It takes time, commitment, and countless cups of coffee to get to grips with SEO, and you can guarantee that the moment you’re finally on track with your business’s online presence and marketing strategy, Google will throw down another algorithm update to blow you off course.
At times like this, when it feels like you’re fighting an uphill battle, or the prospect of continuing manual competitor analysis and keyword searching seems overwhelming, SEO tracking tools will be the best gift you can give yourself.
SEO Tracking Tools for the Win
We all know how essential SEO is to the effectiveness and overall success of a website, but few of us have the capacity to manually perform all of the SEO tricks and tips required to maintain a thriving online platform.
This is where SEO tracking tools come in.
There are a plethora of tracking tools available, with some free and some paid-for. Some are better than others, depending on what you’re looking for, but in general, you can expect an SEO tool to:
Analyse Competitors
Understanding what your competitors are doing online, and identifying their strengths and weaknesses, is essential to the successful development of your own business.
SEO tracking tools enable businesses to analyse competitors and their strategies, identify opportunities, and measure their performance against leaders within the industry.
Identify Keywords
Keyword research and optimisation is crucial for accruing users who find your website organically.
SEO tracking tools can help you identify relevant keywords, run real-time analysis on their rankings, and even optimise your content accordingly. These types of tracking tools eliminate the need for manual keyword research, and help you make an actionable strategy for increasing organic traffic.
Analyse Backlinks
SEO tracking tools provide insights into both the quantity and quality of backlinks, which is important to get your website taken seriously by search engines. Monitoring backlink profiles helps businesses identify potential opportunities for link building and ensures a healthy link profile.
Measure Site Speed
Don’t fall into the trap of focusing your SEO efforts on keywords and backlinks. The overall user experience is important for search engine algorithms, which includes factors such as site speed and mobile optimisation. They can monitor and analyse the responsiveness of your website to ensure the user experience is seamless.
Monitor Performance
They can help you monitor how well your website is performing in SERPs.
By reporting and analysing your sites organic traffic and conversion rates among other factors, tracking tools can give you a definitive overview of how well a website is performing. They can also make suggestions and changes for improving the site performance.
Best SEO Tracking Tools in 2024
As you might expect, there is no one-size-fits-all. The best tracking tool for your website depends on a number of factors, such as your specific aims and your budget. Here we explore the best of the bunch, for both free and paid-for SEO monitoring tools.
Google Analytics
There is a paid version of Google Analytics, but for anyone who wants to minimise their expenditure, the free version of Google Analytics is a good place to start.
This provides site content reports that measure engagement and behaviour metrics for each page on your website. It can also determine where your traffic streams are coming from, and optimise these channels to increase traffic.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another free tool that works especially well when used in conjunction with the free version of Google Analytics.
With this tracking tool, you can get an overall SEO analysis of your website, with suggestions on how to update your strategy, or new keywords to focus on.
Bing Webmaster
Bing Webmaster offers a free range of features designed to assist in optimising websites for better search performance. It displays the search queries that led users to the website on Bing, along with metrics like clicks and impressions.
Using Bing Webmaster you can also get insights into search volume, demographic information, and related keyword suggestions.
SpyFu
SpyFu is arguably one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools available. It has an excellent paid premium version, however the free version shouldn’t be overlooked.
It allows you to compare the performance of your website against your competitors and checks which keywords are being searched for, along with their ranking difficulty.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a premium tool that starts at $79 a month. It monitors your website’s organic traffic and keywords, and produces reports of how well you’re ranking against your competitors.
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular tracking tools amongst the SEO community. This paid monitoring tool, which starts at $129.95 a month, allows you to easily monitor your ranking, and identify growth opportunities.
The domain compare report is a particularly good feature of SEMrush, which lets you compare your website to your competitors.
SEOQuake
SEOQuake is a Google Chrome extension that you can use through your browser to perform on-page audits.
It works by scanning your site for errors that would be picked up by search engines, as well as analysing the performance of all of the links on your website. It’s a free tool that works well in conjunction with other free tracking tools.
Moz Pro
Moz Pro is a paid SEO tool that starts at $99 a month. It has a plethora of features that ultimately work to improve the ranking of your site and drive traffic. It has crawlers to sweep your site for SEO errors, and will tell you how well your keywords are ranking compared with your competitors.
Sitechecker
With a starting monthly subscription price of $41, Sitechecker is one of the more affordable paid-for tools. It features an SEO monitor that alerts you when errors are spotted, and makes suggestions to fix them.
It tracks the ranking of your website and you can select whether you would like a daily or weekly email update of keyword movement.
Final Words
Any website owners who have never used SEO tracking tools are about to have their minds blown because these handy little tools are an absolute game-changer.
The ability to measure user engagement and other factors on your site in real-time can entirely alter the way you run your site.
Using one should be the bare minimum for anyone operating a website, but for more in-depth metrics and analysis you can expect to pay a premium.
If you need help analyzing data and creating actionable reports, reach out to us today.
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