  • How many searches are made for each phrase
  • The clickthrough rate of each searched phrase

Knowing this tells your where you stand vis-a-vis your competitors in specific keywords, as well as what you’re currently turning up on.

Using this, you can pick and choose which battles to fight and what keywords to target as part of your SEO strategy.

A quick crash course in Yoast SEO

If your site is hosted on WordPress, then you might have heard of Yoast SEO.

If you haven’t however, then here’s a quick crash-course!

Think of this SEO tool as spell check for your online content. It gives you real-time updates on the SEO-friendliness of your content as you’re creating it.

Yoast will tell you:

Keep you pointers to improve your content and its ranking, including:

  • Keyword density
  • Metadata
  • Subheadings and titles
  • Images and rich media
  • Links (internal or otherwise)

And as one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there, it integrates easily with your WordPress site, no matter who developed it or what template you’re using.

How Yoast improves your content marketing

Yoast is more than just an SEO tool however – it can also help you create better content overall!

While an SEO tool first and foremost, one of Yoast’s underrated features is its readability function.

The key to a successful SEO strategy is well-written, quality content – and most of us could use a helping hand sometimes.

While you’re submitting ongoing SEO content or updating existing content, the Yoast icon on your dashboard will provide recommendations that make your content more readable, including:

  • Sentence length
  • Paragraphs and spacing
  • Trimming down complex sentences
  • Grammar advice

Struggling with SEO tools?

Get help from a Melbourne SEO agency!

So there’s your crash course in how each of these free SEO tools work. Obviously, this is only a high-level overview – each of these tools has countless features that we don’t have time to go over.

We know you don’t have time to learn how to use each of these SEO tools… or at least, not without soaking up a considerable portion of your day-to-day business!

That’s when you should call a Melbourne SEO agency like iformat.

Give us a call on 1300 88 64 50, or tell us a little about your business here and we’ll get back to you.