SEO tools are auxiliary software used in the process of search engine optimization, including query tools, ranking tools, traffic analysis tools, and more. Effectively utilizing SEO tools can help you analyze your website’s strengths and weaknesses, assess competitors’ sites, and gain insights into the latest search engine trends.
SEO Tools from Google
Let’s begin with the highly convenient tools that are easily accessible and closely aligned with our ranking goals, starting with Google.
To enhance user convenience, Google provides access to various analytic tools that allow you to assess your website’s performance, essentially for auditing purposes.
And you know what? You can use these tools completely free of charge! Without further ado, let’s see what they are.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool developed by Google to assist companies in optimizing their website’s search visibility.
It provides all kinds of information you need for your website. For example, the keywords and rankings of your website, which search terms users came to your website through, the display result status of the search terms, click-through rate, which websites link to your website, and so on.
Additionally, this tool can identify issues related to website quality and security. For example, 404, mobile-friendliness, malicious website attacks, etc.
How to Set Up Google Search Console?
Step 1. Visit URL: https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome
View the upper left corner of the interface, search property> add property.
Step 2. Select property type.
There are two ways to verify authority, domain and URL prefix.
The difference between the two is that the domain can contain all your website resources, such as your HTTP and HTTPS websites, you only need to enter your domain name like something.com when verifying resources. To use this method requires you to have the authority of the domain administrator.
But when verifying the URL prefix, Google Search Console will only verify the URL that you input as well as the pages under it. So as you need to enter the prefix, you should type the URL instead of the domain https://www.something.com, or https://www.something.com/blog/. For this method, you only need to have the authority to manage the website. This method also allows multiple verification methods instead of only through DNS verification that the Domain method has. So it’s absolutely more convenient!
Even though there are two methods, under normal circumstances, we will go with the URL prefix method.
Step 3. Choose a domain name verification method.
As you choose the URL prefix and enter your own domain name, you will find that there are many ways to verify it. Don’t worry, you don’t need to do all of them, just choose one that you find easier to do.
- HTML file: This method will provide you with an HTML file, download it and place it in the root directory of the website.
- HTML tag: A string of tag codes will be provided and you need to put it in the <head> tag on the homepage of the website.
- GA and GTM (Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager): If your account already has permissions for these tools and has administrator authority, you can directly verify the account.
- Domain name provider: This method requires you to have the authority of the domain name administrator. It will also provide you with a string of text and put it in the domain name setting. This is also the verification method that is used if you go with the Domain method on the previous step.
How to Find New Keyword Opportunities with Google Search Console?
To optimize our website for attracting traffic, we need to periodically seek out new keyword opportunities. Without a proper tool, there would be a lot of time and resources to invest in and it still probably won’t do well.
But don’t worry, you’ve got access to Google Search Console now and it’s pretty convenient to use. In fact, Google Search Console is a very good tool for finding those opportunities and it can also help you find very relevant content.
To explore more keyword opportunities, we can check the performance section on the left-hand bar> click search results> click (+) button > select pages.
Enter a certain URL of the website, you can see some keywords that are ranking for a certain article.
How to Monitor The Keyword Ranking of Articles？
Many people use Semrush or Ahrefs to monitor keyword rankings due to their convenience. But in terms of accuracy, Google Search Console is slightly better.
To monitor keyword rankings, we need to go to the performance section>search results>click (+)> choose pages.
Enter the destination URL, and you can see the current status of the ranking of all keywords of an article. Filter the ranking of the keywords that the article is mainly concerned about, and you can choose a period of time for comparison.
How to Optimize Internal Link Construction?
Internal link optimization is a necessary skill for us to conduct SEO and Google Search Console is an effective tool to help us optimize the internal links.
Step 1: Click on the links report on the left-hand bar and you will be shown the internal links and the top linked pages. This report shows the top pages with the most internal links linking to them.
Step 2: Click more under the page list to view the number of internal links of the key pages you want to get internal links, and then find a way to add some internal links to these pages, and some unimportant internal links can be weakened.
How to Optimize External Link Construction?
The links report also indicates numerous external links pointing to our site.
On the one hand, we can check whether the content of these website links is what we expect, and then we can optimize the content.
