3 Essential Tools to Boost Indexation and SERP Optimization
Search marketing is about gaining relevance with search engines. Technical SEO is an indispensable element of the struggle to improve user experience, crawlability, indexation and rankings.
Such a world requires plenty of tools to get around. However, with all the components of SEO and the many tools that claim to solve each little one, it can be hard to find the right one. The following list is a great starting point and probably all you’ll need for a while as you experiment with more tools and techniques.
1. Backlinks
Backlinks is a free backlink monitoring tool that allows you to see who’s linking to you and find more linking opportunities. It’s integrated within Ubersuggest and the two create a single robust, yet simple, SEO tool.
To use it, just type in the domain or URL you want to check then select the type of report you want to view: URL, Domain/* and Domain/. URL report shows you the backlink information about that specific URL only; Domain/* pulls up backlink information about the domain, excluding subdomains; and Domain/ reveals all backlink information on the domain, including subdomains. In the backlinks report, you can see the domain score, backlinks count, follow versus nofollow links, number of .edu and .gov backlinks, the referring domains and the estimated amount of traffic received by the URL or domain. Essentially, this can be a quick summary of how you’re doing compared to your competitors.
Another important feature of the Backlinks report is link analysis. When you pull up the report, it shows a list of all the URLs linking to your website. You can view one link per domain, filtering out all others to show the best one, or see all incoming links from any particular site. You’ll be able to see the source title, target page, domain score of the linking site, page score of the linking page, link type (text/image), anchor text, the first and the last time you crawled to find the link.
When you’re looking for specific linking opportunities, such as when analysing competing domains, you may want to use advanced filtering to find the best opportunities. Backlinks allows you to do just that. You can look up links according to the keywords or phrases they contain, their domain extension (.com, .org, .net, etc.), the referring domain (include/exclude any) and the anchor text (include/exclude any specific text). You also get an option to export the data to a CSV file for more advanced analysis.
If you’re a regular user of Ubersuggest, you’ll find the integration with Backlinks helpful. You can view link information across multiple reports and in more detail on the Top Pages report, which shows the most popular pages in a particular domain
2. OnCrawl
OnCrawl is a technical SEO platform that analyses your website as Google does. It’s data-driven and provides SEO analysis reports on a daily basis to ensure optimal performance. Additionally, it can be used on any type of website be it an agency or in-house.
OnCrawl offers a three-fold solution to SEO: SEO crawler, log analyzer and SEO impact report. The easy to use SEO crawler is a daily monitor of the indexability of your content. It helps you understand how Google views your website across various devices. This gives you insights into how best to optimise the site. You can use these insights to improve your web content by analysing its uniqueness and depth. Information about the page load speed can be used to enhance the user experience. You’re also able to analyse your internal linking structure to position your most important pages prominently on your site architecture.
Rather than wait for Search Console alerts, OnCrawl’s log analyser gives you a daily report on how search engine bots crawl your website. This allows you to see whether the important pages on your site are being crawled. You can also determine how frequently each of your pages is crawled and pay attention to the inactive URLs. Since OnCrawl sends daily reports, you can use the log analyzer to know the status reports being made to search engine bots every day and bring the 404 dead ends and any server issues to your attention.
The third feature, the SEO impact report, blends data from crawls and log files to give you an understanding of the impact of various ranking factors, information which you can use to optimise your SEO budget.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is a popular SEO tool known for its “Organic Research” feature. You can use it to do keyword research, analyse competing domains and optimize your Google Ad campaigns.
When you enter a domain into SEMrush, you get access to a huge amount of data that can help you understand the website better. If the most important metrics, you have traffic data which shows you the amount of monthly search traffic the site gets. You also see the “Traffic Cost”. This is an estimate of how much the site’s traffic is worth. Rather than just telling you how much traffic a site gets, SEMrush goes ahead to tell you how much that traffic is worth, making this a distinguishable feature among SEOs.
For keyword research, the tool offers a comprehensive report showing a list of the best performing keywords which you can apply to your own site. This is especially important if you’re analysing your competitors. You can easily see the terms that they rank for compared to other keyword research tools such as Keyword Planner, for instance.
Traffic Analytics is another important feature of SEMrush. It reports on a website’s overall traffic (not just from search) and breaks it down into various categories such as traffic sources and geographic distribution. You can also view the sites that send the most traffic to the target website, including the social platforms giving it the most traffic.
These are some of the great opportunities SEMrush gives you to research and reverse-engineer what’s already working for others.
Conclusion
SEO is much more effective when you have a selection of tools to come to your aid whenever you need it (daily). However, there are hundreds of tools out there to choose from. So why not start with the popular options as you discover what works best for you.
Don’t worry if you can’t choose one. Each of the three tools on this list has unique capabilities which you can use at different points in your SEO campaign. You just have to know when.
Featured image by EstudioWebDoce pixabay
