Why all the Fuss about SEO?

SEO was developed for the sole purpose of improving web accessibility. It helped identify web content and its purpose by following HTML4 guidelines.

That meant pages needed to have unique titles appropriately reflecting their content and headings to help gather other relevant information. These headings, titles, and other on-page signals create a better user experience(UX) and show search engines what’s contained on a page.

SEO quickly caught on because there was a realization that it could help websites rank higher on the SERPs, resulting in increased organic traffic.

Why Use SEO Tools?

Keyword research and data analysis is accurate and less tedious when you use SEO tools. They make it easier and less time-consuming to see what’s working and what to tweak in your strategy to make it work better. The best SEO tools provide reports on how you measure up to your competitors and where the greatest optimization opportunities lie. You can also measure search performance by country, region, or language.

Fortunately, there are several SEO tools out there, both free and paid, that can help you view websites how search engines like see them. That way, you can improve your relevance and ranking for your target keywords.

Here are the Top 5 SEO Tools for 2023

1.SEO Tools for Excel

SEO Tools for Excel is an amazing tool. It is installed directly into Excel giving access to a whole host of different features- on-page SEO, loads of scraping options, social shares and much more. 

This tool allows you to easily connect all sorts of tools and services and pull data directly into excel. It also crawls a website and pulls all the info a crawler would, including HTTP status codes and redirect destinations. SEO Tools for Excel connects to all the Google APIs, including the translation one. It also works with all the major SEO tools and some obscure ones too. It’s also amazing how it continuously gets updated.

Once your tools are combined with excel, you can quickly get a really good visualization of your data. You also get more data quickly because you skip the whole middle process of copypasting, CSV to textfile, combining sheets and the other processes that take a lot of time. With SEO for Excel, you can do all that in just a few minutes.

There are so many features packed in this, it virtually does anything you'd ever need to do in SEO. 

2.Ahrefs

Ahrefs is among the best SEO analysis tools to audit and optimize websites. With it, you get a high-level view of all your projects and track their SEO performance and progress.

Ahrefs' five main features are:

• Site Audit → Analyze your competitors. Pop the hood of your website’s on-page SEO performance. Stop guessing and find out exactly what’s holding your website back from ranking.
• Site Explorer → Find keywords your customers are searching for. Get an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL. 
• Keywords Explorer → Learn from your industry’s top-performing content. Discover thousands of great keyword ideas, analyze their ranking difficulty and calculate their traffic potential.
• Content Explorer → Get content ideas on any topic. Discover top-performing “linked-to” and shared content in any niche and find thousands of link prospects.
• Rank Tracker → Monitor websites’ ranking over time and chart your performance against your competitors. Get scheduled reports, straight to your inbox.

Ahrefs does its best to provide, like their sign-up page says, “ Everything you need to rank higher & get more traffic”

3. AlsoAsked

AlsoAsked is a super useful tool that capitalizes on how Google is increasingly using “People Also Ask” for query refinement. It collects, organizes and displays PAA data from Google search results. You can then interact with and explore this data on the site, export it to CSV format and process it with other SEO tools or download image graphs for a presentation. 

Because PAA results mostly appear among the top 3 Google results 75% of the time, this tool without a doubt provides a great chance for increased visibility for search terms that were previously perceived to be too broad to target.

AlsoAsked differs from similar tools in one major way. It is the only tool that provides live PAA data, critically mapping the connections between topics. This makes it possible for you to get the best possible insights into the questions both users and search engines want answers to.

Without signing in or purchasing AlsoAsked allows you a limited number of searches. But, with the paid plan, you get a much higher amount of monthly searches, can export your data as CSV and bulk check keywords. You’ll also have access to your search history, cache and user management.

AlsoAsked key features are:

• PNG image export
• Deep search
• Bulk searches
• API access (coming soon)
• 1 year search history

If you are looking for results that show the intent connection between questions, more niche queries and up-to-date results, AlsoAsked is definitely what you need.

