19 Best SEO Tools for 2022 (+ How to Use Them Like a Pro)
– So there are countless
SEO Tools that you can use, but which ones are actually worth the time to learn and invest in. In this video, I'll share
19 of the best SEO Tools you should be using right now. And I'll show you how to use each one, like an SEO pro. And make sure you watch the entire video, because SEO Tool number 12
is my personal favorite, and it's 100% free to use. So if you're excited about this video, please like it right now,
and let's dive right in. (upbeat music) So let's start with the best SEO Tools for tracking performance. Number one is Google Analytics, which is critical for tracking
organic search traffic growth and conversions. So this is the new
backend version of GA four or Google Analytics four.
And so this is for my
agency in particular, and what you can see is if, there, you can spend all day basically on this, but there's a few things
I want you to look at. So we're gonna go to acquisition, we'll look at traffic acquisition. And then the key metric that
we wanna be taking a look at from an SEO perspective is gonna be looking at organic search. So over time we wanna see that this is growing appropriately. Number two is Google Search Console, which is essential for
tracking performance and technical SEO. So like Google Analytics
is 100% free to use Google Search Console, and this is, there's a ton of value
with Google Search Console So there's really just no
reason to not be using it, but there are a few things. So first obviously we can
measure performance, okay? So we'll go and look at the
performance report here.
So now we're in the performance section. You can see a few different KPIs here. So the first is gonna be the total clicks is the amount of clicks you're
actually getting from Google. And this is not a
hundred percent accurate, but it's still relatively accurate. This is the amount of impression. So this is how many times
users are seeing your listing or your result inside Google. And then this is the average CTR. So this is how often people
are clicking on your result in Google. And lastly, this is the average position. So you can look at this
in a few different ways. You can look at it by keyword, but you can also look
at it based on pages, and you can start to see what pages are producing the most
clicks and impressions, and of course you can use
this data to your advantage. So you can look at pages
that are ranking high, but have low CTR, okay? So in this case, Duplichecker here, and I fully expect this
to have low CTR because it's a navigational
keyword, that we do not own.
So typically when you
target keywords like that, even if you rank, well,
you're still gonna get low CTR because people searching that, are typically just looking
for the actual brand that they're searching for. And you can see this when
you look at blog spot and Duplichecker, look at the CTR relative to the other ones, much, much different. So the point here is that
you can use the CTR data. You can use a position data, you can use all this
data to your advantage, to improve SEO performance, and ultimately get more
organic search traffic. And just getting an
increase in organic CTR is the way to get an immediate influx of more organic search traffic
leads in sales of course. Now I won't go through each
piece of Google Search Console, but obviously, we can
go to URL Inspection. And this allows us to look
at any URL on our website and see how well it's
being crawled and indexed.
We have all the performance sections with traditional search
results, discovery section and Google News. The index portion here
will actually show us how well the side is being
indexed, very, very important. And then also under page experience, we can see how well we're doing from a core web vials perspective, okay? So we wanna see that most of our URLs fall under this good URL section. If this percentage is very low, then we need to start looking into and seeing why that is happening, okay? So this very, very important. Now we look at Core Web files,
we have 20 failing URLs, just something we'd wanna investigate and see what's going on. So from there, there's some
other advanced stuff here, we can look at amp, and see
how well that's performing.
We can look at the breadcrumbs. We can look at site links and search box. We can also see if we have
a manual action, okay? So if we had a manual action from Google based on some sort of links
spam, it would show up here, and then we can also look
at possible security issues that the website is suffering from. Lastly, we do have the links section, which is the amount of links
that our website is getting from other websites, so backlinks. So Google Search Console
is extremely powerful and you can get a ton
of information and data and be able to use this
data to your advantage. Number three is Nightwatch, which is currently my favorite
keyword tracking tool.
So I'm inside Nightwatch, and right now Nightwatch is definitely my favorite rank tracking tool. And just keep in mind,
you don't have to use a rank tracking tool. You can definitely use Ahrefs or Semrush to track your rankings, they both have that
functionality built into them. But I guess I'm a little old school, and I like to just have a
separate rank tracking tool. And so Nightwatch does a really nice job.
And the cool part is
you can track keywords on the national level and the local level. So looking at some of these keywords here, they're pretty much
tracked on national level, but I'll show you one that's
tracked on the local level. So this one here, SEO Jobs, this is specific tracked
in St. Louis, Missouri. So what it's doing is it's just, when it conducts this initial crawl to see where it's ranking, it's only looking in the St Louis area to conduct that to see where
it's currently ranking. So if someone were to
search just SEO Jobs, without any modifier on it
in, the City of St. Louis, they would see that my post
was ranking number four. So this is a really cool feature. And ultimately looking at this, they're also gonna show you the volume and it updates every 24 hours as well. So there are many, many tools out there that you can use as far
as rank tracking goes.
