Content Marketing Made Simple

SEO Tools You Can’t Do Without

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There are a lot of SEO tools out there.  Which ones do you really need?  Opinions differ, but let’s talk about a couple of functions that you need your little SEO helpers to perform:  keyword research and rankings monitoring.

Keyword research
Let’s face it—keywords are as important today as they were back in “the day”, you know, when SEO cavemen and women were wielding their SEO clubs to beat the search engines over their unsuspecting heads.  Of course, keyword stuffing is no longer cool, but keywords are.  Choosing the right ones remains critical.

You can try to figure this out for yourself, but unless you know exactly what terms your customers are using to search for your products you can’t be sure you’re hitting the mark.  That’s where keyword research tools come in.  These handy SEO tools provide you with traffic stats, so you can estimate how many people are searching for a specific term every month and how many clicks you’ll be getting if you get to the front page of search results. The Google AdWords keyword tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are examples of the most popular keyword research tools.

Another neat SEO tool you can use is Google Trends.  It tells you about the audience behind your chosen keywords, whether it’s stable, growing or declining.  This kind of knowledge allows you to make projections about your success.  Considering the fact that it takes time to start ranking with your keywords, it’s good to know what the traffic stats may look like in the future.

Rankings monitoring
Checking your rankings remains the only good way to measure the success of your SEO efforts.   Of course, if you’re targeting large lists of keywords or working on a number of websites you can’t check your rankings manually.  This type of “hunting” takes a lot of time that would be better spent on improving your rankings.

SEO tools that monitor your rankings are out there, and they can do the work for you.  I can’t recommend one over another, but try them out and see which one you like best.   Even if you doubt that search engine rankings still a valid way to measure SEO success, you have to know where you rank for the keywords you’re targeting.   Even more importantly, you need to know whether you’re moving up or down in the search results, because you can’t tell if you’re doing things right unless you monitor the effect of your actions on your site’s ranking.  That’s why rank monitoring SEO tools are still a must-have.

Of course, good content, good writers and the help of SEO specialists are other helpful SEO tools.  But ultimately, it’s up to you to determine the success of your efforts.   The tools are there to facilitate your content marketing plan, not do the job for you.