Being a stakeholder who deals with website optimization, you definitely wonder how to monitor the efficiency of the implemented SEO content audit tool. Which crucial items should be checked? What metrics can the audit tools capture? And are there any predictions on the future of SEO monitoring tools? Let’s find this out right now.
Powerful SEO Tools
The representatives of different spheres – from IT to digital agencies and promotional marketers – most of the time deal with products. Products that have to be developed, promoted and made recognized among other similar ones. Product optimization is achieved by implementing solutions, such as:
- Using relevant keywords and phrases of the appropriate density
- Analyzing the pages along with tools for text and HTML
- Claserizing
- Keyword SERP tracking
- Checking server status code
All the aforementioned features are usually provided by the simplest SEO tools. But what about more advanced solutions?
Ideally, professionals as web marketers, SMBs, SEOs, Product Managers, and digital agencies, search for SEO tools, which combine reporting and monitoring options, deep website audits (including main and test URLs), the analysis of tech errors, headers, and meta tags, loading speed, and image analysis, if any. Many of those features are easily found among the top monitoring SEO performance tools. The tools vary by different parameters:
- Interface and usability: some tools (for example, Ahrefs) seem to be a strong report-building tool with a hard interface, requiring lots of professional’s attention. Others are rather light and easy-to-navigate. The last one attracts the majority and becomes a real trend in 2021.
- Price: SEO audit tools vary by different types – free, and prepaid. The costs are up to $1,000 per month (check at Moz Pro, Ahrefs), however, you will get many advantages and probably be overwhelmed with the included benefits:
- Tracking and crawling within an enlarged number of campaigns, web and mobile ranking, etc.
- Researching keyword queries and their usage per page and list, backlinks, and rank checkers query
- Reporting on the scheduled template or branded basis to quickly share with customers or managers
- Accessing the tool 24/7 which is a definite advantage for globally spread teams
- ROI: making efforts to achieve the goals in optimizing your product directly depends on the outcome – the smarter website auditing tools are the better.
- Key features include: a variety of needed features depends on the pricing and subscription plans. Additionally, some tools provide discount options, which can’t but make the web marketer specialists happy.
The list of tools is enormous, software companies on behalf of marketing demands, keep up with developing new features for monitoring a website’s SEO. But are they relevant for every business type – tiny in-house and large widely spread foundations? Move further to discover.
Best SEO Tools for Small Businesses
Determining the best SEO tools for startups and small companies, specialists consider major factors, such as price, the ability to scale upon a request, features, performance, and especially business needs.
Spending money on optimization is always a challenge. Small businesses rarely have a separate budget line for using expensive tools. In this regard, the best tool will be free of charge or at least have reasonable pricing. An outstanding benefit is also a free trial period, for example, the SE Rank audit tool.
Scalable solutions to extend or reduce depending on the need are also in high demand. Let’s imagine, a business is allocating resources and promoting a product for Black Friday. Do the analytics need more data or promotional text to be spread much more? Sure! Occasional and future SEO needs have to be considered while selecting the website audit tools for your company or project.
The main features of the monitoring tool directly depend on the domain. Either these are SEO tools; PPC research; B2B features, or Social media options – all these options are available in the bulk of tools. SE Rank is considered the one containing the most requested features to fit small businesses’ requirements.
The performance of the monitoring tool is a key point when considering a tool. If the tool is slow, or too complicated – it’s the wrong tool.
Definitely, not any tool from the top lists can be considered as the best website audit tool unless it suits the stakeholders’ needs. Pay attention to the tools we work with as they are the foundation of success:
- SE Ranking,
- Ahrefs,
- Moz,
- Google search console,
- SEMrush,
- Netpeak Spider.
SE Ranking
A reliable and multifunctional service for every SEO specialist SE Ranking is needed for the following:
- checking positions in Local Pack,
- monitoring backlinks,
- keyword analysis,
- competitive analysis,
- availability of API,
- possibility of guest access for clients.
Let’s dwell on some of the possibilities:
SEO / PPC
Find out what keywords a competitor’s site is ranking for in organic and paid search results.
Compare the issue for different periods.
Identify new competitors in organic and paid search results.
Keyword analysis
Get a complete list of competitors for a specific search term.
View the history of ads and advertisers by keyword. Find out which ads have been the most popular and effective.
Collect a list of related keywords and expand your research.
With the help of SE Ranking, you can easily generate monthly reports in Google Data Studio, which allows you to keep each client up to date on the progress of a project.
