Search Engine Optimisation is what we do best, and we think its most probably the best thing since sliced bread (in the digital marketing world anyway). Over our years of SEO-ing, we have come across several tools that are also probably better than sliced bread (unless that sliced bread has been toasted and covered in Nutella).
Anyway, that’s enough about bread – on to our top SEO tools.
Google Analytics.
GA is our bread and butter (that’s the very last mention, promise). It offers an absolute wealth of information – that can actually be quite overwhelming if you’re not using it regularly (especially when things change within the system and you have to figure it out!) GA can be used to find out which of your webpages a user landed on, how many pages they visited, how long they stayed on your website, what they did when they were there, where your users are located, what their demographics are, which your most popular pages are – the list goes on and on, and it’s most definitely our top SEO tool.
Google Ads.
Another quite obvious one. We use Google Ads (which until recently was called AdWords) daily for PPC campaigns and to keep up to date on keyword changes. Ads, like Analytics, is free to use, and there are a wealth of training and educational documents, tests, and papers to help you use it better. Not only is it fantastic for PPC, the Keyword Planner is a great place to start when you are writing SEO focused copy.
PageSpeed Insights.
Page Speed is very important to search engines- they don’t want to send users to webpages that take an age to load because nobody’s got time for that. In this case slow and steady doesn’t win the race- you need to be quick (and steady – all the things the hare should have been). PageSpeed insights tells you how fast your webpages are at loading (on desktop and mobile), and gives you some ideas around how to make them faster.
Google Trends.
If you want to know how popular the keyword ‘french cheese’ has been over the years then Google Trends is the tool for you. In fact, Google Trends can show you how much more popular searches for French cheese are than Italian cheese.
Not only is this a fun tool to play around with, it can give you insights into the kind of content that is popular right now.
Qualaroo.
This tool helps you to analyse your online customer’s decisions in real-time. It’s all about finding out why people do things on your site- from why they’re on your site in the first place, to why they’re interested in a particular feature or whether they’re likely to recommend you. It asks people questions without being too intrusive and once you’ve got their answers, you can turn them into actions to make your site better.
User Testing.
This is a fantastic tool to find out exactly what people think of your website. Often, if you look at the same website day in-day out, you can start to miss things. You can’t see the wood from the tress and so the bigger picture is lost. You’re too involved to see what’s right in front of you. Hence, we bring in fresh pairs of eyes. UserTesting gives you the opportunity to ask impartial users questions about your website. You set a list of questions along with some parameters and then they get to work. In not very long, you’ll have videos of them actually using your website whilst thy answer your questions. Nifty hey? Whilst this is not a cheap service, it is an invaluable one (as long as you ask the right questions!)
Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog’s SEO spider tool crawls your website (or any other website you’re interested in) in the same kind of way that search engine spiders do. It shows you quick wins where you can improve your site’s SEO, and gives you ideas for longer term strategy. You’ll quickly see if you’re duplicating page title tags, missing meta descriptions and find out where your broken links are. Screaming Frog is a great part of any SEO strategy.
CopyScape.
This tool combats duplication. It’s simple, you pop the URL of one of your pages into CopyScape, and it will tell you if the page has been plagiarised anywhere on the web. Content duplication is a big no-no in the world of SEO, so CopyScape can tell you if you’ve got a problem or not.
If you want to find out some more about any of these tools or discover a little more about what we do here at Footprint Digital, then please leave us a message or drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!
