Businesses, especially small businesses and startups, find it extremely challenging to distinguish themselves from more established competitors due to the ever-increasing competition within the digital marketplace. That’s why the use of digital means of advertising has become crucial in today’s business world. Digital marketing increases website traffic, and one of the most effective strategies that businesses can employ is search engine optimization or SEO. Millions of Internet users use search engines every day. Search engines, like Google, help them get answers to questions and find solutions to problems.
When done right, SEO gives you the opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition. As a result, you can gain user trust, thus, increasing traffic to your website. However, like with any marketplace, dozens of SEO tools are available for you to choose from. Some provide more bang for the buck or are better than others. That’s why it’s important to make the right choice.
If you’re in the market for the most useful SEO tool for your business, this post has put together a list below of some essential characteristics that the best SEO tools should have. Deciding on what SEO tool to use based on the features to be discussed in this article will make your SEO work much easier.
1. SEO Score
It’s crucial to have an idea of where your website currently stands in terms of SEO. It’s especially true if you’re new to the search engine optimization game. That’s why every SEO tool should have an overall SEO grade function. The SEO score will reflect any problems that you don’t know about or how well optimized your website is, both content-wise and technically. Maybe, you have some problems worth investigating. Picking an SEO tool that’s capable of providing an overall SEO grade in a way that’s quick and easy will allow you to better find solutions.
2. Data Accuracy
You’ll have a better chance to react and succeed with an SEO tool that’s precise at tracking and reporting data. For instance, the heart of any software for search engine optimization is a keyword ranking tracker. You can check the accuracy of such a feature by comparing the data it generates with the results from other tools. Remember that the only way for you to assess the effectiveness of your SEO tool and actually see whether or not it benefits your business is by being able to analyze visibility, traffic, and conversion rates accurately.
3. Comprehensive Website Audit
One of the main functions of an SEO tool is a website audit. Its goal is to regularly check for ways to optimize the website further to increase traffic and conversions. It also looks for technical errors and issues. Finding a tool that comprehensively analyzes your website is vital since a website audit covers a variety of parameters. Keep in mind that a good SEO website audit provides actionable recommendations for further optimization or improvements, on top of covering and reporting on every web page.
4. SEO Crawler
The success of a website audit largely depends on how technical the crawlers of your SEO tool are. The question now is, “Are the crawlers of your SEO tool capable of conducting technical SEO audit?” Don’t forget that technical SEO is what allows search engines, like Google, to find, crawl, and index everything that your website contains. Passing the search engine’s technical SEO requirements is crucial to your website’s success.
The truth is that almost any SEO tool can detect the presence of robots.txt files and sitemaps. However, the most useful tools are capable of taking things a step further by crawling your site in the same way search engines do. That means it will find issues or problems that Google looks for when crawling your site.
Technical SEO crawlers can detect the following:
• HTTP and HTTPS conflicts – A technical SEO crawler will find instances of Cascading Style Sheets, videos, and images that are hosted on insecure URLs. Secure pages containing insecure assets do return scary warnings of a bigger problem in your site. Don’t forget that insecure sites are bad, and Google definitely punishes them.
• Duplicate content – A good SEO tool with a good technical SEO crawler will find the underlying technical issues that result in duplicate content in your website that you might not have an idea about. Note that duplicate content can actually strike by accident, and you’re up for some serious punishment from search engines if your site happens to contain some of them.
• Broken pages and links – If your pages are inaccessible or your links don’t work, Google can’t index content. That’s because search engine crawlers follow links to access pages. Finding links that lead to web pages that return error codes require a good SEO tool with good technical crawler.
5. Competitor Research Tool
Tracking the keywords that your competitors use is crucial to winning the SEO game. An SEO tool with a competitor research feature allows you to see what’s working and what’s not by giving you a view of the keyword rankings in both organic and paid searches. Of course, you can obtain strategies and methods to optimize your tool further from this data.
6. Mobile Optimization
A useful SEO tool should be able to determine the level of mobile-friendliness of a website. It should also be able to supply information on what changes need to be implemented to improve the site. That’s due to the fact that mobile traffic is now increasingly making up more of all organic visitors. When indexing pages, Google and other search engines have actually started going mobile-first as a result.
7. User-Friendly Interface
How hard is it to use or navigate the SEO tool? User-friendliness is actually one of the most important factors to consider since there are so many SEO tools to choose from. As you click through the platform, is it intuitive? Is it user-friendly? Note that the user interface (UI) should be easy to use and simple to understand, regardless of the user’s SEO knowledge. The best SEO tools provide you with the important features you need while being intuitive at the same time.
Final Thoughts
Again, there are a lot of SEO tools to choose from. The many options available in the market can make it difficult to find the best ones. The good news is that most of them will offer a period of free trial to users. Use the free trial period to get to know the tool and try out every feature on offer. Don’t forget to take the characteristics or features discussed above into consideration.
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