But right now, and I've used
many of them to be honest, I've used probably at
least eight to 10 of them over the years I've been doing this. This one in particular Nightwatch
is my personal favorite. So I definitely recommend checking it out. So now let's dive into the best SEO Tools for keyword research. The first is Semrush, here's how to use it for keyword research. Okay, so I am in Semrush, and I'm just gonna use my
website for this example. And so there are a few different ways that you can Semrush for keyword research.
And the first is you wanna
look at your existing keywords. This is always the best place to start, because it's much easier
to improve performance on existing keywords. And these are keywords within the top 100 than it is to target new keywords. So it's always best to start here's. So what you wanna do is go in here, enter your domain name or any
domain that you're working on and then go to positions. So the first thing you wanna do, is when you see all of the keywords that you're ranking from the top 100, is you're going to start to
break these down into groups.
So the first group of keywords you'll definitely want to attack are what I call low hanging fruits. And so these gonna be keywords ranking from positions two to 15. So just go to the positions
tab, and then go from two to 15. So these keywords are absolutely critical because these are the ones
you need to push forward, because even just going a few spots can immediately increase
your organic search traffic. And of course there's many different ways to increase performance, such as increasing the
quality of the content, optimizing the page from
an on-page SEO perspective, building more topical relevance. So building supporting assets
to support that primary asset, and of course, acquiring backlinks. So there's a variety of
things that you could do to improve the performance
of existing keywords, but this is the best place to start. Because if you think about it, if you go from let's take
Buy backlinks for example, if we were to go from
number four to number one, that would be a substantial
increase in organic CTR. So we should be looking at these keywords as our initial targets,
very, very important.
And then if you wanna go even further, you can start to sort by KD as well. So you could start with
the very easiest keywords and then work your way up. This is typically what we'll do, because we want to get
quick wins out of the gate. So we'll just go ahead and click on this. And so now we can see the exact keywords that are ranking for
in positions two to 15 and also keywords that are very low KD. Now, of course not all
keywords are created equal. So it's gonna be a lot more valuable to increase our rankings for
let's say, Clayton SEO Company or Santa Monica SEO Company, because the likelihood that
that will actually turn into qualified leads is much higher. However, increasing our rankings
for Mathew Blanchfield SEO, is probably not gonna
do a whole lot for us as far as the business objectives.
So you have to really focus on intent and prioritize these
keywords based on intent. That's very, very important. So this is how you go
about looking at keywords that you're already ranking for, and this is the best place to start. But after that, you should
go to the keyword overview. And this is where you can
basically do your keyword research from scratch. So for this example, I just
did something very broad SEO, which you would have a
very tough time ranking for this keyword, if
you attempted to do it. But what do you wanna do is you
wanna take that seed keyword and sort to break it down further. So there's a few ways
to go about doing this. Now, obviously you can
use your best judgment and a bulk analysis here
and start to enter keywords, and you can get some rough estimates, or you can go over here
into the keyword magic tool and start to see all of
the different keywords.
Now there's a lot of stuff
in here that's not relevant. So you're gonna have to
filter through all this, and ultimately take advantage
of these different filters. So we can start to sort by very easy, and just see right away, what are the easiest keywords
that we can attack right away. Now, of course, there's gonna
be some keywords in here that we're gonna filter
out that are not relevant, but you can also filter by CBC, which is gonna show us
what keywords are valuable.
And so we start to see
here, divorce lawyer as SEO. So if you wanted to start an SEO Agency, that specifically helps divorce lawyers, then this would be a good keyword that you would definitely wanna rank for, even though the volume isn't great, you know that any leads
that are coming through this are gonna be extremely high quality, and this is likely gonna
have a high conversion rate. So take advantage of
the keyword magic tool, it's another way to start to
find these untapped keywords that you're not currently
attacking right now. My second favorite keyword
research tool is AlsoAsked.com, and here's how to use it. Okay, so normally when
you're trying to build topical relevance, what you'll need to do is you wanna go into Google and enter one of your primary
keywords and you scroll down, you wanna look for the
people AlsoAsked section, and this is a terrific way
to build topical relevance around your primary topic.
And so you can do this manually, no doubt, but there is an easier way that you don't have to do this manually. And all you have to do is
just use this amazing tool called AlsoAsked.com. And all you have to do is just
enter your primary keyword in here and the keyword that
you're trying to rank for, and then it's gonna give
you all of these suggestions that are directly pulled from Google. So we know 100% for a fact that these are being searched in Google, because Google would
not actually show these if they were not being searched. And so the cool part about this is that most people doing SEO
will never find these keywords because many of these won't
actually have any search volume when you use the traditional tools. And most people, when they
don't see search volume, that's basically where their search ends. And this is a huge, huge mistake because you can build
tons of topical relevance and authority by targeting these keywords, that Google is telling you
that people are searching.
So we're getting validation, and we're getting qualification
that these are real topics that are being searched in Google. So you need to tackle these to really build that infrastructure, around that core keyword
that you wanna improve. So if you wanted to rank for coffee, which I wouldn't recommend,
'cause it's a head keyword, but let's just say for
the sake of this example, if you wanted to improve
the rankings for coffee, we'd wanna build out additional assets to support that primary asset.
