Businesses are starting to understand the importance of being in the online space. With 28 percent of American adults now “almost constantly” online, plenty of brands are implementing their digital marketing campaigns to attract the tech-savvy audience. And they are doing so with great urgency in an effort to outrun and outrank their competitors.
With the multitude of businesses working to establish their foothold in the digital space, it’s difficult to capture your share of the market. This is where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes in. SEO makes the internet seem smaller for users, narrowing down the search results to the most relevant web pages.
Winning the Game of SEO
Google uses a variety of metrics to decide whether a website or webpage will appear on the first search engine results page (SERP) or not. SEO uses different strategies and tactics to work around these rules and signal to Google that your website does deserve to be on the top spot of the SERP.
Getting on the first page is important because this is the most optimal position for your site to drive traffic. The top listing that appears on Google gets 31.7 percent of the clicks, which means it gets the most traffic. It’s not easy to get to page one, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
So how do you do it?
It’s not enough to just incorporate SEO into your digital marketing plan. You have to be smart and resourceful to make sure you milk this strategy for every possible drop of advantage it can give you.
Plenty of SEO tools are available to help you boost your site’s ranking. But you need to pick the right software; one that fits into your overall goal.
Choose one tool that corresponds to each tried-and-tested SEO strategy. This way, you get an advantage for each industry-proven technique, securing your digital marketing campaign.
These are the five fundamental strategies in SEO and respective online tools, software, or plug-ins you should have in your arsenal.
- For Content Optimization – Squirrly
You need to provide relevant, timely, and authoritative content because it’s what consumers need. When they do a search on Google, the search engine determines the intent behind that search and comes up with results that are the closest possible matches.
So you need to tailor your content depending on where you think the customer is on the buyer’s journey. Google’s Micromoments represent different stages in this journey: I Want to Know, I Want to Go, I Want to Do, I Want to Buy. Position your content depending on the reader’s intent, whether they’re exploring, looking for information, taking inventory of their options, or planning to buy.
You can create effective content with the right tool.
Squirrly is a WordPress plug-in that helps you optimize content for the right keyword and user. This tool measures your title tag, meta title, meta description, and character count as you’re writing your content to see if they’re SEO-friendly.
Squirrly offers over 200 functionalities, including keyword density evaluation, performance analytics on social media, and a “traffic light feature.” Your text will turn green, amber, or red to signal its level of optimization.
Although Squirrly touches on strategic keyword placement in your content, you can pair this tool with another one that focuses mainly on keyword research and analysis.
- For Keyword Research – Google Keyword Planner
A dependable keyword strategy is to use long-tail, localized ones to target “near me” searches. For example, “SEO company” is a general keyword catering to users who are probably still in the exploring phase. On the other hand, “SEO services in Denver, CO” targets those who are looking for information about a nearby business or considering a purchase at a nearby service provider.
For keyword research and analysis, Google Keyword Planner is a dependable tool. It has two main functions: discovering frequently mentioned keywords and looking at the performance of your current ones. Google Keyword Planner gives you the number of impressions and clicks for a group of keywords for a specific period. It also gives you an overview of volume trends over time.
What’s great about Google Keyword Planner is that it gives you an estimate of how much it would cost to use these keywords in your ads. Of course, you can incorporate these search phrases in your content to drive organic traffic. But this means you don’t need a separate tool for your paid media strategy.
- For Link Building – Ahrefs Alerts and Site Explorer
Link building means collaborating with site owners and getting them to link back to your website. This strategy drives traffic to specific webpages you want to rank and builds your site’s authority. Google considers pages with many backlinks as authoritative because this means your content is citation-worthy.
Ahrefs provides a wealth of tools to build backlinks. One is the Site Explorer, which generates a comprehensive backlink profile for any website. The tool shows you the list of other sites that link to a specific website, how the anchor text is used, and the strength of the backlinks.
With this, you get a glimpse of your own backlink profile. But you can also research your competitors and get insights on how you can improve the ranking and authority of your web pages.
Another useful tool from Ahrefs is the Alerts. This sends you a notification via email whenever any of your web pages is backlinked or mentioned. You can also receive alerts whenever a competitor receives or loses a backlink.
- For SEO Mobile – Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Google rolled out the mobile-first indexing late last year. This means that your website must be mobile-friendly for it to rank high. Google may de-rank those that aren’t optimized for smartphones. A mobile-friendly site is quick to load, easy to navigate, and has a responsive design and an intuitive user interface.
Run your site through Google’s mobile-friendly test to see if it passes the standards. This online platform identifies errors in your website, including incompatible plug-ins (like Flash), too small font sizes, content that doesn’t fit in the screen, and viewport that doesn’t automatically respond to the screen width, among others.
- For Monitoring and Measurement – SEOMonitor
Website monitoring and performance measurement is an important SEO strategy. This allows you to locate errors in your site, such as broken links, duplicate content, and underperforming keywords, helping you come up with solutions. This strategy also lets you see if you’re on track to achieving your SEO goals
SEOMonitor is an all-inclusive SEO analytics tool. It helps you predict the performance of your search campaigns based on your current SEO activity. SEOMonitor collects data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics and generates a load of information you can mine: keywords that brought clicks to the site, landing pages that get the most traffic, organic traffic split into branded and non-branded, and a lot more.
SEOMonitor also evaluates the quality of your online traffic. It breaks down the number of visits that lead to conversions and the revenue you made from each keyword.
What’s great about SEOMonitor is that it produces clear, actionable data through its reports. So if you find Google Analytics overwhelming, this tool is for you.
Generating Traffic with the Right SEO Strategies and Tools
An improvement in your online presence means more than just driving traffic to your website. It means numerous opportunities to convert visitors to leads, and eventually, to customers. Although the competition to get consumer attention is tough, the upside is you don’t have to spend a lot of money. What you need are the right strategies and the right SEO tools. Achieve those, and you could start to see a spike in your traffic.
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