You don’t need to be an expert marketer to optimize your website and blog posts for search engines. Anyone can quickly learn to take care of website SEO and research for keywords, as long as you have the right tools in your SEO toolkit.
Below are some of the best tools you can use to optimize your blog posts for SEO, analyze your competition, find low-competition keywords, link building, and much more.
If you’re new to search engine optimization, these are the tools that you must have on your side. The best part is they are free to use. Pick your tools and get started on building continuous organic traffic to your website.
1. Yoast SEO
Optimizing a website for search engines requires covering a lot of areas, like writing meta descriptions, inserting the keywords, creating XML sitemaps, and more. Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that makes all these tasks simple.
Using the plugin, you can easily optimize the pages and blog posts for keywords, write meta descriptions, and even improve the readability of your blog posts.
How to use it
After installing Yoast SEO, it will automatically scan your blog posts and give you suggestions on how to optimize them with keywords, how many times you should mention your keywords, and how to enhance readability.
Yoast will also generate an XML sitemap and integrate with Google Search Console for easily managing your site.
2. UberSuggest
How do you find the right keywords to optimize your blog posts? This is a dilemma most bloggers and marketers come across. Sure, you can use Google Keyword Planner to find keywords but it only offers very limited information.
Meet UberSuggest. This tool will help you find the best keywords to rank higher on Google without having to deal with too much competition. UberSuggest will even allow you to search for keywords in Google Search for the web, YouTube, shopping, and images as well.
How to use it
All you have to do is simply enter a keyword or a search phrase into UberSuggest and it will give you a detailed analysis of the keyword instantly.
In addition to finding out the monthly search volume for specific keywords and the difficulty of ranking, the tool will also provide you with a list of keyword suggestions, which will help you find more keywords related to your search.
3. MonsterInsights
Understanding your website visitor behavior is another important part of optimizing your website for SEO. Learning which links are most clicked, which files are downloaded the most, which ads were clicked the most, will help you enhance your website better.
MonsterInsights is a powerful analytics plugin for WordPress that helps with all those tasks and more. With this plugin, you can track your links, downloads, ad clicks, sales, referrals and much more.
How to use it
After installing MonsterInsights plugin and connecting Google Analytics to your website, you’ll be able to track and analyze your website using MonsterInsights dashboard.
The plugin will help you track many different parts and elements of your website such as which blog posts are the most popular, how visitors are finding your website, track button clicks, and more.
4. SpyFu
Have you ever wanted to find out how your competitors are generating so much traffic to their blogs or what keywords they use to optimize their blog posts? Then SpyFu is the tool you need.
With SpyFu, you can instantly analyze web pages and blog post URLs to research your competition. Using the tool, you can find out which keywords you should use to outrank your competition and learn more about their own competitors.
How to use it
To begin analyzing your competition, simply enter the URL of a website into SpyFu and the tool will generate a detailed report on the traffic, keywords, links, and the SEO of the website. Switch to the Top Keywords section to learn about the best ranking keywords for your competitor’s website.
5. Imagify
Compressing your images helps improve the website speed. And Google always rewards website with fast loading times with better rankings. Imagify is a powerful image optimization tool you can use to compress your blog images.
One of the biggest concerns about compressing images is avoiding the loss of quality in the process. Imagify handles this perfectly. The tool compresses your blog images to reduce the size without affecting the quality of the images.
How to use it
After installing Imagify on your WordPress site, the tool will automatically compress and optimize images whenever you upload a new JPG, PNG, or GIF file into the website.
It will not only help improve your website loading speed, but it will also minimize the server resource usage as well.
6. Hunter
Guest blogging is one of the fastest, easiest, and best free ways to build backlinks for your website. It’s also a great way to grow awareness for your brand and reach new audiences.
A key aspect of guest blogging is outreaching. You have to reach out to bloggers to get permission to publish on their blogs and publications. Hunter is a useful tool that will help you with that process.
How to use it
When pitching a blog post to a publication, it’s important to find the right person to reach out to. Hunter helps you find the email addresses of the right people so that you can find the editors in charge of handling content to directly pitch your blog posts.
Simply enter a website URL and it will show you a list of email addresses with detailed information related to all the people who work at the company.
SEO is not just about optimizing for keywords and search engine ranking; it’s also about improving your website’s user experience. Everything from your website’s design to its loading speed contributes to the website SEO.
Think of your users before search engines. Work towards offering a great user experience, and you’ll easily be able to get better rankings on Google without much effort.