And the more of these additional assets that we build out, the more topical relevance and authority we're going to build. And so this is really, really important. And this tool really does it super well. So I can't suggest it enough, it's really one of my favorites. And my third favorite
keyword research tool is Answer the Public. Here's how to use it. All right, so now I'm
inside Answer the Public, and this is a completely public tool. So you don't actually
have to sign to use this. You can just use the free version. And all you need to do
is just enter a keyword that you're trying to rank for. So in this case, we're just gonna do SEO. So then I like to click on the data tab so I can quickly see all
of these different topics that we could potentially cover to build topical relevance
around that core topic.
So very similar to AlsoAsk.com, or using the people
AlsoAsk section on Google, but at the same time, a lot of these keywords are
not gonna show volume, okay? So if we go and look at
our SEO courses worth it, you may find a little bit of volume, but at the end of the day, a lot of these are not gonna
have a ton of search volume, which means it's a golden opportunity to attack these keywords. So to just give you an
example, take this one here. Can SEO make you rich? We'll go ahead and open
up an incognito window. And this is obviously a little
of the personalization here, but we'll go ahead and search this, and you'll see that Gotch SEO
is ranking right here, okay? So I was able to rank this
very, very long tail keyword that didn't have much volume, but we know for sure that
people are searching it, okay.
There are people searching this. It may not be a lot, but
people are searching it. And so when you wanna
attack these keywords, you can rank very easily, because most people will not
be optimized this specifically. So you'll see a lot of the pages here. And this is usually my go-to. I love to see this is when
there are pages ranking that are not specifically optimized for that exact long tail query. So in this case, I optimized it hard. So can SEO make you rich? That was the entire
focus of this asset here. Now we go and look down. There's one here that
talks about being rich. So that's why this one's
doing particularly well, but the other ones Quora, or even looking at some
of these other ones, we have, how to make money with a SEO, that's a little bit broader than this specific keyword phrase. So what you wanna do is always
try to be very, very granular with satisfying the
intent of that keyword, down to the exact optimization. So in this case, I want
as granular as I can go and I wanted to satisfy the
intent fully and completely.
And that's why I'm ranking without needing very many links, okay? So once again, not a
super competitive keyword, not a keyword that's gonna show a lot of search volume data
in the traditional tools because tools are not super accurate, but this is certainly something
that people are looking for. So just keep that in mind. And when we think about this, what we need to think about is we're building topical relevance. It's not always about driving
the most traffic possible. We have to build this topical relevance, which will then allow us to perform better for our primary keyword. So if I wanted to rank for SEO, which I would never dare
to try to rank for that, I would be building
topical relevance for SEO.
That's very, very important. So that's what you need
to use this tool for. And don't be thrown off by the fact that these keywords don't necessarily have a lot of search volume. That's a big mistake that people make is chasing search volume,
which is a huge, huge mistake. 'Cause you're missing out
on so much opportunity. Now let's dive into the best
SEO Tools for technical SEO. The first is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. I am inside Screaming Frog, and screaming Frog is
a tool that I've used pretty much my entire SEO career, it's absolutely one of my favorite tools. I use it pretty much on a daily basis to crawl sites and do various things. But there's so much that this tool can do, that I'd have to dedicate
an entire video to it.
But in this case, I'm just
gonna kind of give you an overview of what it can do. And at a very high level
Screaming Frog is designed just to be able to crawl websites, and then give us the ability
to optimize technical and user experience issues, and also to optimize
content related issues on this sitewide basis. So all you to do is just take your URL, whatever domain you're trying
to improve in this case, all you just got SEO, of course, and then you wanna go to the API section. And so I highly recommend that you always integrate
Google Analytics, Google Search Console, the
PageSpeed Insights, API, and then one of the link tools. And the reason why it's important is 'cause you're gonna
be able to use use data to make educated decisions. So for example, if we wanna find pages with poor SEO performance, we're gonna find pages
that have no traffic from Google Analytics, have no impressions or clicks
from Google Search Console, and have no backlinks
let's say from Ahrefs.
So if a page hits all of those points, it means that it has
very poor performance. And so we're gonna have to make a decision on what we should do with that page, okay. That's very, very important, because we don't want pages on the site that just are really taking up space. And if they don't have
any of those metrics, then they're probably thin, or they're not super high
quality, let's be honest here. So we have to follow the data, and make data driven decisions.
So all I have to do is once you put the URL in or the domain, you've connected, the
APIs just click Start. Okay, so once the analysis is complete, you can do all kinds of
stuff with Screaming Frog. And like I mentioned, it
would take me an entire video. In fact, I could probably
do an entire training series about this tool alone. But I'm just gonna show
you a couple key things. So first thing is I always
like to sort this by HTML and then we can quickly see the pages that are likely to be indexable. So you're gonna find some
here that are not indexable, but regardless, what I wanna do, is I wanna scroll over here. And we can start to look at a
few things in these columns. So couple key things is, number one, let's keep scrolling over here. First one is crawl depth. So what you wanna do on
crawl to see that no pages are more than three clicks
deep on the crawl depth. Now keep in mind, this is
always going to be dependent on what you're trying to do
with some of these pages.
