The Complete Guide to SEO Management and SEO Tools for Businesses

Investing in SEO is one of the best things you can do for your business. 85% of business owners and digital marketers report SEO as being the most useful method of obtaining new customers.

SEO is the cornerstone of content marketing. It gives your business more power and control than other digital marketing techniques. It also lasts far longer than other styles of advertising and digital marketing that disappear as soon as you stop paying for them. 

All of these factors, taken together, are some of the reasons why SEO has the highest ROI of any digital marketing discipline.

Today, we're going to show you some of the most powerful and popular SEO tools so you can see for yourself how they can take your business to the next level. We'll also be taking a look at some best practices to help get your page to the top of the SERPs.

Without further ado, here are some of the best SEO tools currently on the market to help you get found!

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SEO Tools

Google PageSpeed Insights

It's no secret that SEO algorithms are constantly changing. Google is constantly re-assessing what metrics matter most to qualify as a quality website.

Page load time has become increasingly important as a metric, as a result. It's especially pertinent with so many users browsing the web with mobile devices. It's vitally important a website loads as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

All of which makes Google PageSpeed Insights such an invaluable tool for content marketing.

GooglePageSpeedInsights analyses a number of KPIs to determine how quickly your page loads. It can even assess your site for numerous different devices which is useful for optimising for mobile performance.

These insights are then returned as a simple, easy-to-understand score between 0 and 100. Google PageSpeed Insights illustrates how technical SEO can even influence business website design.

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Google Lighthouse Chrome Extension

‍Google Lighthouse is a free Chrome extension that allows you to test any website and how it measures up with key Google metrics, including Google Web Core Vitals, the latest key Google metric you should take notice of.

Simply add it to your website and you will be able to see what Google thinks of your website, any errors it throws up and how you can improve your technical SEO.

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SEMRush

It's hard to know how to improve your site if you don't know how it's performing. Unfortunately, many SEO tools can be expensive. This is just one of the things that makes SEMRush such a blessing for webmasters looking to optimise their site's performance.

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SEMRush is configured to keep up with the latest on how SEO works. Their in-depth technical SEO analysis considers everything from on-page SEO to backlinks. These insights are then returned as an in-depth report, which can easily become an SEO management strategy.

Say you're wanting to rank for the keyword 'medium-sized business London'. First, the technical audit will tell you how you're ranking with that phrase currently. Next, you could plug 'medium-sized business London' into the keyword research tool.

Some of the results might be:

• medium-sized law firms London
• medium-sized accounting firms London
• medium law firms London
• medium-sized companies in London

The keyword research tool will also tell you how much a click for that term would cost in a CPC campaign. It lets you know how much competition there is for that term, how often it's looked up, and how difficult it is to rank for that phrase, as well.

It's not difficult to imagine how these insights can be integrated into your existing digital marketing efforts, no matter what they might be. If you're doing content marketing, for instance, an excellent series of blog posts on 'the best medium-sized laws firms in London' would be an easy pick to boost your rankings. 

Any business you might happen to feature is highly likely to share your piece on social media, as well. They might even write their own post mentioning your mention, getting you a new backlink at the same time. 

SEMRush is a perfect example of how each aspect of SEO impacts the other. Becoming familiar and comfortable with that idea is one of the most important aspects of SEO management.

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Answer the Public

As we saw with SEMRush, a keyword research tool is one of the most useful SEO tools in your arsenal. You can never have too many, especially considering keyword research is often the keystone of your SEO management strategy.

Answer the Public is like a keyword research tool and social listening resource all in one. All you have to do is input the SEO phrase you're hoping to rank for and you'll be given a list of alternative keywords, similar to SEMRush.

That's just the start, though. Answer the Public provides a wealth of additional information which is returned via an insightful, intuitive infographic. These visuals help you and your marketing team internalize some of this data in a way that spreadsheets struggle to communicate.