4.Semrush

Semrush tends to be a favorite for SEO’s and Agencies. With it, you can easily assess your rankings, identify changes and find new ranking opportunities. 

With Semrush, you can compare up to five of your competitors within one report. You also have the choice to uncover and analyze key metrics for either a particular country or globally. This covers paid search, organic search traffic and the number of backlinks

Another cool feature is that you get to choose the domain type to view. It can be a subfolder, subdomain, or root domain.

Semrush key features include:

• Domain Overview
• Competitive Research
• Keyword Research
• Link Building
• On-Page and Tech SEO

With +55 tools available, SEMrush ensures that you are working on the right content in a data-driven way.

5.Screaming Frog 

Specifically for the SEO-minded, Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is an advanced and fast SEO site audit tool. It crawls websites you specify and examines the URLs for common SEO issues. It is great for crawling both small and extremely large websites, simplifying and expediting what would otherwise be a time-consuming process.

Manually checking every page would is extremely labor intensive, and you can easily miss a meta refresh, redirect, or duplicate page issues. But, with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you can analyze, view and filter the crawl data as it’s collected and updated continuously in the user interface.

With this tool, you can export key onsite SEO elements such as URL, meta description, page titles and headings to a spreadsheet to use as a base for your SEO recommendations. 

Screaming Frog's key features include:

• Finding Broken Links
• Auditing Redirects
• Analyzing Page Titles & Meta Data
• Discovering Duplicate Content
• Extracting Data with XPath
• Reviewing Robots & Directives
• Generating XML Sitemaps
• Integrating with GA, GSC & PSI
• Crawling JavaScript Websites
• Visualizing Site Architecture
• Scheduling Audits
• Comparing Crawls & Staging

Screaming frog comes in both free and paid versions.

If you are accustomed to working on large sites, this is undoubtedly a must-have tool for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the latest SEO techniques I can use to increase organic traffic?

1. Find Your Competitors’ Best Performing Pages
2. Inform Your Content Strategy Using a Keyword Gap Analysis
3. Use Digital PR to Earn Authority Backlinks
4. Improve Your Organic CTR Using PPC Testing
5. Optimize for ‘People Also Ask’
6. Steal Your Competitor’s Broken Backlinks
7. Use Supporting Content to Show Topical Expertise
8. Use Internal Links to Supercharge Page 2 Rankings

What is the latest in SEO?

Content created by Artificial Intelligence and optimized for search engines is among the SEO trends that are rapidly growing. This strategy allows for faster content creation and ensures that It’s highly optimized.

What are the two techniques of SEO?

SEO techniques are broadly classified into two categories: 

1. White Hat SEO - Search engines recommend these techniques as part of a good design. 
2. Black Hat SEO - Also known as spamdexing, search engines don’t approve of these techniques and always try to minimize their effect. 

What SEO technique is the most efficient in the long term?

The best long-term SEO strategy is aligning the goals of a website with those of search engines. Search engines are big on providing the best user experience. If your site provides the best solution for the searcher's intent, your website has a shot at ranking at the top.

How do you grow SEO organically?

1. Get More Backlinks. 
2. Start with keyword research. 
3. Optimize Your Pages With Keywords. 
4. Write Longer Content. 
5. Go after less competitive keywords. 
6. Optimize for Search Intent. 
7. Improve Your Site Speed. 
8. Optimize Your Content.
9. Make your site mobile friendly

How can I improve my SEO for free?

1. Find better keywords.
2. Delete duplicate content.
3. Fix 404 errors. 
4. Write a unique title tag for every page. 
5. Write a compelling meta description for every page. 
6. Clean up your URL structure. 
7. Update your blog often. 
8. Include H1, H2, H3, etc.
9. Add internal links.
10. Optimize images and videos.
11. Reference authoritative sources.
12. Intergret social media.
13. Optimize loading speed.
14. Optimize for mobile devices.
15. Link build.
16. Remove bad/ broken links.
17. Syndicate content.