On the other hand, we can search for some websites similar to these, and then contact such websites to build external links. Such external links are more relevant.
How to Identify Duplicate Keywords?
Sometimes a website is operated by multiple colleagues, and the content may be duplicated. How do we identify these duplicate pages?
Step 1: Click performance>search results>add new> and enter the target keywords.
Step 2: Select pages from the results that appear, you can see how many articles on our website are competing for this keyword.
Step 3: Compare the ranking changes of these two pages for this keyword over a period of time with that of the previous period. You can know which article Google agrees better with.
How to Make New Content Crawl Quickly?
If you publish new content and want to be quickly crawled by Google, in addition, to quickly updating the sitemap and submitting it, we can also use the URL inspection tool to submit our URL.
Step 1: Click on URL inspection and enter your new content URL. Generally, new online content will not be crawled by Google soon, and it will prompt “URL is not on Google”.
Step 2: Click the “Request indexing” button to request Google indexing.
Note: If our existing articles are updated, you can also use this tool to request Google to index again, and quickly let Google know that our content has been updated.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you track and monitor real-time statistics about a website, including its traffic and users.
If you want to know where your website visitors come from, what they have seen on the website, which pages are popular, and which traffic has got a better conversion, Google Analytics can definitely help you.
How to Set Up Google Analytics?
Before using Google Analytics, you must have a Google account. You can use your existing Gmail account, or register a new Google account.
1. Login address: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/.
Click Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Enter the page and click Admin.
3. Click Create an account on the Google Analytics Admin page.
Here we can set up the account and customize the account name.
4. In Google Analytics, you can choose how to share your account data with other products and services. As a default, you can select them all, then click “Next”.
5. We can choose to analyze three types of objects: Websites, Android App, and iOS App. If you do not have any app to track its data, you can just choose “Web” in the options here.
6. In the media resource settings, enter the name, URL, select the industry category and time zone; make sure that the URL starts with HTTPS or HTTP, otherwise the statistics will not display. Once the information has been input correctly, click the “Create” button.
7. After clicking the “Get Tracking ID” button, the Google analytics agreement will pop up. Here we tick all of them and then choose “I accept”. Then they will jump out of the website tracking code page you need.
8. Install the Google Analytics code on the website. The code needs to appear on a page that every user of the website can visit. And add it between <head> gtag.js</head>.
How to Use Google Analytics to Analyze Data?
After setting up Google Analytics, we will get the traffic data obtained in various channels. This data will help you to improve your website. Google Analytics panel mainly includes tags such as Home, Real-time, Acquisition, and Engagement, etc.
Home: It is a summary of the overall website traffic overview. The information in each section of the homepage can be used as a starting point for analyzing website or media data.
Real-time: With the real-time reporting function, you can monitor the activities that occur on your application or website in real-time. Through the arrangement of cards, understand how users enter the conversion funnel and their behavior after entering the funnel.
Acquisition: According to the form of conversation medium, conversation source, and advertising campaign, the user conversation and conversation method can be displayed in a data form, and user activities can be displayed in the form of days/weeks/months.
Engagement: In terms of interaction duration (session duration) and events (such as the most frequently viewed screens, the most frequently triggered events), the user’s interaction with the website is summarized.
Monetization: Show e-commerce activities from the perspective of purchase income, situation, products, and coupons. For example, the number of product views, the number of shopping carts, and the number of purchases.
Google Pagespeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a website performance testing tool developed and designed by Google that can help you perform a full range of optimization on your website based on the best optimization suggestions.
But one very important thing to remember is that you should not always be obsessed with 100 points. Because for some websites, this perfect goal is almost impossible.
Themes with very complex functions, such as e-commerce and membership sites, are relatively complex and it is even more difficult to get full marks.
How to achieve high scores in the Google PageSpeed Insights test？
- Optimize Picture Size
Reducing the size and file size of images on a regular basis is time-consuming but critical.
There are specific numbers of images that each website contains to make it more user-friendly, more appealing, and more dynamic and interesting. However, images of large size can often cause a website to run slowly and to load slowly.
If Page Speed Insight reminds you about image size, you need to do the following:
- Check the images uploaded to the website.
