A Beginner’s Guide: Convince & Convert’s Favorite SEO Tools
The Convince & Convert team always takes a look at the condition of our customers’ search engine optimization (SEO) efforts as part of the discovery process that we use for our content marketing. This is due to the fact that we need to first ensure that there is a solid groundwork in place for content success in order to be able to formulate the most effective content marketing strategies and recommendations we possibly can.
There are a few tools that we recommend for those who are just starting to dig into their own SEO efforts or aren’t full-on SEO practitioners…yet. While we use a wide variety of tools, techniques, and approaches to review our clients’ SEO, there are a few tools that we recommend for those who are just starting out.
Get a super-quick and comprehensive overview here: Hubspot’s Website Grader®
Website address: https://website.grader.com/ Prices start at zero dollars.
You need a decent beginning point, but you already have a million and a half other things to do today. Or perhaps you don’t have a lot of experience working with SEO and need some advice on what to search for? The Website Grader that Hubspot provides is an excellent place to begin.
A URL and an email account are all that are needed to use this free auditing tool; the results can then be ungated. You will receive a beautifully designed high-level analysis of your website in less than one minute. This analysis will include essential aspects of SEO, such as:
• Overall website performance, including page size, page speed, browser caching, and page redirects.
• Mobile readiness, which includes legible font size and responsive design
• Essentials for search engine optimization, such as indexability, Meta descriptions, and descriptive link text
• Security features, such as SSL certificates and HTTPS
• Mobile readiness, which includes legible font size and responsive design
The Website Grader that Hubspot offers will not only do an overall health check on your website but will also provide you with specific and practical recommendations for how to improve it. It is not at all awful for getting your feet wet with SEO or just making sure that you are covered on the most fundamental aspects of SEO.
Dive deeper into data: Analytics provided by Google
Website: https://analytics.google.com
Free, free with advertisements, or paid for
You can still get a ton of helpful insights and information through Google Analytics, even though Google has been shielding more and more of its users’ data (including SEO queries) from advertisers and websites for some time. Some examples of this include:
• Dips or spikes in page and/or website traffic
• Underperforming pages that may need a boost or update
• Additional content and optimization opportunities via onsite search results
In point of fact, Ahref has a piece on their blog that goes into great detail on how to gain SEO insights, information, and action items from Google Analytics, and it is highly recommended that you read it. Especially considering that Google Analytics is still one of the internet analytics solutions that is utilized the most and has the most popularity in the United States.
Learn the big picture (in terms of content, metadata, and site structure): The website for Screaming Frog may be found at: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk.
Prices range from free (for up to 50 URLs to be crawled) to £149 per license.
Screaming Frog is without a doubt one of Convince & Convert’s most preferred auditing tools for both their website’s content and their search engine optimization efforts. This deceptively simple SEO spider tool can let you crawl pretty much any website you choose, and it swiftly spits out all of the data you need to obtain the whole, big picture view of what exactly your content and SEO looks like right now:
• Compile an exhaustive list of URLs, including: Screaming Frog compiles all of the URLs that you need into a single, elegant list, saving you the trouble of having to search through each individual blog post or extract them from Google Analytics. It even includes PDFs, which means you won’t have to follow every link on the website in order to get the buried PDF treasures. In addition, reviewing the list of URLs can assist in locating instances of duplicate content or peculiar URL slug pathways, both of which can be readily rectified or clarified.
• Conduct a thorough examination of the page titles and meta data Screaming Frog not only provides you with detailed information regarding the page titles, H1s, and meta description, but it also counts the number of characters.
• Make sure you have a “genuine” sitemap: Although you may have the visual organization of your site’s navigation set up in a certain way, search engines may see a very different sitemap because of one-off URLs and rogue URLs. The “genuine” perspective of what your website actually looks like and how the information architecture is put together can be more easily created with the assistance of Screaming Frog.
Although the output of Screaming Frog requires a little of knowledge of SEO at a basic to advanced level, it is an useful tool that the Convince & Convert team uses on a regular basis.
Put all of your chips on insights: SEMRush Website: https://www.semrush.com
Price ranges from $99.95 to $374.95 per month
Do you need a powerful tool that can effortlessly perform all of these functions for you in one place? It’s going to be SEMRush!
SEMRush is “the only platform that enables marketing professionals to develop, manage, and analyze campaigns across all channels to boost their online exposure.” This includes keyword research, on-page SEO, local SEO, competitive analysis, rank tracking, and a great deal more.
Your actual SEMRush dashboard and account can tell you just about all you need to know about the SEO of your website, including the following things, in addition to the capabilities that have been mentioned above:
• Comprehensive site audit: SEMRush performs an audit of your website using over one hundred and thirty on-page and technical SEO checks, such as crawlability, internal linking, hreflang, AMP, and HTTPs concerns, to identify any immediate problems or warning signs. You will also receive an up-to-date report on the condition of your website as a whole.
• Monitor your brand by tracking mentions of it as well as brands owned by your competitors on the internet.
• Backlink audit: Just like the site audit, the backlink audit performed by SEMRush examines your website to determine who is linked to your website and whether or not the websites that are linking to your website contain harmful content.
In addition to being highly customizable, SEMRush provides a plethora of extra capabilities and tracking tools related to social media, paid marketing, and content.
Do you need additional information about SEO auditing?
Even while there is no one perfect tool or one perfect approach to audit or check up on your SEO, there are tools (like the ones C&C recommends, which are listed above) that can make the process simpler and run more smoothly. A member of the Convince & Convert team is always available to speak with you in real time if you have any questions or require any additional assistance.
