The practice of SEO can seem a bit daunting to anyone who is completely new to the world of search engine optimisation. Danielle Haley at FSE Online Ltd reveals three of the best campaign analysis tools to get you started
SEMRush
SEMRush is potentially one of the best search engine marketing research tools that allows you to opt for its free, ‘basic’ version before committing to a PRO account. This allows you to get a taste for what this tool is capable of in terms of how it can help you manage and monitor your search engine optimisation campaign and ease of use etc.
SEMRush is designed to allow webmasters to research competitors’ keywords and discover which keywords are driving traffic to a particular site, as well as offering an insight into what that website is already ranking for. SEMRush will run on any webpage or website (as long as it’s been around long enough to have generated data for the scraping tool) and can pull up various reports to help you learn how to tailor a search campaign to the current strengths and weaknesses of the website. Whether you are the webmaster of your very own blog and would like a wider audience, or are looking to drive more targeted traffic to your B2B site, SEMRush offers budding SEOs a great place to start.
MajesticSEO
When it comes to competitor link research, Majestic comes up trumps every time. It offers a variety a tools that deliver a vast library of rich data that can be used to source and build quality links for your own website.
Using Majestic, you can review the backlink profile of any website just by entering its URL into the search bar. You can also use this tool to check out what sort of sites are linking to your own website, which means it can be used during a link clean up or disavow process.
Majestic works using two metrics that measure the authority of a particular site. One of these metrics is called Trust Flow, which takes into account the quality of the linking site and gives you an idea of how much credibility it has within the search engines. The other, Citation Flow, judges how influential a site is by assessing the amount of links that is pointing to it.
When looking at both metrics, it is possible to determine how much authority a particular website has, and whether or not it would be beneficial to link to it (or vice versa). Majestic is definitely worth investing in if you are considering link building using ethical and organic methods.
Google’s Keyword Planner
This is a great tool for anyone who is not really sure where to start when it comes to choosing targeted keywords. Search engines have evolved at an incredible rate over the past few years, becoming more and more sophisticated month by month, but Google’s algorithms are still nothing more than a robot, which means that they still rely heavily on keyword placement.
It is important to use this tool to determine which keywords to target based on their respective search volumes and the surrounding level of competition. The data provided can help you discover what to expect in terms of traffic from each keyword and from this you can develop a realistic, long-term search campaign. The planner offers geographical volumes, so you can view search volumes within particular countries, and also offers suggestions for alternative keyword phrases to open you up to new ideas.
Google’s Keyword Planner is essential for any webmaster looking to increase traffic from particular keyword phrases. Once you’ve established your keyword strategy, you can create highly targeted content for your site.
Overview
If you are looking to take on the world of SEO and are keen to take steps to improve your search engine presence, these three tools are your first port of call.
That said, if you don’t have the time or the inclination to spend hours trawling through various different analysis tools, we would highly recommend getting in touch with a professional SEO consultant, who is experienced in bringing together data from various different tools and applications to give you the information you need to be successful in the SERPs!