Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of running an online business. This is because, in an online business, traffic to your website is always directly linked to your revenue. Hence, businesses spend thousands of dollars on their SEO efforts. The Big companies go to extremes in getting more traffic to their website and don’t shy away from spending even millions of dollars on their SEO efforts. Hence, it is often extremely difficult if not outright impossible to compete with these companies and outrank them from the search results for terms that they rank for.
A wise strategy would be to stay away from these topics and target on ranking for easier search terms, not targeted by these big corporations. However, to do this, we would need to find out more about topics, their related keywords, understand our website’s performance, and figure out a plan to implement changes. To do all this, Google has released a set of free tools for Webmasters. Let us now take a look at the 3 Most Useful such tools.
Google Keyword Planner:
Google Keyword Planner (SEO rank tracking tool) is the place where we can get accurate data about any keyword that is entered into the Google Search bar. It has several different options that are invaluable to webmasters in understanding about the competitiveness and feasibility of targetting particular topics and keywords. The most important information that the Keyword planner gives us is the Search Volume and Search Trend for any keyword. Using these metrics, we can get a rough idea about the effort involved in trying to rank for a particular keyword and the potential traffic that it can bring to our website.
Google Analytics:
Once we start working on trying to rank for a set of keywords, we need to be able to see if the effort we put in is actually working or not. This can be done using Google Analytics. This tool shows us detailed information about visitors to our website and where they came from. From Analytics, we may be able to even figure out new ways through which visitors are finding our website and then develop it.
Google Alerts:
This is a not-so-popular tool from Google but it can be extremely useful. Using this tool, we can request Google to notify us if a particular keyword related to our brand or our brand name gets mentioned anywhere on the internet. This alert will give us the chance to better address our customers’ complaints and problems regarding our products.