Google Analytics

If you're serious about optimising your website, you need to have Google Analytics in your toolkit. It's one of the most powerful free SEO tools on the market. It also sets the standard for what an SEO tool is and does, so it's a good idea to get used to it.

Google Analytics offers deep insights into every nook and cranny of your entire site. The deep, granular data on your audience demographic alone makes Google Analytics invaluable. 

It can also give you ideas about where your organic traffic is coming from. This makes it useful as part of an SEO management strategy to generate backlinks.

For an example of what the SEO insights from Google Analytics might look like, put into practice, imagine a hypothetical technical audit. Google Analytics might reveal that a series of tutorial videos are especially popular. The audit might also show the main audience being college-educated men between the ages of 30 and 45.

It can even tell you where they're from.

It's easy to translate those details into an actionable content management strategy. You could create social media posts spotlighting those tutorial videos, for instance. You can schedule them to post when your audience is most likely to be online, as well.

This is a good example of how SEO and social media can interact.

It can even influence where you focus your efforts. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook aren't the only social media networks, after all. You might create a series of LinkedIn posts around your content to meet your customers where they're at. It's easy to imagine a lead-generation system built off of these insights, alone.

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‍Google Search Console 

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes. If you're serious about optimising your website and making sure every piece is performing at peak capability, Google Search Console is for you.

Google Search Console is an invaluable keyword research tool to have as part of your content strategy. It assesses your site 

It offers some of the deepest, most granular data about your site's performance. It might reveal that you get the bulk of your traffic at 10:00 AM GMT, for instance. This insight could impact everything from when you publish your blog content to your social media schedule, for instance.

It also reveals the top 1,000 keywords and backlinks for your website, as well. These can also easily be converted into your content management, giving you future ideas for blog posts and backlink building campaigns.

Google Trends

When it comes to marketing businesses online, the less guesswork the better. Whenever possible, it's best to know exactly how your content is going to perform. It gives us the ability to work smart and hard.

Google Trends is a simple tool with some surprisingly powerful applications. At its heart, Google Trends simply shows you a line graph of a keyword's popularity, over time. That's just the start, though.

Google Trends will also show you how that query performs in specific areas. Alternative keywords are also provided, which makes Google Trends useful for keyword research and content planning strategies, as well.

Google Trends is useful for data visualisation, also, which is invaluable when you're dealing with investors or illustrating the need for a service. You can even compare keywords, which is highly useful for creating A/B testing.

You might create a graph comparing the historical data of keywords like 'technical SEO audit' vs. 'social media marketing.' Technical SEO has been exploding in the last few years where social media marketing has remained relatively static.

This graph alone makes a very compelling case and would convince anyone who's on the fence about SEO.

Focusing on SEO is one of the best things you can do for your business if you're serious about thriving in the digital age. It lets you know exactly where to focus your efforts for maximum output. It gives you the opportunity to truly know what your customers are thinking, so you can give it to them!

The internet and digital technology have levelled the playing field in so many ways. These SEO tools and techniques are the same used by the biggest companies in the history of humanity and they are at your disposal! You just have to know what to do with them.

Google My Business

Google My Business (or GMB) is often thought of as a ‘local business’ tool. Many business owners and marketers overlook this and discard it as not-that-important.

We disagree. It is important.

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GMB allows businesses to create a free business profile that will appear in search results. You can (and definitely should) collect reviews that appear on your profile.

Look at it this way, Google is providing a tool that it wants you to use. You are trying to appear higher in search results and so our advice is to play the game Google wants you to play! Create your GMB profile, optimise this and keep adding reviews, posts, images and more. Google will love your business all the more for it and you will appear in more search results. That’s the goal, right? 

Looking For Content Marketing?

Content marketing is both an art form and a science. Content needs to be interesting enough to strike your audience's interest. It also needs to be thorough to showcase your brand's authority.

When it works, though, it works like a charm.

If you're ready to find out how content marketing can boost your SEO efforts and elevate your business to the next level, get in touch with us today!