5 SEO Tools to Maximize Rankings for Your Website

Unsatisfied with your website’s ranking? Don’t worry; there are many SEO tools you can use to figure out what may be affecting your position on Google’s search engine results pages. In just a few minutes, you could have a list of tasks to do that can significantly improve your site’s performance and optimization. Before I go into the list of SEO tools you can use to maximize rankings for your website, I have to warn you that I’m not recommending that you use all of them at once. If you’re not familiar with the tools, then you will get overwhelmed very quickly. Start with the one that appeals to you the most, and once you’ve analyzed your site and made improvements with that one, you can move on to another one. Every tool has it’s own pros and cons so I find it’s best to use them all separately to get the full picture. With that out of the way, let’s get started with these amazing tools. #1: Screaming Frog If you’ve ever considered going through every page of your site to manually review them, don’t do it. You don’t have to when you use Screaming Frog. This tool saves time by not making you go through every page of your site only to find out the majority of them are fine. It alerts you to what you need to work on, such as: Which title tags and/or meta descriptions are missing, duplicate, or too long. Pages that don’t have a header (H1). Any 404 pages. Pages that have no internal links. Pages that have too many internal links. Screaming Frog gives you a snapshot of all the pages of your site, so you can get right to work on what needs to be fixed. What’s the best thing about Screaming Frog? It’s free for up to 500 pages. #2: Ahrefs Ahrefs is your go-to tool for link analysis. Want to know your competitors’ backlinks? Just search their URL in Ahrefs and see all of their backlinks. As you’re looking at other sites’ backlinks, take a look at yours to see if you have any low-quality, spammy sites with a link to your site. Google may be decreasing your ranking because of them, so it’s worth your time to reach out to those sites to ask for link removal or disavow them with Google. Ahrefs also has a keyword research tool, so you can use that too to see if the keywords you’re aiming for are the right ones for your target audience. #3: SimilarWeb SimilarWeb has a free version, but you will likely want to splurge on Pro because you can get a lot more functionality. This tool will analyze your site based on the most important metrics that Google uses to rank sites. It will look at how well your site’s been optimized for certain keywords, backlinks, social media, site speed, traffic demographics, and so much more. The Pro version allows you to see traffic trends, research keywords, and save results, so you can see how your website is improving over time with the work you’re doing to it. #4: SEMRush The team at SEMRush has developed this tool to be your go-to for everything. You know it, and it does it. It will analyze how well your site’s pages are optimized, which keywords the site is ranking for, which pages are the most popular, how your social media is doing, your backlinks, the backlinks your competitors have managed to get, and of course, traffic information to understand if you have the right people coming to your site. #5: Google Trends and News Dashboard I know; I just listed two tools here. They go hand-in-hand, though. Google Trends is a powerful tool for people who want to publish content on news, trends, events, etc. News Dashboard helps you see how well your site is reporting the news, missed opportunities, and what may be coming up to get ready for on your site. When you use these two tools together, you will be much more successful in reporting news as it happens. Getting Started with SEO Tools for Maximizing Your Site’s Rankings If you have the time to learn SEMRush, that is a good one to dive into since it has the most tools in one. However, it is a hefty tool, so if you’re looking to start with a bit of information to digest, go with Screaming Frog or SimilarWeb Pro first. You can then move on to Ahrefs for your backlink information. Want more tips to improve your SEO? Click here to grab a copy of our Ultimate SEO Checklist.

Search Engine Optimization

5 SEO Tools to Maximize Rankings for Your Website

Phil Frost

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Phil Frost