So for me, a lot of these pages that are deep in the crawl depth, these are things that are not really, I'm not really trying to rank in any way. Now we do need to make
sure that these are fixed and we need to do an audit
to make sure that these are where they need to be. But as a general rule thumb, we wanna stay at about three clicks deep. So we'll need to go
through and clean that up. Now, going back through here is, a couple other key points is, and of course, like I mentioned, there's a lot of data here
that you can dive into. You can also sort this by word count, so you can see what pages
have very low word counts.
So then you can see why
they have low word counts and what you should do with them. So if you find a page
that doesn't have users from Google Analytics, and you find a page that doesn't
have clicks or impressions, and then you scroll over and you see that it also doesn't have backlinks, then you know that those are pages that you're gonna need
to do something about. The second best technical SEO Tool, is the detailed browser extension. Okay, so now I'm gonna show you how to use the detailed Chrome extension. So this is really, I use
this almost on a daily basis when I'm doing SEO. 'Cause it's just so incredibly
useful for so many reasons. So first couple things is
right away just by clicking, you can see the title,
the meta description, even the URL structure. And even if it has canonical issues, right away, we can see
all of these things. And we can also see if
there are indexation issues right away. So we wouldn't wanna
see a no index tag here on the homepage of a website typically.
So this is another good thing, you can quickly see at
a glance what shows up. So one thing I do like to look
at is the heading structure. So sometimes right away you can see, oh, okay, they have multiple H ones, or they're missing an H one. Typically there's nothing inherently wrong with having multiple H ones,
it's just not proper structure, but it's not gonna destroy your rankings. But if you're really
doing it the right way, you should pretty much
only have one primary H one on the page. So this is a proper format. We have a bunch of H ones,
many H twos and many H threes. So, and then you can
actually go to headings and see how this is all laid out as well. So can't recommend this
Chrome extension enough, it is absolutely my go-to
almost on daily basis or when I'm training
people with my program, I'm constantly opening this thing up, and be like hey, let's dig into this page and see what's going on.
'Cause this thing really
helps you at a glance, see many, many important
variables in SEO campaign. The third best technical SEO Tool is Google PageSpeed Insights. Okay, so now I'm inside
Google PageSpeed Insights. So this tool is absolutely
critical for benchmarking your current core web vital score. So go ahead and just put
in any URL into here. So then we'll want to go
down here and just see what it came up with. So looking at this, it's
claiming that it failed, but I know that it doesn't. But going down here, we need
to go and look at this score. So the score is really what matters here, and we wanna look at it on
both mobile and desktop. So on mobile is a 93,
on desktop, it's a 100. So ideally we should get
into this orange range or if we can, get into the green. The green is obviously where we wanna be if we're trying to achieve
maximum website loading speed and user experience. However, we really wanna
stay out of this range. And this is likely where you will start to see ranking decreases.
This is probably the range
we do not wanna be in. So at least get into here
to least be kind of neutral or average. And you're likely not gonna
see a decrease in performance being in this range. But I would still aim to try
to get up into the 90 to 100, to really maximize loading speed. So this tool is just the
foundation for optimizing for core web vitals, but this is just how you can benchmark and ultimately where
you can continually test and try to improve. And just use this tool to constantly test how far you've come, after you've started to
implement a lot of optimization and various changes that are necessary to ultimately score highly
on this particular tool.
All right, so now let's
dive into the best SEO Tools for content creation. The first is the AM
Institute Headline tester, which is one I use
almost on a daily basis. Now I am inside the AM Institute
Tool for Headline Analysis. So this is absolutely
one of my favorite tools. I use this probably
almost on a daily basis. It's truly amazing. What I'm doing is I use
it to the best headlines, sometimes for subject lines on email, sometimes for Twitter posts, sometimes for blog posts. It doesn't matter. It has so many purposes, but ultimately you need to use this tool to improve your headline. And you may or may not know this, but your headline is pretty
much the most important part of any type of content or page. And it's been said that, 80% of people don't read past the headline. So your headline needs
to be really, really good for someone to wanna commit, to actually consuming your content. And this is also important
on YouTube as well. So just to look at this, you enter any type of headline in here. So in this case, I'll do
something very generic, how to build backlinks, and
then we'll see what it does.
And so this just gets a
solid 25, which is not great. And they'll tell you
what the score is here. And ultimately their criteria
is to be what is considered a professional copywriter. You need to get in the
range of 30 to 40%, okay? So this 25% is okay, but it's not really
the range we wanna get. So in a bare minimum, we're gonna try to get into this range. So to get into that range, we need to use some
different types of words. So maybe I would do something
like, how to build backlinks or how to actually build backlinks. And now what I've done is
I've increased it to 80% just by adding one word.