Every site has errors. And yours does too. Even if it seems to you that the site is flawless in terms of development and design, there are technical and content issues that can hinder its promotion.
The main thing in working on errors is to notice them in time because the result of long-lived bugs on the site can be a drop in search positions and loss of traffic. And you definitely don’t need that.
The particularities of technical errors are that they constantly appear, and the issue of correcting them cannot be solved once and for all.
SE Ranking has a tool to help combat SEO issues – Site Analysis. The main function of the tool is to conduct regular site diagnostics and report to you on its results.
Ahrefs
Among SEO tools there are those that immediately identify him as an experienced specialist.
Any website promotion is impossible without two tasks – the selection of optimal keys, as well as the construction of its link profile.
Both of these tasks are performed perfectly by the service that we will be reviewing today.
Ahrefs positions itself as a tool in SEO promotion, which is aimed at solving the following tasks:
- Analysis of organic search results of competitors. Link promotion, content, traffic, and positions are assessed. The service has a huge database of 250 million keywords in the US and about 100 million in other countries.
- Keyword analysis. It includes both the search for low-frequency queries and searches suggestions and clustering by semantic groups. An impressive database of 3 billion keywords and search suggestions allows you to find thousands of ideas. The keyword difficulty score is the main filter for choosing the best keywords for promotion.
- Backlink analysis. The service scans from 4 to 6 billion links per day and updates its index every 15 minutes. A more powerful link search tool is unlikely to be found. The link base is even more impressive in size and is already 13 trillion links, 200 million domains, and 3 trillion individual URLs for 2018!
- Content analysis. Just type in a keyword and find fresh and cited content for that keyword. The tool allows you to simplify the search and analysis of content.
- Analysis of positions. Given the above capacities, the service does an excellent job of scanning positions.
Google search console
This web service is widely known and used by SEO specialists and other types of stakeholders. With the help of the Google search console, a webmaster can check indexing status and optimize the visibility of the website itself.
Among the main features of this tool are:
- Crawl rate setting for checking the statistics of attempts to visit your site. The service also provides the error report to early fix the issues and allow search engines to find the site faster.
- Consider the external and internal pages, leading to the website. The analysis is crucial for ranking.
- Site speed reports review. This user experience report aims to help on monitoring the liability of the website.
- Adapted options for a better mobile user experience.
Google search console is extremely popular and is being improved all the time. In 2021 the web service is going to dive deeper into website testing, and suggest new features for monetization.
SEMrush
This marketing toolkit is a real find for an experienced specialist. SEMrush suggests a variety of features, needed for different areas of interest, such as SEO, content, market research, advertising, and SMM/SERM.
Depending on the area of interest, there are a bunch of tools, which cover the necessary cases. Prominent features are:
- Market analysis and paid advertising, which is in need of online shops and blog sites.
- PPC keyword research. The tool provides a great ability to build search campaigns.
- Competitor monitoring. Check the recent updates if your competitors to be on the same level, and suggest more to your customers.
- Rank tracking. With the SEMrush tools, target keywords are tracked in the website location, so that they correspond to the real needs of the customers.
- Content optimization. The organic traffic drives faster with the recommendations from the service.
All in all, the aforementioned marketing toolkit will suit your needs for running a small business, and a big enterprise. Since they are both market leaders in the all-in-one SEO tools space, Semrush is often compared to Ahrefs. If an ‘all-in-one’ toolkit is right for you, take the time to understand the differences.
Netpeak Spider
The Netpeak Spider tool is generally considered for complex SEO analysis.
Try and use this tool for handling the following cases on your web site:
- SEO errors search. Be sure your site map is built correctly and no issues prevent it from proper ranking at the top.
- Branded audit generator. Personalize your site with branding and be sure it is unique.
- Linking optimization for enhancing the SEO.
Conclusion
To promote your site effectively, you need special SEO tools that help you get rid of a bunch of routine work, and also free up a lot of time. Moreover, such tools often help to avoid mistakes.
At the same time, you should not count on the fact that you will find a universal tool in which you can simply press a button and get the best results, and easily getting into the first lines of the search results. This is not the case, using special tools, you get a lot of information about the effectiveness of the site, but decisions on how to proceed further are still up to you.
Even if you have only one site, manual monitoring of changes with indicators is quite a time consuming and difficult, because you always need to take into account many factors and their impact on the position of the resource, and if you have a whole network of sites, then without high-quality SEO tools you won’t get along.
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