Trending SEO Tools in 2023
Making great content shine with search engine optimisation
At Modular Digital, we’re constantly investigating how this fast-moving area of technology is evolving and changing. Today, a wide variety of different technical tools exist to help website owners achieve the best search results for the content they’re publishing. What follows is a short introduction to some of the leading SEO tools available right now.
How do we find the content we’re interested in online? Most of the time, we’ll use a search engine. Website owners and content strategists have all kinds of ways to make sure we find their site instead of another one. The broad term for this dark digital alchemy is search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. This relatively new but extremely important important field of digital marketing is something of an art, a science, and a kind of magic all rolled into one.
How could we define SEO? In the real world, it is a far-reaching term for a fairly wide range of methodology and software that marketing professionals, digital publishers, and business owners use to ensure that their content is discovered and browsed by the largest possible number of people.
To add an extra layer of intrigue to an already rather complex subject, the various ways that SEO actually works – and the most successful strategies for making it work – are constantly changing. This is because all the major search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo constantly modify and change the algorithms that organise the way search results appear. It’s a wild world out there in search engine cyberspace.
It’s pretty important, then, for any business to stay up to speed with the current best practices in search engine optimisation. After all, there’s not much point creating beautiful, captivating and original content if it’s not appearing in search results.
The leading SEO tools of 2023
Majestic
Majestic is one of the oldest and most widely used SEO tools on the market, and it’s popular for good reasons. Its main focus is on the creation and optimisation of so-called ‘backlinks’, which are links in text, images or video between one website and another one. These can be very important in determining search rankings. For example, if a website with a relatively low amount of traffic contains backlinks to a number of sites with much higher traffic and then directs people to those sites, the search ranking of the lower-traffic site will go up. Over the years it has been in use, Majestic has captured vast amounts of information about how backlinks change and improve the way websites appear in search results. It doesn’t have any Google Analytics integration, but that doesn’t necessarily matter if you want to use it mainly to improve the performance of backlinks in your site. As with most (but not all) SEO tools, it is probably best used by web and marketing professionals; it isn’t targeted towards the non-specialist user.
Semrush
Semrush is a package of software applications that forms one of the most powerful SEO tools developed to date. In total, it offers dozens of different tools for all kinds of search optimisation work; these cover the standard functions of other SEO tools, and a whole host of other functions that enable you to see how your site compares to other sites in your field. It also provides solutions to boost your rankings in search results. Semrush can be a tricky suite of software to use, though, unless you’re already an SEO expert; it’s not great for non-specialist users outside digital marketing or IT teams. It is probably most useful for keyword research, a core area of SEO which is concerned with working out the best keywords to direct traffic to a particular website. This simple-sounding task is actually one of most complicated and fast-moving aspects within the entire SEO industry.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics isn’t simply an SEO tool. It provides a pretty vast array of website performance analysis functions, of which SEO is just one part. Whilst free to use, it requires a small piece of code called a pixel to be embedded into your website, and inevitably shares the data it extracts with Google. It’s probably most useful as a tool for determining where your website’s traffic is coming from, and also for finding out the particular keywords people used as search terms which led them to your site. For e-commerce sites owned by small businesses, there is also a really useful feature for tracking the so-called ‘conversion rate’ (the number of site visits that generate sales on an e-commerce website). This feature can also test the effectiveness of links and keywords throughout your site. Google Analytics is perhaps best as a tool for data analysis to work towards enhancing and streamlining the effectiveness of your overall digital marketing strategy.
Google’s Search Console
Google’s Search Console, on the other hand, is a free SEO tool that’s designed specifically for non-experts to use. The idea behind it is to give website owners with a minimal budget the tools they need to improve their website’s performance in search rankings. The suite of tools it offers provide instant information on your site’s performance; they also highlight anything that is hindering it from working as well as it could be. In this respect, and because it’s free to use, Google Search Console is probably the best SEO tool for website owners without a big budget to spend on more sophisticated SEO activities.
SpyFu
SpyFu is an interesting newcomer to the SEO tools marketplace. It is specifically focused on searching for and generating data about the particular keywords that websites purchase through Google’s AdWords search-based advertising service. The idea behind this (and a clue is in the name) is that it enables companies to ‘spy’ on their rivals by working out which keywords they are purchasing for digital advertising. In this way, it’s possible to use SpyFu to work out which words and phrases attract the most traffic to a given website. This can be extremely useful in helping to attract more traffic to your site, and you can use SpyFu to keep a close eye on what your rivals are up to at the same time.
There are a great many other interesting SEO tools out there, including Google Optimise, which is used for testing certain website features, and SEOquake, a powerful toolbar extension that allows you to see multiple search parameters at once. And there’s also MozPro, a new kid on the block and a fairly expensive SEO tool which aims to boost website traffic, improve search rankings, and promote a site’s overall visibility across all the different search engines currently in use.
Overall, it’s impossible to say that a particular one of the SEO tools cited in this article is the most suitable one for your business. It could be that your website would particularly benefit from one particular tool, or from several. For example, combining overall website performance analysis using Google Analytics with Majestic’s backlink optimisation and a cheeky touch of SpyFu to check out what your rivals are up to might yield great rewards. Alternatively, your site might benefit from some serious keyword research and optimisation using Semrush. It’s all about working out exactly what will yield the best results in collaboration with an experienced web professional.
Do you need to analyse and optimise the way your business uses SEO? If so, it’s a great idea to have a chat with a friendly digital expert. At Modular Digital, we have an in-depth knowledge of this complex and wide-ranging dimension of digital marketing.
We’d love to discuss the specific needs of your business, so why not drop us a line to go through your requirements in more detail? All great business relationships start with a call.
You can reach out to Emma on 07584 652 285 or emma@thisismodular.co.uk to get the conversation started.
