Last week we published a piece on SEO for 2019 and the things we think you should concentrate your efforts on this year. Off the back of that, we thought it would be handy to recommend some tools that will help you ‘do’ SEO.
In this guide, we share with you our favourite SEO Tools to help run your affiliate marketing business. By using these tools you'll easily be able to improve the visibility of your website on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines. The majority of the tools featured are free to use too, so you can start optimising your site without spending a penny. Result!
Google Analytics
This should be a given. It is the most crucial tool at your disposal. There is no other data source that gives you the quality and detailed information that Google Analytics does. For free. If you don’t have it installed on all your sites, do it now.
- It’s simple to install and there are lots of plugins out there that can help you do that
- You can create custom reports and use it to understand where the problems with your site might be
- You can quickly see key metrics like bounce rate, visitors, geo-location, social media interactions… the opportunities to learn more about your users are endless
- It’s compatible with other tools like AdWords
- You can set up goals so that you can track your user’s interaction with your site
- Track content to see what gets the views and shares. Once you learn which content is performing well you can create more of it.
- Did we mention it’s free?
Google Search Console
Like Google Analytics, Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) if a free tool that will offer powerful insights into your website that will change your life. Seriously. If you want more traffic, this is the place to start.
It’s like a central console for all your site’s data and traffic stats. It will show you crawl errors, the keywords and queries that resulted in your site being shown, what sites are linking to yours, mobile usability, and so much more.
One of the main features of the Google Search Console is the ability to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a detailed list of all the pages, posts and products on your website that you'd like indexed by Google. The easiest way to create an XML Sitemap is to use the Yoast SEO plugin. You'll find a full guide on how to create and submit your XML sitemap here.
Dive deep and make the most of another free Google tool.
Keywords Everywhere
This is a free Chrome and Firefox extension that displays valuable Google keyword search volumes, costs per click and competitive data for keywords on multiple sites. It also allows you uncover long-tail phrases with accurate search volumes and CPC data.
We actually like it more than the Google Keyword Planner. Do you know how we would describe this tool? Convenient. And quick. You don’t have to research and compare keywords from multiple platforms. You just go to Google and type in your keyword. The Keywords Everywhere tool displays the search volume for that keyword in the Google autocomplete section. Not only that – it will show related keywords with search volumes, CPC and how competitive the keyword is.
We love it. It’s free, so easy to use and pulls in the same data as the Google Keyword Planner. And just like any other good keyword planner, you can build lists and download them as Excel, CSV or PDF files.
SEMRush
This is one with a fairly hefty pro version price tag, which starts at $99 a month. But if you sign up you can get up to 10 free requests per day. So, if you search for a domain and look at the organic traffic for that domain, that’s two searches. And with a free
With a free account you can crawl your website with the Site Audit tool. This will crawl 100 pages of your site, which is more than enough if you have a relatively small site.
We think SEMRush is a great tool, even with the restrictions on the free version.
Ubersuggest
This is an awesome tool from Neil Patel, whose blog we love. The tool was acquired by Neil over a year ago and has been repurposed to offer more than just keyword ideas. Firstly, it is free, which is always a bonus.
The idea behind Ubersuggest is to find more keywords – the more keywords you target, the more traffic you could potentially get. Once you know what keywords are driving traffic to your site, you can pop them into Ubersuggest and it will show you a load of long tail variations for those keywords.
For example, we rank well for ‘how to be approved as an amazon affiliate’. So, when we plug that into the tool, we get other long tail keyword suggestions. By adding the long tail terms into the content that features the keyword you are already ranking for, you’ll find that you start ranking for them too, quite quickly. This means either adding the long tail terms into the existing content or expanding the existing content to include the new long tail terms.
Buzzsumo
There’s going to be an awful lot of content in your niche already. So, the last thing you want to do is just churn out content that people have already seen and read before, or even worse, that they’re just not interested in. Scoot on over to Buzzsumo and plug your keyword into the tool. It will show you the most popular articles with those keywords.
The results are based on social shares. The thinking being that if an article is being shared multiple times, it must be useful/interesting/entertaining. The idea here is to take those results and use them to give you ideas for content. Don’t just copy the articles. Firstly, that’s wrong on a moral level, and secondly, it shows a massive lack of creativity, imagination and work ethic.
Google Trends is one of those tools that once you've used it once you'll find yourself re-visiting it time after time. It's perfect for getting an idea around the popularity of a particular keywords or market. Not only does it give you data on how much interest there is right now but it also gives you an insight into seasonal trends market growth and predictions on how much interest there will be in the future.
Google Trends
We like to use once we've created a keyword list using the other tools. By comparing 2 or more terms you can quickly see which keywords have the most interest enabling you to prioritise your content creation process.
Let us know if you use any other tools on a regular basis that you think deserve a mention. Have a play around with these tools. Dig deep and they will help you grow your websites and hopefully help you get more sales.