So that word actually just adds a little more emotional
appeal to that headline. So instead of just how to build backlinks, now it's how to actually build backlinks. And so we can add things like that to make it better and
ultimately more appealing for someone who's scrolling through and they see this headline. So take advantage of this
tool, it's absolutely amazing, and use it to really tweak your headlines and make them better. And want thing you can
do that a lot of people don't consider is, if you have a keyword
that's stuck in position, let's say, three or four, optimizing the title tag
on the actual result, the search result, can
actually improve organic CTR.
And that's one of the fastest ways to grow your organic search traffic. So if you can grow organic CTR, you're gonna immediate influx
of new organic search traffic. But the number one factor
for increasing organic CTR is the actual title tag that will show up in
Google search results. So you really should be tweaking that and optimizing that, and ultimately testing it
when you're in that position.
So that's how you use this tool. Take advantage of it. The second content creation tool, I can't it live without
is Hemingway Editor. Now I am inside Hemingway Editor. And this, when I say that I
use this tool on a daily basis, I actually mean. I use it multiple times on a daily basis. This is probably, I would
say out of all the tools that I use other than
maybe Semrush or Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog, this tool, I probably actually use this tool more than those tools, to be honest, it's that important to my business. So every single piece
of content that I create goes through this tool, every single one, whether it's a YouTube script,
whether it's a blog post, whether it's a Twitter post,
whether it's a LinkedIn post, it all goes through here. And this tool, although
it is going to give you the suggestions and only kind
of do the thinking for you, this tool will actually
make you a better writer, and it's gonna show you how
to write very efficiently.
So I can't recommend it enough, always run your copy through this and always try to make it better. And we do this actually
with our SEO content for our clients too. Every single piece of
content goes through here, and then goes through Grammarly as well, because we're really trying to make it as good as it can possibly be, and as readable as it can possibly be. So a couple things to look at here, we have the readability score.
We should try to keep
this below grade eight. This is currently grade six. That means that it's easy to read. And when things are easy to read, people will consume more of it. And if it's super technical
and really hard to read and hard to understand, then people are gonna consume less of it. It's just the way humans work.
It doesn't matter how smart someone is. People like things that
are easy to understand, easy to read, and so that's what this
is gonna do for us. Also, we can see the word
count that's important, but what it really matters here, a few of these other
things, so avoiding adverbs. So I took a little snippet from my post about how to build backlinks. We don't want many adverbs in here, so we can go through find an adverb. And obviously there are situations
where adverbs make sense, but sometimes they don't. So let's read this sentence here. Then move in onto topically
relevant prospects on a national level. So I could just eliminate
this completely and just say, then move on to relevant
prospects on the national level. So I don't probably need
to say topically relevant, it's kind of the same meaning ultimately. So that's what this tool will help you do, it will help you kind
of refine your content and really just make
it much more efficient. So, and even looking at some of these, like this one that's
highlighted in yellow, this means that the sentence
is hard to read, okay? So I can restructure this, make it a little bit easier to read.
And ultimately if I
make it easier to read, according to Hemingway, it's gonna be easier to
read for the users as well. So use this tool to your advantage. What I recommend doing is typically, I'll write my own content
let's say in a Google doc, and the, and I'll put it
into here to do my editing. Sometimes I'll actually write
the entire thing in here, so I can just go and
write it the right way, right out of the gate. But that's up to you in
kind of your own workflow. But I cannot recommend this tool enough. This is a tool can make
someone who's just an average, maybe even not a great writer, into an above average writer. It is that good of a tool. And I just can't recommend it enough, it's so incredibly valuable. And most importantly, it's free to use. So take advantage of it. The third must have content
creation tool is Grammarly. Okay, so I am inside Grammarly now, and this is absolutely a must when you're trying to improve the content for SEO performance. So like I mentioned before,
we always use Hemingway and we use Grammarly
to improve our content.
So what you need do is set the goals. I typically just do the general settings, I don't usually change this very much, and then you just click done, and then just paste your content in here. And so in this case, I
just took the content from my backlinks post. And what you wanna do
is just literally go, suggestion by suggestion and
implement what makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, don't do it, but you wanna go through
and improve all of these, because Grammarly is really gonna help you improve the quality of this writing.
So just make it a part of your process to take your content and
put it through Grammarly to make that it performs really
well, at least in this tool. And so typically we aim
to get a perfect score, but at least get it up into the nineties. So this content needs a
little bit of reworking, and it needs to be improved
so I can push it up further on the performance scale. And the final SEO content creation tool you need to use is Surfer. Okay, so I'm inside Surfer, and Surfer is by far my
favorite OnPage SEO Tool, and it's absolutely
critical for our process within our agencies. So as I mentioned before, what
we always do with our content is we obviously write the content and then we run it through Hemingway, and then we run it through Grammarly, and then once it's past those two checks, then it goes into Surfer to
get that final optimization.
