The Internet offers limitless opportunities to get your hands on tools that can help you develop your SEO skills and give results to your clients. However, if you are a beginner or you are willing to mix it up a little regarding the tools and strategy you are using, then read on to find out what works for us.
SEO Tools Our SEO Experts Love
AHREFS – for research and analysis
Probably one of the best, the Ahrefs is an SEO tool that will help you analyse the backlinks your team builds. It helps learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them.
You get the following tools:
- Competitive Analysis
- Keyword research
- Backlink research
- Content research
- Rank tracking
- Web monitoring
The fact that Facebook, LinkedIn, Adobe, Netflix, Uber, Pinterest, eBay, Shopify, Tripadvisor, Expedia, SurveyMonkey and HuffPost are just a few of the companies that use this tool tells you a lot about its efficiency.
It offers a 7 day trial for $7 which is included in the $99 Lite plan, or you can choose from the $179 a month – the Standard plan (which is the most popular plan), the $399 a month – the Advanced (for 3 users) or the $999 a month – the Agency plan (for 5 users).
If we talk numbers, every day they crawl 5 billion web pages, 170 million root domains. They are powered by 48 petabytes of storage 65,000 CPU cores. Their index size is 16 trillion known links and 3 trillion known URLs.
SCREAMING FROG – research and analysis
By using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Software, SEO experts can conduct in-depth technical SEO audits. It is used by Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu and by thousands of SEO experts in the world. With this tool you can:
- Find Broken Links
- Analyse page Titles and Meta Data
- Extract Data with XPath,
- Generate XML Sitemaps
- Crawl JavaScript Websites
- Audit Redirects
- Discover Duplicate Content
- Review Robots and Directives
- Integrate with Google Analytics
- Visualise Site Architecture
You can get the Free Version that has a crawl limit on 500 URLs and lacks the additional features from the complete package of £149.00 per year.
Building SEO Strategy
When it comes to where to start from when you are about to design an SEO strategy that will show results, you can follow this pattern:
- Keyword research – find the most relevant keywords your client should rank for;
- On Page Optimisation – optimise the website of the client;
- Competition analysis – analyse the company’s competitors;
- Creating backlink strategy – make a plan on how and how often you will build backlinks (this is an ongoing step – throughout the whole course of the projects)
- Content – provide quality and original content for blog posts, guest posts, social media platforms
- Report (monthly) – provide a monthly report to your client by telling them everything that has been done in the past month, the problems, the challenges and the results.
Monitoring Your SEO strategy
You should always be on top with all the developments with your SEO projects. Therefore, you need a working monitoring strategy that will not waste your time. Instead, it should be regular and provide constant information about the process. Here is what you can do to have a steady success.
Weekly Research on Competitors
You need to know what your competitor is doing every day and how they are changing their content so that you can make a few changes to overtake the control. Based on this, you should update the content on the website regarding products, special offers or any other deals that will make your client remain relevant.
Use the SEO tools
They are important and they pretty much do all the analysis for you. You just need to pay attention to the results.
Performance Check
Never forget to Check Your performance on a daily basis so you can be sure where you are standing at the end of the day: have you completed all the tasks for the day and how many of them were successfully finished.
Writing an SEO Report
Finally, writing an SEO report is how you inform your client about the details of the work done on the project during the past month. In this way, you become trustworthy and reliable and the client will be able to understand all the effort and energy put in the opportunity for their brand to grow. Here is what should be included in this SEO Report.
Keyword ranking – to show them how their target keywords rank on Google Search Results.
Organic Search / Traffic – give the client an easy way to understand where do new website visitors come from and some extra information about their activity on the website. Also, you should include how much new leads you were able to generate
Average Time on Site – you should also make the client aware how much time the visitors spend on the website and based on the length of their presence you can discover any problems related to speed or content.
Bounce Rate – this is the user interaction on the site and this result can help you figure out how to convert it into more sales.
Earned Links – one of the biggest factors for page ranking is certainly the earned links. With it, you can build trust signals on the website, conversion rate and referral traffics.
If you find this article helpful, you can share it so other people can benefit from it, or if you are looking for top-notch SEO services, contact us for a free first consultation and we can make a deal about the rest.
