Easy SEO Tools for Beginners
Starting as an SEO expert is an exciting prospect. You can drive visibility and increase conversion for your clients with SEO and enable them to grow their brand online. But as a beginner, it may become a little tough or time-consuming to go through all the nuances of SEO manually.
Seasoned marketers and content creators use various online tools that make it easier for them to conduct keyword research that identifies areas of optimization, backlinks, and other on-page and off-page factors. These online tools can help you in various aspects of optimization, but none of them is an all-in-one tool that can perform every element involved in SEO.
Moreover, as a beginner, you’re constantly learning about the field with a limited budget to spend on these tools. So how do you find the exact tool for the job and ensure that you’re not spending unnecessarily on tools that you don’t need?
If you’re unsure about which tool to use, look for the most commonly used ones in the market. The most famous tools in the market are notable because they’re easy to use and deliver precise results.
Best SEO Tools for Beginners
SEO is a dynamic field with multiple elements involved in ranking websites. Google has over 200 ranking factors, which almost makes it impossible to optimize for each and every one of those factors, especially as a beginner.
Online tools help you to identify opportunities and plug gaps in your SEO strategy, saving time and effort on your part while ensuring that your website is optimized for that factor.
The most commonly used beginner tools in SEO are:
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free-to-use tool provided to everyone with a website. Also known as webmaster tools, the analytical console lets you monitor your website’s presence and growth on Google SERPs.
Google search console provides you with valuable information regarding your site’s ranking and health, which you can use to further increase rankings on Google’s SERP. You don’t need the tool to appear in the SERP, but you can choose what is ranked by search engines on its results page. It’s also straightforward to set up; you just have to verify your website with a code or submit your site for indexing on Google Analytics.
The tool lets you optimize the key factors that play a part in ranking and improving your site’s performance. Google search console is especially recommended if you’re a beginner or have a new website to be ranked.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a favored tool by SEO specialists, marketers, and content creators. Ahrefs provides a great analysis of the SEO features of your website through its audit features. The tool also lets you know where you can improve your site for higher rankings, along with competitor analysis.
Ahrefs is also helpful to identify your competitors’ linking strategies and have them pointed back at your site. You can fix broken links in your site, identify the pages where most visitors are coming, etc.
The tool has the largest database for links, which helps identify relevant and organic links for your website.
SEMrush
Another renowned tool among SEO experts, SEMrush, is an ideal site-auditor, keyword research and competitor analysis tool for beginners. Most professionals favor SEMrush because of its easy-to-use dashboard and convenience in assessing ranking factors and identifying ranking opportunities.
SEMrush allows you to monitor your rankings and improve your website’s performance. You can also compare your website with your competitors for links and info like which page attracts the most traffic. The tool also generates an analytics report that mentions your website’s data, traffic received, domain health, and which keywords yield results and which aren’t.
Perhaps the most significant advantage of SEMrush is that it provides extensive information on keywords for your site. It tells you about related keywords to your niche, top-ranking sites for those keywords, their CTR, and competitiveness. With an arsenal of information on the perfect keywords for your site, you can save lots of time on keyword research and competitor analysis.
The tool is also ideal for content creators, as it gives a clear picture of organic traffic insights. You can view all your articles and blog posts on the dashboard and other information like word count, semantic keywords, and the number of social shares received. SEMrush is also used by businesses to improve site health and increase conversions using data-driven strategies.
KW Finder
KW Finder is a pure keyword research tool that helps you to know the long-tail keywords with low competition around your niche. KW Finder is appropriate for beginners but is used by experts alike as it’s one of the best keyword-finding tools in the market with the added capability of analyzing backlinks for your niche.
KW Finder has a rank tracker tool that tells you your organic rankings on SERP and areas where you can improve. You can analyze how your website performs on one metric and then move on to the other with this tool.
But, this tool’s greatest forte is that it shows comprehensive details about a particular keyword, related terms, and their comparisons by volume or cost-per-click. With all the details around the best keywords that you incorporate, you’ll find keywords that are more likely to bring you conversions.
PageSpeed Insights
In 2020, Google outlined the importance of user experience as one of its core ranking factors. The idea was to segregate pages with similar content based on the experience it provides its users with.
Page experience is a part of user experience, which determines how quickly your web page loads properly with all the visual elements. A poor page experience would increase your site’s bounce rate, with users ditching you for your competitors.
To know how your web page is performing for this metric, PageSpeed Insights is an ingenuine tool that lets you test your page’s load time and other Core Web Vitals. The tool is also an offering by Google, which gives a score to your web pages based on the core web vitals.
This is surely a must-have tool for any SEO expert regardless of their experience. While the other tools mentioned in this list mostly pertain to keywords and links, PageSpeed Insights lets you know about the design elements that affect your web page performance.
Moz Pro
What started in 2004 as a blog and an online forum for SEO experts to chip in their projects and ideas has become a major SEO software today, favored by numerous businesses and SEO analysts. SEO specialists mostly favor Moz because it keeps up-to-date with Google’s algorithm changes which help in ranking websites effectively without missing any key optimization points.
Moz is a full-service SEO software that gives you keyword recommendations, site crawls, insights and suggestions on improving rankings, and much more. The tool’s software is pretty easy to use and very intuitive. One of its popular features includes the toolbar, which informs you of your website’s optimization elements while you’re browsing another site. The tool has a page optimization feature, which provides data-backed solutions to improve the ranking of each and every page of your website.
You can also compare your site’s traffic and keyword performance with your competitors. Knowing which keywords and pages are outperforming yours will give you a solid foundation to work on and enhance your SEO rankings.
Last but not least, true to its origins, Moz still has a chat room where you can get responses to your queries from fellow SEO professionals and discuss projects.
Answer the Public
Tools like Answer the Public are immensely popular among bloggers and content creators as it allows you to find topics for blogs, and it’s completely free to use.
Answer The Public is great at finding keyword opportunities for you by recommending related phrases around your niche and covering a topic comprehensively. You also get great opportunities to place your content on Google’s featured snippets in SERPs, which greatly enhances visibility, traffic, and potential conversions.
Keyword research is pretty easy and lightning-quick with the tool; you can download a list of focus and related phrases to use in your blog posts.
Majestic
Majestic is a comprehensive marketing tool designed for businesses, marketers, SEO specialists, and content creators. Majestic offers countless features and functionalities that can be leveraged to propel your site to the top of the Google SERP.
With Majestic, you can view the top million websites and the strategy that gets them ranked highly on SERPs. It also has a site explorer feature that gives you an overview of your website’s SEO performance and backlinks. Apart from these, it has keyword research, and competitor analysis features to get you going on your SEO campaign.
Wrapping Up
These were some of the most helpful tools in SEO, that help you to identify key areas in your site that would otherwise be too cumbersome and time-taking to find out. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t have to break a sweat in your SEO campaign, you still need to churn out engaging content, incorporate relevant links and do the legwork on the analytical factors provided by the tool.
As a beginner, these tools will help you gain a strong foothold in SEO. Most of these tools also have free trial periods, so you don’t have to worry about budgets immediately for using the tools. Just use the tools to your advantage and work on the suggestion for improved rankings and a successful SEO campaign.