So what we typically use
is just the SERP Analyzer. And so you'll run your
primary keyword through here, and then you just go ahead and open it up. So let's say I wanted
to rank for backlinks. So what I would do is I would
just take my primary page here and hit compare. And then once that's
done, what you wanna do is just go ahead and click
on this little part here and click audit. So now there are a few things
you wanna look at here. First thing is obviously
missing common backlinks. This is a big one. So if you don't have these backlinks, it's gonna be very difficult
to go and beat the competitors. So in the case of backlinks,
it's extremely competitive. It's a head keyword. So it's not really a keyword that I wanna rank for long term. It's gonna have a lot of volatility. And ultimately the ones that are really gonna stand the test at
time ranking for this, are gonna be websites that
are super authoritative, so.
But let's say I did wanna rank for it. I would wanna go and get
links on all of these sites, or at least attempt to. So that's the first, next is we wanna, instead of looking at true density, go straight down to the word section and make sure that the word
count is where it needs to be. So based on this, the
word count is appropriate and we're in the range that we need to be, to be able to actually
compete for this keyword.
Next thing you wanna look at before I actually do the optimization is scroll all the way down here. We wanna see the load speed. So time to first bite is the first one. And we wanna see how
we're doing on that front. It looks like we're not doing too well. So we need to improve this. Now of course, the number
one ranking result is doing, is much slower, but that's not the point because they have incredible
website authority. So you have to think about these things are way differently, because Moz has such
strong website authority, they can get away with more. Now, the opposite is true, If
you had low website authority, you wouldn't be able to get away with having a slow loading
website or slow loading page. So in this case, it's something
we would need to improve, if we want to increase performance. Next thing here is just
straight load time. Now, load time, we're doing really well. So not really much room
for improvement here, but this initial first time to bite is something we need to fix.
So that is just the initial stage. We wanna hit the right word count, and we wanna make sure that the page loads as fast as possible. Ultimately faster than the competitors for this specific keyword. That's the key. We're just focused on
this one keyword phrase. And we wanna try to dominate based on this one keyword phrase. Now go back up, once
you got those covered, you wanna go up to true density. So what I like to do is I
literally just go one by one and try to find opportunities
to add these topics into the actual page itself.
And so this can be a very
time consuming process is not easy. It may look easy on the surface, but to sometimes integrate these ideas, it can take a little bit of time. So like Anchor Text, for example, I guess I don't really talk
about Anchor Text on here. And if we go and look at this post, we'll go and see if we
mentioned Anchor Text at all. We mentioned it one time here. So we're not really talking
a whole lot about Anchor Text because Anchor Text is a
completely separate topic and that's why I have a
completely dedicated post for it because it's such a deep topic that needs to be covered on its own. So with that said, Surfer is telling me that I need to at least have a section about Anchor Text to discuss, because ultimately when you look at this, we look at the competitors, it seems that most of them
are about Anchor Texts pretty frequently in their
page, that is ranking. So this is something that we
should also emulate as well. So that's all we're doing.
We're just emulating the first page, as far as the topics
that they're discussing. We're not copying the first page and the content that they have. We're just making sure
that we're talking about the same topics, because clearly these competitors are doing
something that's working, okay? So they're here for a reason, it's because Google has decided that they are the most relevant
result for that keyword. So that's what we're trying to be. We're trying to be the
most relevant result for that keyword, but this does not take away from the fact that we need to find unique angles, and ultimately we need to
create a page that's different and attempt to be better than
what's on the first page.
So that is the most important part. But this is the fuel and the fire that helps your content
become much more relevant, and ultimately build it
more for the search engines. We're kind of feeding the search engine. So this is how we use Surfer. Now let's dive into the best
SEO Tools for Link Building. The first is the Data
Miner browser extension, which will help you during
the link prospecting phase. Okay, so now I am in
Google search results, and I'm just gonna quickly show you how to use the Data Miner plugin.
So this particular plugin
here is extremely powerful, it's free to use, and what it will do is you can
scrape pretty much any page to collect any type of data
that you're looking for. So in the case of what
I'm doing right here, is I'm doing link prospect,
and that's just an example. So I did right for us plus health.
And what I'm doing is I'm
looking for opportunities to write guest posts on health websites. So let's say we had a
client in the health space. We'd wanna write guest
posts on health websites. So this is one of the simplest
queries that you can use to find all of these opportunities. Now, without Data Miner,
you'd have to go one by one and copy all these out, which
would be very time consuming, which we don't wanna do. So Data Miner allows
us to really streamline this whole process. So what you can do is you just
go to Google search results and get all links. And this is except for 2021, but it still works perfectly fine. So what we'll do is we'll
go like the Play button, and then it's gonna go ahead and do an initial scrape like this. And what you have to do is
you have to click Scrape. So what it'll do is it'll
just scrape the top 100, and then all you have to
do is just click Download, and then select what you
wanna do, so Copy Clipboard, and then just add that to your
link prospecting database, and then repeat this for all types of different
link opportunities.
