How to Use SEO Tools: A Beginner's Guide

How to Use SEO Tools: A Beginner's Guide

Have you ever wondered how websites land on the first page of Google? Well, you're in the right place today! Most of the time, it's due to SEO or search engine optimization including services provided by professionals such as those over at FullbeamSEO.

What is SEO, anyway? How can SEO tools help me to do so? Let's dive right into it and explain each step by step for using SEO tools for the absolute beginner as they pass through every step of the process to achieve higher website visibility.

What is SEO?

This article will define SEO before learning how to use the SEO tools. SEO is a process that optimizes your website to rank higher in search results on engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The more people will come and visit and drive traffic to your websites, hence increasing engagement and potential selling. SEO tools help you analyze your website, figure out where things can go wrong, and track your progress.

Why Do You Need SEO Tools?

Trying to fix a car without the necessary tools is almost impossible. Similar to SEO, but for real reasons:

• You will have no clue about what keywords are being used to find websites like yours.
• You will know why your website isn't ranking the way you wanted it to.
• You will have no clue about what they do differently and how that's better than you.

SEO tools give you all this information, allowing you to take informed decisions.

Key Features of SEO Tools

• Keyword Research: Find out what keywords to target for your content.
• Site Audits: Analyze the structure, speed, or content problems you might have on your site.
• Competitor Analysis: A window into the strategies your competitors are using to outdo you.
• Backlink Tracking: Describes the number of external links pointing to your site, which increases your ranking.
• Analytics: Track how well your site performs at a given time.

Now that we have had an introduction to what SEO tools are and why they matter, let's get into how you can use them effectively for keyword research.

Step 1: Keyword Research

SEO tools aid in keyword research, the words or phrases that people enter a search engine to find something relative to your content.

How to Use SEO Tools for Keyword Research

1. Choose an SEO Tool: Among the available tools, you can pick from Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMrush.
2. Enter a Seed Keyword: This is the starting word or term related to your website. Suppose you have a travel blog. In that case, you would write "best places to visit in Europe."
3. Analyze Related Keywords: The tool now presents you with related keywords, search volume, and competition levels. You'll focus on keywords that show high search volume but are relatively less competitive.
4. Select Target Keywords: Choose keywords that best match your content and audience. For instance, "hidden gems in Europe" is probably a better choice, since it's less competitive than "best places to visit in Europe."

Tip: Long-tail keywords—phrases that have 3 to 5 words—are usually less competitive and can drive huge traffic.

Step 2: Site Audits

Technical problems always bring down the best content. Problems like slow speed, broken links, or a lower mobile optimization ability can be easily discovered in site audits.

How to Use SEO Tools for Site Audits

1. Choose your SEO Tool: Screaming Frog or SEMrush both have features that enable you to run site audits on your website.
2. Scan Your Website: You need to input your URL in the tool for scanning errors.
3. Analysis of the Results: This tool will show a report of problems that contain:
   • Broken links: Links to pages that don't exist.
   • Slow loading pages: Pages that take time to open, thus overwhelming visitors.
   • Missing meta descriptions or titles: Important to help search engines and users understand your content.
4. Solve the Issues: Most tools will give you solutions. For example, in broken links, replace it with a live URL.

Tip: Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly; search engines prefer sites that are optimized for mobiles.

Step 3: Competitor Analysis

Do you ever wonder why your competitors rank better? Competitor analysis will teach you from their strategies and help you improve.

How to Use SEO Tools for Competitor Analysis

1. Identify Competitors: Use Ahrefs or Moz to find your top competitors for certain keywords.
2. Analyze the Content: Examine the style of their content. Are their blog posts longer? Do they have more graphics? Are they targeting other keywords?
3. Look into Their Backlinks: Using tools like Ahrefs, you can see where your competitors are gaining their backlinks. If a large site links to them, email them for the chance at getting a link to your site as well.
4. Compare Metrics: You could compare the difference in domain authority, organic traffic, and keyword rankings of your site against your competitors to see where you can step it up.

Track Your Efforts

Once all those changes were made based on your research, it is essential to track your efforts.

How to Use SEO Tools for Monitoring

1. Set Up Google Analytics: This free tool by Google tracks visitor activity on your website, pointing out how long they stayed and what pages they visited.
2. Use Google Search Console: You can view the performance of your site regarding Google searches. It shows you what kind of keywords you rank with and how many clicks you get.
3. Monitor your keyword rankings: Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs monitor keyword rankings over time, showing that you are improving in your SEO efforts.

Conclusion

Using SEO tools can be very overwhelming but actually brings huge online visibility to your website. Start by doing some keyword research and running site audits, analyze your competitors, and track your progress regularly.

SEO is a marathon run, not a sprint. "Give it time"—and all those nice things that various blogs and websites say. All these right tools and strategies would boost your rankings. So what are you waiting for? Get started with SEO tools now and let your website climb the ranks! Happy optimizing!