What is SEO
SEO is short for search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
SEO is also about making your search engine results are relevant to the user’s search query so more people click the result when it is shown. In this process, snippets of text and meta data are optimised to ensure your snippet of information is appealing in the context of the search query to obtain a high CTR (click through rate) from search results.
Google Analytics
Analytics is an entirely free program for tracking traffic patterns on your web-site. It integrates well with other Google applications such as AdSense and AdWords, which makes it all the more valuable. Custom dashboards are possible in this tool, including whatever metrics you wish to view details on.
The primary Visitors Overview screen helps you view your traffic patterns for the past month (or view patterns on your custom date selection). ‘Visitors’ also shows you the average time spent on your site, the bounce rate, and the percentage of new visits which summarises a good, high-level overview of how your site is doing. High pages/visit, high average time on your site, and a low bounce rate give you an idea of how useful visitors are finding your site once they arrive.
Other information regarding Traffic sources (to track if web traffic is coming from a variety of sources), Content (which depicts page views instead of visits), Conversions (of type Goals to track different kinds of action on your site like length of time spent, reaching a specific page etc and E-Commerce to know where your most profitable customers came from) can be easily obtained and managed via Analytics.
SEMRush
This is a paid tool which is ranked way up by many digital marketing guru’s. SEMRush lets you do keyword research, track keyword ranking, check backlinks and most importantly do a complete SEO audit of your blog. SEMRush makes it easier to find what keyword your site (or for that matter – any site!) is ranking for. Since, the tool has access to large amount of data from Bing and Google, it lets you see where the competitors are ranking for more than 95 million organic keywords.
Thus, it gets easier for you to determine how successful a keyword is for a particular domain and also to see the value of organic traffic coming to specific landing pages. Using this tool, you can find keywords which are driving traffic to your competitor’s website, following which you can write quality content based on those keywords and the valuable pearls of inputs gleaned.
Authority Labs
Monitoring rankings regularly is a key task for SEO. Authority Labs provides a daily SEO ranking reports tool which automates campaign monitoring, competitor tracking, and local rank tracking, thereby saving a lot of time. All you need to do is add the domains and keywords you want to track and its gets done!
Authority Labs provides daily rank checking on all the accounts, tracks search results at postal code or city level for accurate reporting, and adds domains or pages from any country and language offered by Google.
With Authority Labs, you can also track competitor domains and gain valuable insights. Moreover, the tool can be accessed by unlimited users for reporting at no extra cost.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs gives you a Site Explorer and backlink checker for providing SEO data. The suite includes SEO Report, Site Explorer, Domain Comparison, Backlinks Report and Batch Analysis. Site Explorer is the most popular tool of Ahrefs which is a backlinks profile checker that runs reports on URL or domain and gives key metrics on the number of referring pages/IPs/domains/subnets, backlinks, backlink types and anchor pages.