To create impact with SEO you need tools. You will need tools that help you do the needed research and also to keep track of your performance. At Direct Impact we work with a combination of several tools to ensure that we are able to create impact. In this blog we will show you the tools you’ll need to start performing with SEO.
Semrush
Semrush is the main SEO tool that we use at Direct Impact. This tool is the heart of our research, measuring and reporting. Semrush is also designed to be a tool that can support you from research to reporting.
Research
Semrush offers great ways to do research. Their keyword magic tool is a great keyword research tool. Semrush will show you both short- and long-tail keywords with search volume and the competition for that keyword. You can also use Semrush to check a list of up to 100 keywords on search volume. Next to keyword research you can also do research on your competitors. Semrush offers a way to compare your performance on keywords and link building with competitors. Showing you the gap between both keywords and link building. But the best part, it can give you a list of keywords and links you might be missing compared to your competitors.
Measuring
Measuring results is another great thing Semrush can help you with. You either do this manually or via a project. We would advise you to make a project, but also check manually from time to time. By manually filling in your website you can check your link building and keyword status. It will also show you the growth or decline of both over months. When you make a project you can measure keyword performance, link building statistics and technical SEO. By linking both Google Search Console and Google Analytics you can also see some more behavioural data. Using the project part of Semrush will give you some amazing insights you can steer on for all three main pillars of SEO.
Reporting
Semrush has an awesome feature that will let you automate your reporting. You can create a custom report that will automatically be sent to your email address at predefined moments. Apart from the automated reporting, you also have a live Semrush project to keep track of reporting on keywords, link building and technical SEO.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is currently the only real way to get direct information about your organic performance from Google. Since Google owns by far most of the search market it pays to keep track of your performance in this search engine and take that as a lead for your strategy. The main reason we use Google Search Console is to keep an eye on data directly from Google. But, we also use Google Search Console because it gives some great data on your performance. You can keep track of keywords you rank on, the average position they rank on, the impressions on keywords, clicks and the average click through rate. You can also look into data for pages, countries, devices and search appearances. Google Search Console will also provide you with tips on Core Web Vitals. These are the optimization points from a technical aspect of your website. It can also give you some more in-depth information about page experience, mobile usability and enhancements like breadcrumbs, snippets, link building and lets you perform some manual actions like uploading your sitemap.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the best tool to keep track of the behaviour of your organic traffic and definitely unmissable in SEO (and practically online marketing). You can connect Google Analytics to data you got beforehand from a tool like Semrush. You know your page should be ranking high on a certain keyword on a certain page. But without Google Analytics you can’t know how that traffic actually behaves on your website. With Google Analytics extensives ways of analyzing behaviour you can precisely see things like how many people immediately leave your website, what pages they visit next or even set-up funnels. It is also a great way to see how organic traffic is performing against other sources of traffic.
Keyword Tool
In our experience Keyword Tool is the most accurate tool if you need to do keyword research in languages other than English. This tool is also fully designed for keyword research and in it’s way offers one of the best experiences to do keyword research. It gives you an easy way to fill in a keyword and it will give you potentially thousands of related keywords to the one you filled in. These will be closely matched, related or in the form of questions or prepositions. Keyword Tool can give you both short- and long-tail keywords. We also use Keyword Tool for keyword list checks. This tool lets you check bigger groups of keywords than Semrush, but it limits it to a maximum number of lists you can check per day with a maximum number of keywords per list.
Answer The Public
Another keyword research tool? Yes, another keyword research tool. But not just any, this is Answer the Public we’re talking about. Quite possibly the most loved long-tail keyword research tool in the land of SEO. Because this is exactly what it was designed to do and does better than any other tool out there. You fill in a word and Answer the public will give you the best report on long-tail keywords with questions and prepositions you can get. You will have to check the search volume with a tool like Semrush or Keyword Tool.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
It’s time to get technical with Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This is one of our go-to tools when it comes to technical analysis. This tool can crawl your entire website to give you very valuable information on both technical and on-site SEO. With this tool you can check the important things like usage of needed tags, usage of headers, meta titles & descriptions, pages with images that are too big, response codes so you can see pages that have links to pages that are now offline and so much more. This tool really gives you one of the best overviews to check for both technical and on-site optimizations. All you need to do with this tool is fill in your website and make it do a crawl.
Majestic
Our last tool we definitely recommend is Majestic. Majestic is a link build tool. We use this tool for our link build research. This tool gives you data of the worth of a website in the eyes of search engines. You can do this with a single link or do this with a bulk link analysis in which you can upload up to hundreds of links to be checked. Majestic uses a very good understandable scoring system in which you can easily judge if a website is good for link building or not. With an easy formula you check their score to see if it’s worth your investment or not.
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