We are well aware that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps in improving your website’s rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing. However, one of the common mistakes that every business owner or blogger makes is to ignore the SEO once their website ranks high on the search engine.
Now, we cannot stress enough about updating the SEO of your website. Your website is your identity in the digital space. Search engines like Google keep changing their algorithms and that can have a major impact on your website. So, if you want your target audience to be directed to your website through the query they enter in the search engine, it is crucial that you audit your website’s SEO frequently and optimize it in the best possible way to keep your rankings consistent.
Today, we are going to tell some of the best SEO tools available to help you conduct SEO audits of your WordPress website.
If you already own a website on WordPress, you may be aware of some of the tools that we are going to discuss in this blog. However, if you have just created a website or are new to blogging, we recommend that you use these tools to increase the visibility of your blog or website.
Tool # 1 – Screaming Frog
A favourite of WordPress, Screaming Frog is a website crawler that crawls your website URLs to audit the onsite SEO. It helps in:
- Finding broken links by checking for links with 404 page not found URLs, and exports them to the developer to fix it.
- Discovering duplicate content by using its in-built algorithms to assess duplicate elements such as page titles, descriptions, headings or content pages, which is fixed later.
- Analyzing page title and meta descriptions to check if its length is long, short, missing or duplicated across the site.
It takes just few minutes to have the SEO of your entire website analyzed. However, there is one issue – you require Java to operate Screaming Frog.
Tool # 2 – Google Search Console
Previously called the Google webmaster tools, Google Search Console allows users to check the indexing status and optimize the website. It assesses your website and provides insights on what can be done to optimize it. It helps the website owner by displaying the errors found in their website, discover the list of keywords that brings them traffic to the website, and sending a notification e-mail every time an occurs. Google Search Console can safely be called the saviour for all those website owners who’s objective is to rank their website high on search engine. You can also add Bing Webmaster tools to optimize your website on Microsoft’s search engine. However, most people prefer to focus on Google Search Console.
Tool # 3 – Google Analytics
Yet another user-friendly product from Google, Google Analytics provides you with a lot of visitor information that can help you plan your marketing campaigns. It provides data on how many visitors checked your website per day, week, or a month. The sources of traffic, i.e. what keywords brought the users to your website, what is their location etc are some of the insights provided by Google Analytics. While, you may find a lot of web analytics tools that can help you assess the performance of your website and provide solutions to improve it, Google Analytics is one of the preferred tools used by the website owners.
Tool # 4 – BuzzSumo
We all know that content is the king of every website, and we cannot think of any other tool than BuzzSumo that can help content writers and the marketers to create good content. BuzzSumo provides insights on the type of content that your target audience read for up to a year. As a website owner, you might be well-aware that the best way to understand the value of your content is when it resonates with the influencer in your industry and they share it on their social media profile. BuzzSumo helps you in this endeavour.
It provides you a list of influencers in your industry whom you can follow to understand the kind of content shared by them, which becomes a starting point for your content team to write the type of content the influencers read. Apart from this, it gives you insights on the type of topics read by your target audience and helps you create posts can go viral, which helps in boosting your website ranking on the search engine. From providing reports on content analysis – that is how well your content has performed, to giving you an analysis on the kind of content shared by the competitors; BuzzSumo is the ideal content marketing and SEO tool for every website owner.
Tool # 5 – Moz Pro
Moz Pro enables you to run a full SEO and crawl your website. It helps in analyzing your website’s ranking in the Search Engine Ranking pages, performs onsite optimization, and plans the keywords that can bring in traffic to your website. It also performs link analytics in terms of checking your backlinks and how you can use this analysis to find out opportunities to provide backlinks, and helps you to do advance SEO in order to keep your page well-organized.
While, you can use any of the above tools to perform your website’s SEO audits; we recommend that you choose the one that provides you insights on relevance of keywords, provides you details on dead or broken links, and analyses the meta descriptions, tags, headings and images with alt text etc.
Conclusion
While the SEO tools are accessible to all the websites irrespective of how they are built. Every leading website builder available in the market provides its own plug-ins to help business owners and bloggers to perform SEO audits. For example, WordPress has Yoast and Screaming Frog Spider tool to analyze the SEO and the content of the website, while Wix has Techno Bird that performs on-page and off-page SEO audits along with content analysis. Irrespective of what tools you use, it is important that you dedicate some time every month or every quarter to perform SEO audits of your website and to keep it updated.