In this post, you'll discover 5 must-use SEO tools to help you track your local Google rankings and stay above your competition.
When it comes to SEO, offsite analytics play a role that is every bit as important as on-site analytics. An example might be the DA of Moz or other determiners which influence how businesses take your site in an authoritative sense; like its Google ranking.
But to determine Google ranking, you’re going to need sources of information to help you build the most actionable picture.
Google Analytics can give you some good information, but you’ve got to understand where Google is coming from. They’ve designed their algorithms to help facilitate ease of consumer navigation.
The idea is to get the most accurate, directed, relevant results for the least amount of time spent perusing search results.
This is where predictive text solutions come from. And on the face of it, what Google has done in this regard is excellent. But as politics have transitioned—especially in the last several years—Google has become guarded in their algorithm utility.
Algorithms may not be as fair and balanced as they once were.
YouTube and Google are presently wrapped up in serious allegations of censorship. It seems both companies have taken a political slant which has affected how automatic algorithms sort data.
As you may imagine, there is definitely collateral damage—litigation, for one thing.
As algorithms are tooled to exclude certain data that may or may not be relevant to the individual conducting the search, if there’s a political slant incorporated into calculations, sometimes unless the searcher knows precisely what they need to find, they’ll never be able to find it.
Your business can get sucked down this rabbit hole incidentally if you’re not careful.
What all this means is you can’t necessarily trust solutions like Google Analytics to give you data that is either accurate or totally comprehensive.
They’ve already censored people, they’re in litigation about that presently, and there have been no signs (or at least, none this writer has observed) of reduction in relation to such underhanded activity.
To get around this, you need to use tools which aren’t slanted by the organizations that run them.
Or, at the very least, you need to use some tools slanted the opposite direction of bigger solutions which may restrict certain information.
To that end, following are several must-use analytic tools to help you monitor your page’s online ranking in terms of SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
What this will mean is changing up tactics, ultimately.
As you use tools to give you an idea of how your business is doing, you’re going to find that some things work, some don’t.
Sometimes you’re going to need to orchestrate something like a PPC campaign for greatest effect, where PPC is an abbreviation for Pay Per Click.
Sometimes PPC could be a complete waste of time for your business. It’s going to differ per situation, and unless you’ve got the numbers, there’s no way to know where to go.
So, without further ado, here are some tools to help you identify your current SEO profile, find where you need to “up the ante”, as it were, and help you to choose a forward direction.
When you know what’s effective, you know what tactics can be kept, and which ones are better left by the wayside.
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SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.
SEMrush, taking this abbreviation into its name, deigns to deliver top-tier SEM solutions via keywords. Keywords aren’t static. They change in relevancy and effectiveness over time. The downside to this tool is no ability to differentiate between competitors and users.
Still, this is advantageous for many businesses as it helps them get a total picture which isn’t tainted by any subconsciously derivative biases from the performance of others.
Remember when the teacher used to tell you to “focus on what you’re doing, not what little Johnny’s doing”, or something of the kind? Well, when it comes to competitors, it is a good idea to pay them attention; but if you give them too much, it hampers the efficacy of your own operations.
Sometimes with SEO, you’re better suited to ignoring competitors and focusing on your own business. It’s going to differ per operation, but thankfully there are a diversity of available tools.
This is a tool which provides you a dashboard replete with technical data.
You can review your ranking compared to competitors, and not just in one echelon of SEO. You can itemize down to keywords, or you can look at overall SEO effectiveness. WooRank will also tell you what you’re doing well, and what needs help.
For example, WooRank can give you suggestions pertaining to keywords based on the data that’s been collected through previous SEO campaigns. That can be exceptionally valuable.
WooRank does have its costs, though. If you go the “low-grade” option, it’s near $50 a month. The “premium” suite clocks in at around $150 a month.
This particular tool was designed to be used with diverse tools geared at keyword ranking.
Basically, there is a prime focus on backlinks, but in terms of keyword ranking, this program delivers.
Like many other entries on this list, you can see how competitors use certain SEO strategies like external link placement.
As a considerable bonus, you can expect top-tier customer service from this organization; and that doesn’t restrict support in terms of operation as needed.
You’ve likely heard of Moz by now. If you haven’t, understand that it’s a suite of tools pertaining to site-ranking which developed from an SEO company based out of Seattle a number of years ago.
DA, or Domain Authority, is something which has become mainstream and is often determined by Moz algorithms.
The higher your DA, the higher your SERP ranking—generally.
This isn’t always the case; there are always outliers on the web. However, in many situations, if you’ve got good DA, you’ll do well in terms of SEO.
Moz was created as a means of helping you make such determinations more expediently and conveniently.
DYNO Mapper is a generator of sitemaps that has a strong visual element. Additionally, it does include keyword tracking software. Many put DYNO Mapper at the top of the list when it comes to this kind of software.
The site pulls meta keywords as well, and you can track individual keywords or even phrases.
You can also track SEO effectivity via location or search engine. I.E., Bing may have slightly different results than Google.
The problem with many backlink tools out there is that often the only thing you can just about do is monitor your backlinks. That's not enough.
Linkio is a powerful tool that will allow you to dive deeper into the analysis of your link profile, and give you the tools to monitor anchor text ratios, get access to keyword suggestions, set anchor text percentages, import backlinks, crawl and validate backlinks and more.
Linkio is reasonably priced with plans starting from just $19 per month for a single website where you can monitor and analyze up to 10,000 backlinks.
The internet today is different than it was ten years ago, and as technology continues to expand, that trend will as well.
Cloud computing has made many businesses more cost-effectively relevant than ever through diverse apps while increasing their levels of productivity. Think of the right kind of SEO solutions as the online marketing equivalent of cloud computing.
Before SEO became a driving push behind many modern marketing endeavors, businesses couldn’t get numbers that were nearly so accurate. Today, that information itself has a value which is becoming, in some ways, like currency.
If you don’t at the very least get tangentially involved in SEO, you’re going to lose out against competition in the long run.
Well… that’s what the numbers seem to indicate, anyway. There are always outliers; but can you really afford to gamble on being one?
If you’re using SEO, you want to maximize your financial investment by ensuring your efforts are effective, and the tools in this writing are just a few of many which can help you do that.
The very best of luck.
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