This is really a way to streamline
this process much faster. So you can really start to collect all of these link
prospects very, very fast. So I can't recommend this tool enough. The second is the Check My Links plugin, which will help you find
broken links on any page. So I'm gonna show you how to
use the Check My Links plugin. So all you to do is download the extension and then all you're gonna
do is just literally, just click this and it's gonna crawl and it's gonna find
all of the broken links that exist on this page. And so there are many reasons
for finding broken links. First of all, if you're
doing it on your own site, it could be to improve the user experience because broken links
are obviously not good for user experience. The other reason is purely
for link building purposes. So you can use broken links on a page as leverage in your outreach. And so this is just
one way to quickly look for broken links, but I would also probably lean
more towards Screaming Frog, or even Siteliner if I'm really
trying to find broken links at scale across an entire website.
But if you're just trying
to do it on one page, trying to do it quickly,
this tool will do the job. The third tool is Ahrefs, which is critical for link building. Okay, so I'm inside Ahrefs, and Ahrefs is really one of
the best link building tools that you can use. Semrush is equally as good as well. However, in this case, I'm
just gonna show you Ahrefs. So in the case of Ahrefs, if
we're just focusing purely on the link building side of things, there are a few features
that you're definitely gonna wanna take advantage of. So, first of all, always put
your target website in here. You can also put your
competitors website in here and see all of their link opportunities. So that's one of the most
powerful features of Ahref. So what you do is just
go right into backlinks, so you can see all of the
backlinks that any website has. And so if you're trying to
beat one of your competitors, one of the best things you can do, is just come right in
here, click Dofollow, and then look at what
links they currently have.
And then you need to make it a point to try to get the same
links that they have, because you know that these are the links that are helping them
drive results ultimately. So this is really one of the best things for analyzing your competitors, and building out a link
prospecting database, ultimately, and they're basically telling you exactly what they've done to get their
SEO results that they have. It's all right here in front of you. And this is the value of Ahrefs. Now, a couple other things you can do, is you can also go into
the link intersect section right here under backlink profile.
And what you can do is you can see who is linking to your competitor,
but not linking to you. This is important because, of course you may already
have some of these links. So we wanna specifically
see what domains are linking to the competitor, but not linking to us. So just click show link opportunities. Okay, so once the announce is complete, you're gonna be able to
see all of the domains that are linking to your competitor, but are not linking to you. So in this case, I have a lot of ground that needs to be made up on this front because there's a lot of domains that are linking to Neilpatel.com, but not linking to gotchseo.com, okay? So if I wanted to try to
attract as much organic search traffic as Neil does, I would need to go and
get these links, okay? So this is just what you should be doing.
These are the gaps that we need to narrow if we actually want to
improve our performance. And unfortunately, if you
don't narrow these gaps, it's gonna become very, very difficult. So you have to make it a point to try to get links on
these particular domains, 'cause you know, that's
what's helping drive results for the competitor. And then my next favorite
section is under, Best buy links. And so the reason why
this is really important is because when you build
out new pieces of content or you create new SEO driven asset, you need to look for internal
linking opportunities. And the best internal
linking opportunities are on pages that already
have existing backlinks. So all of these pages
have existing backlinks, which means I wanna try
to leverage these pages as much as I can, to really
improve the performance for a new page that doesn't
have any authorities. So we're really trying to drive
authority to this new page so it can get I media boost in rankings and organic traffic in the near future.
So this is really the easiest way to give any new page that initial boost. So Ahrefs has tons of capability, I only covered the link
building side of things, but highly recommend just
using those couple of features because they really
make a huge difference. And the last link building
tool is Sendinblue, which is my favorite
outreach tool right now. Okay, so the next tool I
wanna share is Sendinblue. So this is a tool that we are
using right now for outreach. And there are a million outreach tools that you can use out there.
And a lot of them do
pretty much the same thing, but it ultimately is gonna
come down to your budget and ultimately the user interface, which user interface do you really prefer? So Sendinblue, I love the user interface. We get this set up and
we get our templates and everything put in here, and then we're able to
do ootreach at scale. So this is the one we're currently using, doesn't necessarily mean we're
gonna use this one forever, but this is our favorite
current outreach tool. You do not need to use
an outreach tool though. You can do this all through Google, and your just regular old email. But I will say that using an outreach tool can really accelerate this process and help you be much more organized. And organization is really the
key to scaling link building. So if you look at the
pricing on Sendinblue, it's not super, super expensive,
definitely nothing crazy.
But you think about the
capabilities that you get from this, this investment is very tiny. So I can't recommend this one enough, this is one we've been
using now for a while. And it's definitely an
awesome outreach tool, but like I mentioned,
there's a million out there. So you just need to pick whichever one you like the interface the most, and ultimately which one
fits your budget the best. Okay, so since you've made it this far, here are two more bonus SEO
Tools you have to check out. The first is Process Street, which is the best tool for
systemizing your SEO process.
Now I am in Process Street,
this one might be kind of funny because you may be thinking well, Process Street is
definitely not an SEO Tool, and you are absolutely correct, it is not an SEO Tool. However, it is a tool
for building out systems and processes, which will
make your SEO campaigns much more efficient and
much more effective. The truth is if you're going
through an SEO campaign, and it's different every time, that is not going to work long term, because if it's different every time you can't refine it and
you can't improve it, because you're doing something
different every time. So you need to have standardized process that you go through every single time.
