BRANDING: Taming the SEO Monster – SEO Tools

Note: This is the 4th article of 6 in the series, Taming the SEO Monster. Part 1, Taming the SEO Monster, Part 2, Forms of Searches, and Part 3, Incorporating SEO in Your Website are full of great information to help you build your foundation of knowledge about SEO. — Hanna Schoenrock, Editor

Taming the SEO Monster—SEO Tools

To tame the monster, you have to use the best tools. These are some tools that help with SEO rankings. They should be used in conjunction with each other to optimize performance. That will help give your site top rankings. In no particular order, they are:

• Keywords
• Social Media
• Images
• Videos
• Reviews
• Google Ads/Adwords
• Google Trends
• Google Analytics
• Google My Business
• Paid Tools

These tools, except for Adwords and paid tools, are free. Managing and utilizing these tools is where hiring someone for SEO comes into play because, as you can see, it’s a lot. I’m going to talk about the last five tools and how to use them.

Google Tools

Ads — a paid tool that puts your site to the top of the list based on keywords you determine. It will produce results, but results are maximized when you have someone monitoring it. You can monitor it on your own and Google even provides free classes to teach you, but you have to devote 2-3 times per week to tracking and adjusting.

Trends — a place where you can type in a keyword to see how many people are using that search term as well as what people are searching online in general. You then put those keywords in your website, blog, meta tags, and social media content, and you’ll be ranked as a top solution. The key here is not to pick terms that are highly searched but the related terms.

Analytics — one of the best tools out there. You embed a code in your site, and it gives you EVERYTHING! It will tell you where your site traffic is coming from, keywords people are using, age, location, and so much more. You can even use it in conjunction with paid advertising to see how it’s working. The best part is that it can tell you what’s working and what’s not on your website by letting you know your bounce rate. Bounce rate is when people go to your site and leave right away because you’re not what they’re looking for. This is the first place to go to see if there’s a break in your marketing chain.

My Business — a place for you to manage how your business will perform in a search engine. When someone searches for a service, local listings are given a special, high-ranking section in Google. You show up here whether you like it or not. Google gives higher rankings to those businesses that claim their listing and monitor it. Plus, images posted here are shown in mobile phone searches — a great SEO hack.

Paid tools — these tools do what the free tools do but are deeper and more thorough. They vary in cost, so only use ones that have high ratings.

You should be taking advantage of these tools, especially if you have a tight budget. In the next article, the 5th in the series, I’ll show you how I incorporated my SEO when I first launched my site.

Until then, transform your business into an amazing brand. 

Images courtesy of George Paul III and Pixabay.