- Use compression tools or plug-ins to adjust the image size.
- Compress the images to be uploaded to avoid getting low scores again.
After the image is compressed, you will notice a significant improvement in the score and loading speed.
- Use Browser Cache
While browsing a web page, the browser downloads the files for each page in the background. To display the webpage properly, all the necessary files have to be downloaded by the browser:
HTML, picture, CSS, JavaScript. It slows down the whole process and lowers the score.
This problem, however, can be reduced or eliminated with browser caching.
The user’s browser stores the files so they do not need to download them again when they return to the website.
You can use cache plugins to optimize your website and increase loading speed.
- Streamline the code
Another issue that Page Speed Insight may identify is the amount of space occupied by the source code.
When encoding can be streamlined, it can significantly speed up page loading time by taking up less space. You can streamline the code by deleting or repairing duplicate data.
- Redirect
In addition, the redirection process will also affect the loading speed. If the page loading time is too long, it may be the reason that redirects cause it to not work properly.
This happens when the page redirects to a different page optimized for certain devices.
If you can make sure to build a responsive design suitable for all devices. In this way, you do not need to redirect and can improve the loading speed of the page.
Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool
Google has announced that its mobile search ranking algorithm will consider a website’s mobile-friendliness, which means that mobile-friendly sites are likely to receive more favorable rankings.
WIth Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool, we can easily test the performance score of our website running on a mobile device.
First, visit https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly, and enter the URL of the page you want it to be tested on. And there will be a report about mobile device availability issues.
The Mobile-Friendly Test tool can identify the following usability errors:
- Uses incompatible plugins
- Viewport not set
- Viewport not set to “device-width”
- Content wider than screen
- Text too small to read
- Clickable elements too close together
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a website crawler tool, it will crawl your website through the main domain of the website you provide, and get all the pages and key elements in your website, and provide real-time analysis results.
What Can Screaming Frog Do to Boost Your SEO?
Get All The Links on The Website And Export Them
It can help you get all the links on the website, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, pictures, etc. Export links can get all the exported links of the website content so that you can clean up the links you don’t want to export.
List All Information of Links
The power of Screaming Frog is that it not only obtains all the links on the website, but we can obtain all the information of the link, including the number of links contained in the link, the status code, whether it is blocked by robots.
Also, we can get all information such as title, title length, description, keywords, release time, etc. The information analyzed is so detailed that only you can’t think of it, there is nothing you can’t find.
Quickly find out the dead links on the website
As mentioned above, you can view the status code of each link. Through the status code, we can quickly find the dead links on the website.
I believe that many people will encounter the problem of spiders catching dead links but are unable to find out where the dead links appear.
In addition to finding out all the dead links in a webpage, this tool is powerful in that you can click on a dead link and you can find out which pages contain the dead link in the ‘inlink’ tab.
Generate XML Map
This tool can quickly create XML sitemaps and image XML sitemaps, through the URL for advanced configuration, including last modification, priority, and change frequency.
It not only crawls comprehensively, but you can also set the crawl depth, and you can set different levels of page weights. So you can simply produce the sitemap.xml file.
It Helps to Check robots
Through the indexability bar in the scream frog tool, you can clearly see whether each link is blocked by robots and whether it is nofollow.
This can help you save time without having to repeat checks in complicated codes.
GTmetrix
The loading speed of the website plays a very important role in the visitor’s browsing experience.
GTmetrix is a free online analysis tool that can analyze the specified URL you entered. After the test, the score will be displayed on the result page.
You can also save this “transcript” in pdf format for future website improvement and use it when optimizing.
How Does GTmetrix Work?
GTmetrix’s test indicators are Pagespeed from google and Yslow from yahoo. Both of these are very authoritative analysis tools, so the results can truly reflect the loading speed of the website.
Page Speed
This is the Google Page Speed tool, which analyzes the speed ratings of various web requests.
It includes speed ratings of nearly 30 data such as compressed Html, compressed CSS, compressed JS, optimized images, etc.
We can specifically optimize some slow elements to increase the opening speed of web pages.
