Essential SEO Tools Every Business Owner Should Use

Essential SEO Tools To Instantly Improve Your Marketing

If you have ever felt too confused or overwhelmed by Search Engine Optimization, it may be because you do not yet understand how you could implement some of it yourself or what are the benefits of doing so.

These are some tools that every business owner should know about and use so they can start making efforts in the right direction to getting more traffic to their websites. More importantly, they’re all FREE!

1. Keywords Everywhere

Instant Access to Keyword Search Volume

The first thing that you need to understand about SEO is that it’s all about TRAFFIC. Keywords are search phrases that people search in Google such as “plumber Melbourne” or “cheap plumber Sydney”. If you provide a service, the service+location is generally your main keyword.

But before you start working on those keywords, you also need to find out how many people are searching them. The Google AdWords Keyword Planner shows you this data but you need to set up an account and start an Ad campaign to get full access.

Keywords Everywhere is a plugin for Chrome and Firefox browsers that will show you the keyword search volume as soon as you search it in Google.

So enter your main keyword and look at the number of people searching. Note that the number displayed is the monthly search volume. If you’re not happy with it, try a different version of it or scroll down to Google’s suggested keywords at the bottom and look at those. Bottom line is, this is going to help you with your research so you can set the right target and go after it.

Download For Chrome!

Download For Firefox

Tip: Keep in mind that the data that Google shows you is only partially correct. Don’t be disheartened if you see low figures for your keywords. In most cases, if there are suggestions at the bottom of the results page, there are plenty of people searching regardless of what Google reports.

2. Page Speed Insights

Check your loading speed to improve user-experience

Have you ever felt impatient when you click on a link and the website takes forever to load? Frustrating, right? Well, your visitors feel the same way. On the Internet, “forever” can be equated to the difference between a site that loads in 2 seconds vs 4 seconds.

If you’re going to be working hard to get more traffic to your site, you better have a plan to convert that traffic into sales and revenue and your website not loading fast enough is definitely not conducive to that outcome.

Page Speed Insights is a tool from Google themselves. No better way to get information than from the horse’s mouth. Enter your URL and it will show a percentage-based score of how that page is performing. It will also give suggestions on what you could do to improve that score. If your score is in the Red zone, you need to make it a priority to get it up to Yellow at least.

CHECK YOUR PAGE SPEED HERE!

Also, note that this score is on a URL by URL basis. In other words, just because your Home page gets a good score does not mean your entire website will. If you are trying to rank an inner page, you need to check its score separately.

3. IFTTT

Automate Posting to Social Media

IFTTT stands for If This Then That and it is a great tool that can help you with several things, including your social media & SEO.

The way you use IFTTT for SEO is for your Blog. Most businesses these days have a Blog on their website which they use to post content. IFTTT can help you maximize the impact of producing that content. First, you set up several social profiles for your websites such as Blogspot, Tumblr & Weebly in addition to the usual ones you probably already have like Facebook and Twitter.

Then, you sign up for IFTTT and set up Recipes so that every time you post an article on your Blog, IFTTT will automatically post that article on ALL your social media platforms! This saves you the time of having to post that article manually on all your social media accounts.

Set up the Recipes so that the RSS feed of your Blog is the Trigger and posting on your social media accounts, is the Outcome.

SET UP IFTTT

How does this help with SEO? Well, when an article is posted on your Blogspot or Tumblr, it also LINKS to your website. So just by posting one article, you can get 10-15 good quality links to your website, which powers up your website. These are great foundational links for any business to have and increase your trust in Google’s eyes.