Best SEO tools for 2022: How you can improve website traffic

By Arif Kazi

In this digital age, it has become imperative to have your brand’s presence virtually. What better than having a website? However, things don’t end at it. You have to be on your toes frequently to make your website be at the top of the search results on a search engine. You might be well aware of SEO but the dynamic to manage it keeps changing due to multiple factors. Here’s a list of contemporary SEO tools that may make your job easy to attract more traffic to your website. 

Businesses have increasingly gone virtual. The Internet has become the simplest way of reaching out to the customer with your products when they search for their desired products/ service. The dynamics are no longer in the format wherein the customers leave their house to buy something from a brick-and-mortar store, but can just click a few links and order it online. For example, the “Ok Google” voice command service by the search engine Google has revolutionized the way people search for what they desire on the internet. Hence, the real quest now remains, are you there on the top whenever the customers are searching for relevant products/ services in which you also deal in? Irrespective of the search engine, is your website and the content optimized to make it organically to the top spot in the search engine results page (SERP)?

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SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a term that you and your business might be bombarded with day in and day out. To simply put, it is the conduct that a business follows to increase traffic to its website or other landing pages by elevating its ranking in the search engine’s results. Say you searched for a keyword on google and it provides you with a wide range of websites with relevant content. However, we tend to not go beyond the fourth or fifth website from the listing as we usually find our relevant information in the initial websites. These websites that appear on the top search have a robust SEO in place for making it at that spot. 

SEO tends to be a fine mixture of art and science and you need to apply them both while dealing with it for your website to make it to the top position on the SERPs. Let’s touch on the basics – creating content from scratch with relevant keywords will automatically bring your website to the top on SERPs. But, as easy does it seem, improving your position on the SERPs is as complex given the algorithms on which most search engines rely. With time passing, cracking a search engine’s code is difficult, but you can only test ways to improve your position on the SERPs by engaging with powerful SEO tools that you might want to consider. 

Let’s dive deeper into understanding what SEO tools do and which ones shall you look forward to ending the year 2022 on a high note with.

What do SEO tools do?

The key purpose of SEO tools is to provide you with metrics to SEO tools provide you metrics on the performance of your website on the SERP and engagement levels with the visitors which will lead you to take wise decisions to improve your website’s ranking on the search engine. These tools run various analyses for your website including Site Speed Analysis, Social Media Analysis, Content Analysis, Backlink Analysis, and measures Site Health and Site Analytics, which are then provided to you as actionable reports that you can work on to strategize and uplift your website’s ranking on a SERP.

Which SEO tools are ideal for your business?

There’s a wide range of SEO tools ideal for each one’s different needs for their business. They differ in price points and offerings. You can opt for one or more tools to run trial and error methods to reckon how these tools’ analyses are similar. Like your business is going digital, most SEO tools are on the Cloud and can be availed of on the internet with a trial period followed by subscription fees basis your liking for the SEO tool/s.

Google Analytics

This powerful tool has to make it to the list. Not an SEO tool in its entirety, Google Analytics is a go-to tool for most as it is free and maintained by tech giant Google itself. Interestingly, the tool needs you to place a code into your website and then share your website’s data with Google, which it then analyses and provides detailed diagnosis on areas that might require your attention, that too at no cost in most cases. 

It readily helps you with data about – the region of your website visitors; keywords that directed the users to visit your website and how their journey had been while on your website. If you are looking at funneling the visitor into becoming a customer, you can explore the Conversion feature which enables you to track users’ path on your website.

SpyFu

Ideal for e-commerce, this SEO tool focuses essentially on pay-per-click advertising. Apart from the traditional features like content analysis and backlink tracking, SpyFu helps you keep an eye on the performance of your competitors by giving you detailed insights on the traffic analysis and SEO tactics that they are engaging in to maximise traffic.

SEO PowerSuite

Being readily compliant with desktops, SEO PowerSuite is an application that provides basic analysis including backlink analysis, ranking analysis, and keyword research. Being a local application, the cost of ownership of this tool is comparatively less as compared to its cloud-based counterparts, by levying an annual fee only. For starters in SEO or seldom usage, SEO PowerSuite’s free edition gives you access to key SEO tools and is not time restrictive for the same.

Majestic

Majestic SEO Tools has been a go-to SEO tool in the market for long. With emphasis on backlink analysis, Majestic suggests relevant and an abundance of website links that are relevant to your content which will in turn help your website to rank on the SERPs.

With its USP lying in decoding the back link’s quality mentioned on your website, Majestic segregates quality links from the pool of links and websites, hence enhancing your website’s content’s contemporary approach. Its free version lets you explore some key boost on how SEO with emphasis on backlink analysis might help you to up your ante.

BrightEdge

Ideal for digital marketing needs, BrightEdge essentially focusses on real-time research and analytics. Large amounts of data are stored by BrightEdge in a Data Cube which is provided to its customers to accelerate their keyword research while receiving constantly updated data in real-time from the internet. The repository of data is further integrated with BrightEdge tools that identify an SEO strategy.

SEO dynamics keep changing with time. All you need to know is do you have the right tool to maximise your business’ virtual reach to visitors and customers on the internet.

(The author is Managing Director and Founder of Dust Value. Views expressed are his own.)