5 SEO tools for beginners
Over 50 percent of traffic comes from organic searches on Google. Below you’ll find the tools our content advisors at Journey Agency swear to when we help companies with SEO.
Erik B • 5 Jul, 2022 •
5 Min. read
Why focus on SEO?
Most companies set aside a lot of money for marketing every year, and many forget what the most common way to reach paying customers on the internet – organic searches for a product or service in Google.
Visibility consists mainly of two things:
- relevance
- authority
Google always aims to present the most relevant content for your searches. If you’re looking for a good recipe for cinnamon rolls, you won’t find dentists or car dealers, but pages with content related to the search term. If you have relevant high-quality content for the search terms, you’ll be prioritized by Google. This gives you good rankings and visibility in the search engine, which in turn contributes to free traffic.
Authority is a mathematical term and indicates how much Google trusts your website. An important part of that calculation is how many external sites links to your website. In other words, it’s not enough to simply have relevant content.
Read more: 7 CTA buttons that sell
How do we know what kind of content is ranking?
There are a number of tools that make the everyday lives of SEO advisers significantly easier. The combination of the tools’ specialties provides a comprehensive search engine optimization.
1. SEMrush
SEMrush is invaluable for anyone working with SEO. The tool gives you information about how your competitors work with organic search and paid placements. The tool also lets you quickly examine keywords that you want to rank for, along with their difficulty level, monthly search volume, and search intention. They also provide a writing tool plugin that can be installed in Google Docs.
2. Ahrefs
It can be argued that Ahrefs is the world’s most powerful SEO tool. The tool provides in-depth analyses of results, keywords, backlinks, and other SEO-related factors.
Ahrefs’ web crawler crawls more than 8 billion web pages daily – three times as many as Google’s own robot.
3. Surfer SEO
Surfer has two functions: The first is a Google Chrome plugin that gives you an analysis of a particular keywords SERP. The plugin also provides suggestions for words, headings, and quantity of images that should be used in that article.
The second is an audit, where you can check any URL on the web, get the content score of that page, and see a checklist of what’s missing in order for the content to rank.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is Google’s own analytics tool, which helps you track the activity on your website. Some of the most popular areas of use are tracking sources of traffic, time spent per visit, number of pages per visit, and bounce rate.
It can be a bit difficult to familiarize yourself with Analytics, as there are large amounts of complex data that must be digested, interpreted, and understood. Becoming an Analytics expert might take som time and experience.
5. Tiny Ranker
Tiny Ranker allows you to track rankings and search volume on selected keywords. Setting up automatic reports to track rankings per month is easy, making this one of the more user-friendly tools.
The disadvantage of Tiny Ranker is that it’s only possible to track traffic from Google’s own search engine.
Become an SEO expert
With the help of these tools, everything is in place to check what your competitors are doing, choose the right keywords, and create content that makes Google choose your website in the search results.
Journey Agency can help you with everything SEO – from technical analyses and keyword analyses to content production and reporting.