That is not to say that every
SEO campaign is the same. That's a common misconception, but you still need to have a
process that you go through that makes sense at each
stage of this SEO campaign. So the way that we have it set up is we start with our campaign overview, we have our keyword research
and our SEO content audit, SEO action plan, then we
optimize technical SEO. Then we optimize existing content, and then we create new SEO
content, which is ongoing. And then we acquire links, and then of course there's local
SEO if the client is local. So a lot of these stages like
optimize existing content, create new SEO content and acquire links. These are ongoing processes. So we basically take that
process and we repeat it over and over, over the
course of many months in the campaigns. So, but this is critical for being able to do SEO effectively. You need processes. And most importantly, to
be able to bring people onto your team, to be able to do the work also just as efficiently as you.
And the truth is when you
build out your systems well, and PE train people on the systems, it is truly the best way
to scale an SEO business and ultimately be able to
deliver consistent SEO results in your client campaigns
or with your own website. So just to give you a little perspective of what particular process looks like. So a system can be broken
down into three parts. So SEO within itself is a system, okay? SEO, the broad concept of SEO is a system. Within SEO, we have processes. Each of these things, I just outlined here are processes, okay? So within a process we have procedures. So then we'll go into this example on Has Organic Search Traffic, and you'll see each of
these is a procedure. So this is a step by step checklist that we go through every single time that we're going to do keyword research.
So we're gonna Find Low Hanging Fruits. We're going to Find Unknown Keyword, we're going to qualify, and then we're going to
prioritize these keywords. This process is pretty much
the same every single time. And it's good to have it laid out because when it's laid out like this, you can tweak it and you can refine it, and you can optimize it. And I can't stress this enough, there are tons of ways
that you can build out systems processes and procedures. But I will tell you Process
Street in my personal opinion has really been one of my favorites. It does an incredible job. So I'll give you an example. We'll look at Find Low Hanging Fruits. So in this example, we're gonna go and find low hanging fruits. We give a little overview. We talk about the time
investment, how long it will take. This is good for your
team members to know, because when they're trying to figure out how they're gonna structure their day, they need to know how long
something is going to take.
Especially if they haven't
really done it that many times. Now over time, as people get experienced, they know how long these things take, but it's still important
for people who are new to these processes to be able to ultimately structure
their day appropriately. And then we just it right
into the process like this. So we're going each part of
the process with screenshots. And then on top of it, we also
have a video demonstration of this as well. So I actually go through
video demonstration and I show them exactly how to do this, like over the shoulder.
So we have both, we have the text version and then we have the video demonstration. The video demonstration of
course is in Gotch SEO Academy. But this process here that I've laid out is shameless plug here, this is the exact process I teach inside. Gotch SEO Academy. So you're getting access
to this entire system, the processes and the procedures, plus all of the video demonstration of how to actually execute this. And the crazy part, this is exactly what we
use in our own agency. Like I'm just sharing it here publicly. This is literally what
we do in our agency. And this is, we go right into here and we refine these
processes and procedures based on feedback from our own campaigns, but then feedback from hundreds of people that are in Gotch SEO Academy. So when I say that no other system has gotten more feedback than
ours, I actually mean that because we've had so many
people go through it, and help us refine it
and get tons of feedback. So we have other SEOs, other people who are good
at SEO going through this and improving it over the
course of many, many months and years ultimately.
So can't stress it enough, but you can certainly do this yourself, but you just have to be
willing to put in the time and the work, 'cause it can be certainly
quite the undertaking. So I can't recommend
Process Street enough. And the final SEO Tool you
need to try is SEOTesting.com Okay, so I'm in SEOTesting.com. And this is one of my favorite
tools for running SEO Test. So just to give you an example, this is a little test that we ran for the backlinks blog
post, and it's very simple, you just run the test and
then you're using tool to document that test. And what it will do is it will look across your Google Search Console data and see when the start data of that
test was, and then the end date, and then it's able to see, was there an increase in clicks per day, based on that change. So if we go to results, we're gonna be able to
see the difference here. So we'll see that the control period, there are only about two clicks per day.
The impressions are about 5,000. The test period, there
were eight clicks per day and the impressions were 8,000. So we had a massive
increases percentage wise, as far as clicks per day. Talking 200% and then a
63% in impressions, okay? So this is really, really valuable, when you can run tests like this, you can ultimately see if your SEO actions are actually producing results. And this is important, because
you can use Google Analytics to annotate your actions. But it's hard to link that
up with Google Search Console and be able to collect that data.
You can, of course do, it will take a while to figure that out, but this just streamlines the process and you can ultimately start testing and really being
scientific about your SEO. And so I can't recommend this tool enough, it's super, super awesome. And I wanna be digging into even more and sharing a lot of the
tests that we've been doing. So those are the best SEO Tools you should take advantage of. If you like this video, please like it, subscribe and drop a coment below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video..