YSlow
Like Page Speed, YSlow also includes speed ratings for a variety of items, such as reducing HTTP requests, reducing DNS lookups, avoiding URL redirection, minifying JavaScript and CSS, etc.
In addition to the score, several tabs will be displayed below, which show the test details of Page Speed and Yslow, and the time it takes for each element in the web page to load.
History may save the data you have tested a URL multiple times so that you can make comparisons from the displayed line chart.
The results of GTmetrix are very accurate. We can specifically optimize the elements with lower ratings, which can reduce the opening speed of the web page to a certain extent, thereby optimizing the user experience.
SEMrush
Semrush is currently one of the most comprehensive SEO tools. It has multiple functions such as keyword ranking tracking, keyword research, long-tail keyword research, external chain mining, PPC advertising research, traffic research, etc.
Why is SEMrush Helpful for You?
It Provides You with Powerful Analysis Reports
In the process of communicating with customers, we will inevitably provide customers with analysis reports or industry reports.
The degree of professionalism of the analysis reports directly determines the degree of recognition of your professional level by customers, which leads to the completion of an order.
With its own PDF report, SEMrush is definitely an expert in reporting. The degree of professionalism and richness is more than any other tool.
So how to export a complete report of a known domain name? Select the SEO toolbox in the toolbox selection bar, and then select the domain overview.
After clicking search, you will enter the following interface. All the data displayed on the interface is the analysis report of this website, including organic traffic, paid traffic, directional links, advertisements, keywords, competitors, and other data.
Click the date in the upper right corner to select the query history. There is a PDF button below the date. Click this button to export the report.
Keyword Research
There are two methods for keyword research. The first one is to derive more long-tail words based on known keywords. The tool we can use here is Keyword Magic Tool, a very famous tool from Semrush. The second is to research keywords through competitors.
Keyword Magic Tool: You can find this tool through SEO Dashboard -> Keyword Research -> Keyword Magic Tool. Then enter the most relevant keywords for your business in the middle input box.
Semrush will provide you with more in-depth keyword research based on the latest indicators. You can also use advanced filtering tools to filter out the information you need. For example, you can set include keywords, exclude keywords, search volume range, difficulty range, etc.
Competitive Research: You can find this through SEO Dashboard -> Competitive Research -> Organic Research. Enter your competitor’s domain name, and you will see a list of competitor’s keywords, which contains the ranking of each keyword, the proportion of traffic, and so on.
External Link Analysis
It’s very easy to find external links. To find this tool, you can click SEO Dashboard -> Link Building -> Backlink Analytics. Enter the domain name of the website you want to study.
Please note that you can directly enter the root domain name here, do not add http:// or www, such as https://www.google.com, you can directly enter google.com.
After entering the domain name, you will enter a backlink analysis page, which shows the source of the backlink, the status of Dofollow and Nofollow, the total number of external links, the total number of source domains, the weight of the website, and so on.
WebPagetest
WebPagetest is an online free performance evaluation website that supports IE and Chrome. It uses real browsers (IE and Chrome) and real user connection speeds to run free website speed tests from multiple locations around the world.
How to Use WebPagetest?
1. Enter Required Information
After filling in the site URL, test location, and browser, click start test on the right to check the site resource loading.
The figure shows that there are currently 2 sites waiting to be tested in the queue. You can close the webpage and open it again after a period of time to see if the detection is complete.
2. Check The Test Result
You can view it in the test result, as shown in the figure below:
The figure shows summary information. You can click Details, Performance Review, etc. to view detailed information to understand the site loading resources.
In this way, the reasons for the slow loading (such as domain name resolution problems, CSS, js file loading problems, etc.) can be found out to facilitate subsequent optimization.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an indispensable tool for Google SEO. It has a powerful external chain database, which is an essential tool when making external links to websites.
How Can Ahrefs Help Your SEO?
On-site Diagnostic Tools – Site Audit
Check whether your website meets the requirements of search engine SEO, and can continuously monitor whether the website SEO is healthy, and avoid website ranking decline caused by product update or website modification.
Keyword Research Tool – Keywords Explorer
Ahrefs can query keyword data on various platforms such as Google, Youtube, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, and Yandex, analyze the difficulty of keyword SEO, and prompt related keywords.
