5 Ways SEO Tools Can Improve Your Website

If you’re a web publisher, your greatest desire is probably to have your content appear on top of search engine results pages (SERPs) whenever a user types in a query. But given the millions of websites competing for this coveted spot, you realize that ranking high on Google and other search engines is not a walk in the park.

You actually need to work hard and smart on your website to improve its rankings. One way to improve your website is through the use of SEO tools. Some of the best SEO tools you can count on include Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SEMrush, KWFinder, Moz, Ubersuggest, Serpstat, Screaming Frog, Keywords Everywhere, Fat Rank, Siteliner, SEOQuake, Google Trends, Majestic, Woorank, SpyFu, and Answer The Public, among others.

Each of these tools has its own strengths and weaknesses. If you were to narrow down your search to the best three, SEO experts worldwide would advise you to use either SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz. To discover why you might want to check out a detailed SEMrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz comparison for further insight.

Meanwhile, let’s look at five ways SEO tools can improve your website:

1. By Checking The Speed And Usability Of Your Website

In this fast-paced world, we’re living in, very few people may be willing to wait for even five seconds for a page to load. Most web users like it when they click on a link and the entire page loads almost instantly. For this reason, search engines rank highly those web pages with the lowest loading time.

You can use SEO tools to check the loading speed of your website and how easy it is for users to navigate it. Good SEO tools like GTmetrix and Webpage Test will even give you suggestions for improvement.

With this report, you can work on improving the loading speed of your website by choosing the right hosting options, enabling file compression and browser caching, optimizing image sizes, as well as using a content delivery network (CDN) and external hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo for large video files.

2. By Checking For Duplicate Content On The Internet

Duplicate content can harm your website ranking in two ways. First, assuming you’ve delegated the content writing task to a content writer who largely plagiarizes another’s work, search engines may penalize you with negative search ranking. Secondly, when clever content thieves copy-paste your work to their site, they may confuse search engines to think that they’re the original writers, and thus outrank you.

There are SEO tools designed to detect duplicate content. Use such tools to help you catch your writers for plagiarism and report content thieves to Google.

3. By Studying Your Competitor’s Keywords

One major reason your competitors outrank you revolves around the keywords they rank highly for on search engines. For instance, if you’re promoting your London-based car hire business, your competitors may have a lot of informative articles on their websites that rank highly for keywords such as ‘best car hire company in London.’

Good SEO tools should be able to show you these keywords that propel your competitors to the top position on search engines. You can then tweak your content strategy to make your website equally rich in these keywords, hoping to outrank your competitors in the near future.

4. By Analyzing And Monitoring Your Backlinks

You understand that your website content should have appropriate outbound links to authoritative websites so as to have a better rank on search engines. Also, you need quality inbound links from other websites directing to your website’s pages to improve your credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines.

Internal links are likewise important for your website as they can increase the user’s dwell time, help reduce the bounce rate, increase your website’s page rank and page views, as well as facilitate better crawling and indexing.

With time, the links you included in your content may no longer be valid, in case the content you linked to becomes deleted. In other cases, you may unknowingly link to spamming websites or sites full of malware, so you have to be careful when choosing outbound or external links. Other backlink-related mistakes you might be doing include:

• Lack of do-follow links on your website
• Not using no-follow links for user-generated content (UGC), such as in comments
• Very few backlinks
• Too many backlinks from one site
• Too many backlinks leading to only one website page
• Many outbound links to low-quality sites
• Over-optimized backlinks. For example, having 100 backlinks with the same anchor text
• Other websites deleting backlinks to your site
• Backlinks leading to non-existing pages on your site
• Backlinks from low-quality sites

You’ll agree that manually detecting all these issues will unnecessarily drain your energy. Fortunately, you can use reliable SEO tools to constantly analyze all outbound and inbound links on your website for such issues and get suggestions on how to solve them.

5. By Detecting Technical Issues On Your Website

Common technical issues you may encounter on your website include:

• Broken links
• Non-crawled pages
• Broken internal images
• Permanent and temporary redirects
• Serious server issues
• Under-optimized meta tags: For example, missing meta descriptions, duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, and long or short title elements
• Duplicate content
• URLs with underscores
• Lack of an optimized sitemap
• Empty sitemap pages
• Erroneous source code
• Issues with accelerated mobile pages
• Unminified CSS and JavaScript files

How on earth can your human eye detect all these issues? It’s nearly impossible. What you need is sophisticated SEO tools that can detect these technical problems and advise you on how to rectify them. Fixing these issues will improve your website’s performance and ranking on search engines.

Is That All?

Frankly, this list is but a drop in the ocean regarding the importance of using SEO tools in improving your website. Perhaps a full-length SEO course will comprehensively tackle the use of SEO tools for better website performance and ranking. Enroll in one, if possible.

But, if you need to straightaway get started with one SEO tool for your website, you may purchase one of the top three recommended tools mentioned at the beginning of this article. Ensure you make full use of all the relevant features. Be consistent in applying the recommendations given by the SEO tool of your choice and you’ll soon significantly improve your website ranking.