The Top 5: SEO Software You Shouldn’t Be Without
Efficient SEO requires a clear understanding of the situation your website is in, and the ability to update your information as you proceed.
We practice a data-driven style of SEO because it yields proven results with a reliability that can’t be duplicated without clear data analysis.
So, how do you get that information? This kind of data mining is carried out much more effectively by software than by hand – so long as you set up the software correctly! In this article, we take a look at the 5 most important pieces of software for SEO analysis.
What are your potential clients searching for? Are you sure? With Google Trends it’s easy to see whether a particular search term is more or less popular than another and how that’s changing over time.
If you’ve experienced a dropoff in exposure for a page you optimised for a particular search term, it may be that the term is trending downward – and Google Trends will show you if that’s happening, if it’s likely to reverse, and suggest other terms that seem related.
There are few better ways to get such a detailed understanding of your site as a whole. Running the Screaming Frog spider across your site will pull a full list of all links, whether or not they’re broken, how they connect together, all pages, all images, and related metadata.
This information can be exported into Excel for further analysis easily, and is a great way to flag up various classes of problem so you can deal with them.
To use Google’s Search Console you first need to add your site. Once you’ve done that you have access to a breathtakingly broad array of information, with alerts being available every time you log in covering a wide range of issues search engines tend to penalise – and often with helpful tips on how to fix them! The Search Console is also where you want to go to submit new pages, updated site maps, and disavowal lists to Google. Bing’s Webmaster Tools functions in much the same way for Bing.
Moz Pro offers a full suite of flexible abilities that are well designed for use either in assessing where your website currently stands or in assembling a plan to improve it going forward. You can even use it to compare your site’s statistics against those of your competitors on an ongoing basis, giving you a chance to duplicate what’s working for them and avoid their mistakes.
The most powerful suite of tools Google offers the public for use. Like Search Console, you must first connect your website to Analytics before it can begin gathering data.
Analytics is dense with information, so much so that Google offers a short beginners’ training course and a professional exam in its use. However, it can tell you so much. Which pages are uninteresting to visitors? What page do most visitors arrive from, and what is the most common path through your site they take? Where do you lose more visitors than anywhere else?
All of this is important information not just for your search engine presence but for your website itself.
novi.digital doesn’t just bring these programs to play; we bring years of expertise and a wide range of skills in different aspects of SEO. However, using these five pieces of software regularly will give you a good foundation from which to build.
To find out a little more about how we act on what these programs tell us, or for any other questions you have about SEO, you can contact us here, at [email protected], or call 01524 510 570.
