So, you’ve just started promoting your new business online, and you’ve heard that organic traffic is everything. It’s true, but there’s more to the story than just that. Learning how to get that kind of traffic to your site is the tricky part. In essence, you want to find out what you need to do so that search engines like your site and show it to people.
The more optimized you make it, the higher in the search results it will show up. It sounds relatively simple, but there’s a lot to learn. So, let us take you through the beginner’s guide to essential SEO tools.
What is SEO?
To know why you need to build your site in a certain way, you’ve got to understand how search engines work in the first place. Only if you don’t skip any steps will you be able to boost your business to where you want it to be.
To put it simply: When your website goes live, search engine crawler bots scatter around it and search for relevant information. If there are many things on your pages that are connected with the search term you’re trying to rank for, you’ll do well.
Now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your site better for search engines. If your SEO score is high, the chances are that you’ll rank high. However, to get a good score, you must optimize every page of your site.
Let’s see how to do it.
Conduct Keyword Research With Google Keyword Planner Tool
Keywords are vital for good SEO. They indicate what the main topic of your page is and what queries people should search for to find it. Now, there are two basic types of keywords you could be ranking for:
- Short keywords
- Long-tail keywords
For example, if you own a hairdresser salon, an obvious choice of a short keyword would be just that — hairdresser salon. However, check it with the Keyword Planner Tool, and you’ll see that thousands of other businesses use the same keyword. So, your chances of ranking high are slim.
On the other hand, you can write an article with a keyword of ”How to choose the best hairdresser salon in your town”. Now, there’s a lot less competition, and people will find that page of your site more easily.
The Keyword Planner will show you how much competition there is for a keyword, as well as how many monthly searches it has both locally and globally. It’s a great tool used by both beginners and the most advanced SEO experts, so be sure to check it out.
Keyword research is what we start our beginner’s guide to essential SEO tools with for a reason.
Use Yoast SEO to Write Quality Content
To make your site more visible on Google, content marketing is one of the best routes you can take. You write articles that interest your customers, and through them, you prove that you’re an authority in your industry.
SEO by Yoast can be of great help with this. It’ll allow you to bring your content to the highest standards of SEO and overall readability. It’s also intuitive, which means that it’s easy to use — perfect for beginners.
When creating your content, make sure to cover the topic that you’re writing about in-depth. If you have a knack for writing, the chances are that this won’t come as a burden to you. However, you might not have time to do it, even if you want to. So what are the alternatives?
Well, one thing you can always do is outsource this part of the job. For example, if you have a moving company, you can find an agency specialized in the moving industry. This way, experts do everything for you, and you can just reap the fruits of their labor.
Optimize Your Images With Image4.io
It’s 2021, and you can’t have a website without images. Thus, we can’t have a beginner’s guide to essential SEO tools and not talk about the tool that helps you optimize them.
Image4.io is a great choice, no matter if you’re a pro or just starting. It will compress the images to speed up their load time and improve your website performance. On top of that, it’ll structure them correctly for the crawler bots.
However, you need to pay attention to the captions and alt-text under the pictures. You want them both to reflect the topic, so the search engines know that they’re relevant.
The images bring a lot of value to your site, but their descriptions are important as well.
Use Page Speed Insights to Test Your Load Times
If you want your website to rank high, it must load quickly. There’s no way around this. Both users and crawler bots want to see the loading time under three seconds, and you’ve got to deliver it.
When it takes too long, people just move on and search for what they want to know elsewhere. Your bounce rate will rise, and that’s never good for a website. However, an even worse thing is that they’ll probably end up on one of your competitor’s websites. You’ll essentially give up your customers because your page was slow.
PageSpeed Insights is a Google tool that will tell you exactly how quick your site is and how you can make it faster. It’s a must-have tool for any SEO practitioner out there.
Check your Mobile Version with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool
More and more people are using their phones to search the internet. Almost 60% of all web searches come from mobile devices, and Google also looks at the mobile version of your site as the primary one. So, this is a market you can’t neglect.
Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics are obvious choices if you want to see how your site performs. There are plenty of tests you can run, and they’ll give you suggestions about what you can change to make it better.
Go for a mobile responsive solution right away, and you’ll save yourself lots of time and effort. Your pages will scale down to any screen size, and they’ll look great on every device. If you have an underperforming site, doing this will help you boost your Google position.
People prefer their phones over computers for searching the web.
Remember to Update Your Pages and Content
The last thing we want to talk about in this beginner’s guide to essential SEO tools is updating your site. Both information and trends are constantly changing, so you have to replace outdated things with fresh ones. Go over your old pages and change anything that seems out of place or irrelevant to you. Google will appreciate it, and more importantly, your visitors will value it.
Article by Jonathan
Jonathan Ellis is a digital marketing enthusiast and an avid copywriter working for Movers Development. He often writes on the topics of SEO, e-commerce, and other trending topics. In his spare time, Jonathan loves hiking and playing with his nephew.