The detailed data Include the history of keyword advertisements, which website was placed on, what page was used, and what kind of ad copy was used.
Popular Content Research Tool – Content Explorer
When we are making content on our website, we need to consider content marketing, especially when writing blog articles.
When we don’t know what to write, it is a helpful tool to find the topics with the highest SEO traffic and the topics with the most valuable SEO traffic. At the same time, it can share the most topics on social networks and use them for SNS marketing and promotion.
External Link Analysis Tool – Site Explorer
You can use this function when doing SEO external links and analyzing competitors. It is mainly used to analyze competitors’ external links, competitor website traffic, and competitor keyword rankings.
We must understand several concepts when using this function:
- Ahrefs Rank
This is the world ranking of your website by Ahrefs based on the amount of traffic on your website. Somewhat it is similar to Alexa ranking, SEMrush Rank of Semrush. Ahrefs cannot count the actual traffic to your website, so it is just a reference, and it cannot explain 100% of the website’s problems.
- UR Rating & DR Rating
A bit similar to MOZ’s DA & PA. Usually, we refer to this indicator when we buy external links.
But these two indicators are only for reference. The actual page traffic and experience are more valuable than these two indicators.
- Traffic Value
The traffic value of Ahrefs. It is based on the search volume and the ranking position of the ranking keywords, and then to estimate the traffic of the website.
Keyword Ranking Tracking Tool – Rank Tracker
Monitor the ranking performance of keywords on desktop or mobile, and get daily/weekly/monthly reports.
This can be used to monitor the Google ranking of high-converting keywords on your website, and achieve high rankings, also prevent rankings from falling out.
Sitebulb
Sitebulb Enterprise is a very easy-to-use powerful website crawler software. It is more than just a site crawler. Using this tool, you will be able to evaluate data from an SEO perspective, delivering actionable reports to your clients.
Why is Sitebulb impressive?
Priority Hints
Using Priority Hints, you can find problems faster. It provides you with over 300 pre-processed site optimization checks.
Verification Scores
A verification score provides immediate meaning. Providing executive summaries to customers and managers that place audit results in perspective.
Flexible PDF Reports
In order to make the presentation of your audit simpler and cleaner, you can create a perfect report as a PDF with this tool. How the PDF exports will turn out can be customized for different purposes: like sales prospecting, customer reports, and level C.
Audit Comparison
This enables you to keep track of trends and changes over time. You can compare the audits you have done for a single project and see how the performance of your site has changed between the time periods of your audit.
At the simplest level, you can compare your latest audit with the previous audit so you can see how the changes you have made based on the previous audit actually affect the performance of your website.
Data Visualization
The use of numbers is undeniably a really effective way of showing the data of the performance of the websites, but sometimes it can give you a headache and Sitebulb understands that.
By using Data Visualisation, you can have a quick look at the sites’ performance without really having to look at the individual data. With this function, you can see whether it’s a good performance or not so you can decide which you will put your attention at.
This is why visualizations through graphs and charts make it easy to assist in explaining complex ideas and will help you recognize patterns quickly.
URL Explorer
Using URL Explorer, you can access a list of every URL on your site and create custom reports. You can dig into the data by using the filter to choose which data you want to analyze and create custom reports out of it. .
Scan Unlimited Domains And Large Websites
With Sitebulb you can provide comprehensive audits for your company and to all of your customers, no matter their size or quantity.
You can make as many websites as possible inside Sitebulb as your own respective projects and create audits for each of them. You don’t need to worry about the inability to scan the websites. Sitebulb, got you covered up!
Using The Right SEO Tool to Make A Better SEO Audit
If you want to raise SEO optimization and strategies to a higher level, the right SEO tool is like your right-hand man, as they allow you to improve work efficiency, reduce tedious research processes, accelerate SEO optimization, and let you easily see the results!
Each tool has their own unique values and functions so pick which ones that fit best to your needs. Do you want to use all of them at once? Well, that is even better! The most important thing is that you know their functions and use them to get the most of their benefits.
Do all kinds of these tools dazzle you? Contact our experts here on Paradox Marketing and we will gladly help you out!
