Every business/brand owner you see today is crazy about Search Engine Optimization, aka, SEO. They think they need to know it all, have to do it all, and can do it all, to get tons of business. That leads to a very complicated situation. Run one Google search and there are oodles of books, tutorials, articles, videos, and whatnot, it is all a bit overwhelming, to say the least. Because let’s face it, SEO is a lot of things. And that, in turn, makes this whole SEO business very daunting for people.
The thing is, yes, you do need it. If you want your business to be visible across the online landscape and get your audience to know you better, then, there’s no escaping search engine optimization. But that doesn’t also mean that you need to know it all and you have to do it all.
The problem that we often find business owners facing is that they don’t know where to get started, what to keep and what to ignore. Keyword density, metadata, backlinking, link architecture, etc. are terms that scare people. It’s perfectly understandable. So, let’s start from the start.
What exactly is SEO and what does it involve?
There are varied definitions of what SEO is, but here’s the one that is easy to understand–
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of “optimizing” your business website so your users/customers can easily and organically find your business when running a search by using certain, relevant keywords.
There are two words in the above definition, that you might want to know more about – organic and keywords.
Organic – When you search for anything on Google (or other search engines), you will see some results as “Ads” and the rest not. The non-ad search results are “organic”. These results are naturally populated by the search engine tools without being paid for them.
Keyword – What you type in the search bar on search engines are keyword/s. Depending on how many people around the world are searching for the same thing, determines the keyword volume and popularity. Using those keywords in your brand content can make your brand more visible to your audience or other people looking for similar things.
Useful SEO Tools
There are over hundreds of (at the least) SEO tools that experts and analysts keep talking about. But no one uses or needs to use all of them. There’s no point in spending time, effort, and resources to learn and explore things more than you will ever need.
So, here’s a minimalist guide to useful and absolutely necessary SEO tools that could be valuable to your business and we always use them for our clients with incredible results.
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools): This is a free service offered by Google that can help you understand and improve how the search engine looks at your website. It helps to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s presence across search results. You can use Google Search Console to fix technical errors on the site, submit sitemaps (for better navigation), look at backlinks, and more. It’s a free service by Google and don’t have to sign up for the search console to include your site in search results. But using it can be helpful.
Google Analytics: This is the most essential tool to understand your website and other content performance. It’s an analytics service that gives you basic tools and statistics that is necessary for SEO and content marketing. Google Analytics tracks your website and calculates page visits, time spent by the user on the page, how many pages they viewed, how many people left the page, what is the source of the user, which device they access your site from, and so on. You can also generate a report of all the data that you gather and use it for reference.
Google Keywords: Keyword tool is where you start your SEO research. This Google Keyword Tool is the most popular among others and generates long-tail keywords and related keywords to any topic/subject that you create content for. These are the words that are used by most people to search on the same/similar topic. You can discover thousands of keywords based on their volumes and include them in your brand content for better visibility. There are also other popular keyword search tools like Ubersuggest, KWFinder, etc. that you can use instead of Google Keywords.
Google Trends: Another free Google service that tells you what’s trending in online searches. It analyses the top search queries across different regions, and in different languages used across the globe. You can learn about people’s search behavior, what they are looking for, what they are watching/reaching/shopping, etc. The site also uses a graph to show search volumes across different timelines. With Google trends, you can predict trends, identify seasonal trends, optimize your local marketing, and so on.
SEM Rush: If you are looking for an all-in-one kind of a tool, then SEM Rush is very effective. It provides important marketing insights, monitor, and manage your organic search rankings, create PPC (Pay per click) campaigns, creates simple analysis reports, provides keyword research, and helps with campaign management.
YOAST: This SEO tool is the easiest and best to use for optimizing content. Yoast is a plugin that you can add to many Content Management Systems (like WordPress) and assess the crucial aspects of your web pages. It will tell you if you have enough keywords, the right meta description, proper images, image tags, grammar, sentence construction, and thus, improve the readability and visibility of the content that you create.
Summing up…
SEO is more than just stuffing keywords or writing outstanding meta descriptions. It requires technical expertise, updated industry knowledge, and real-time insights. And no one expects every brand owner to have all of that. The thing is, SEO can be made simple. One just needs to know how to make it easy and suit the marketing goals of a brand/business. That’s why we are there to help you through the ever-changing ecosystem of SEO. By combining practice, understanding, analysis, and implementing our knowledge, we can help make your brand more visible and searchable.