19 min read
7 Best SEO Tools For Your Startup [Ranked & Reviewed]
Did you know that 90.63% of web pages on the internet are not getting organic traffic from Google? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the...
18 min read
Anastasia Nenova •
Published:
January 24, 2023
The process of improving the functionality of your website and raising its search engine rankings is known as website optimization, the goal of which is to increase website traffic and conversions, resulting in more revenue.
With that being said, online marketers and business owners often neglect to thoroughly optimize their websites before moving on to other marketing strategies. However, you can successfully and efficiently connect with your target market, by optimizing your website, without relying on ad investment alone to drive traffic.
The process of improving the functionality of your website's performance in order to attract more visitors, improve site speed, boost conversion rates, and increase sales is called website optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important website optimization practices. The method not only concentrates on getting different pages of your website to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for particular keywords but also makes it possible for prospects to find your business as easily as possible. On-page optimization is the other important factor in this. This strategy makes sure that your website's visitors have the best possible user experience, encouraging them to carry out the necessary action to turn into paying customers.
Any modern digital marketing plan has to include web optimization. A website serves as a company's online home, so it must function well, look good, and be kept maintained. Sales of e-commerce are projected to reach $6.51 trillion globally in 2023. People are increasingly turning to the web to learn more about local businesses; even if you don't offer your products and services online, you really need to be a part of the space in some way.
When your website is properly optimized, it works 24/7 to connect you with people who are looking for you online. Your website and business will show up when customers search for relevant terms. The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to the website optimization process is to optimize for both real people and search engines.
On-page SEO is the process of making web pages more search engine friendly. It can be made better to signal to search engines that your website provides answers to visitors' questions. On-page SEO is a component of search engine optimization that raises the visibility of your website in search engine results (SERPs).
Source: Advanced Web Ranking
A higher SERP ranking on Google will increase organic visitors. 67.60% of all search engine clicks come from the top five organic results.
Technical SEO is another aspect of search engine optimization. By improving your website's structure, technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to find your content.
An example of a Technical SEO report done by ahrefs:
When you create a website, search engines send bots to crawl it and rank each page. Here are some ways to prevent common technical SEO issues:
Your website has to be user-friendly and attractive on mobile devices in addition to laptops and desktop computers. Currently, just over half of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices.
To check that your site functions properly on mobile, you can conduct a basic mobile usability test using Google's Mobile-Friendly Test website optimization tool.
Basic guidelines for optimizing your website for mobile are as follows:
Now more than ever, individuals are doing online searches not only by typing, but also by speaking. It's crucial to voice search-optimize your website for this reason. Voice search has rapidly grown in popularity. According to statistics, 71% of customers prefer voice search to typing when making inquiries. It's important to understand that voice search operates differently from text search, though. In contrast to text searches, which typically use 2-3 words, voice searches more frequently use longer phrases or even sentences.
Source: Thrive
When optimizing for voice search, be sure to include the following:
Website speed directly impacts the SEO of your website and is a recognized Google ranking criterion. If you have an e-commerce site, two seconds is ideal, but your website should load in less than three seconds.
With Google's PageSpeed insights, you can assess how quickly your website loads.
Uncompressed JS and CSS files, the absence of a CDN, the lack of page caching, and large, inefficient files are some frequent issues that cause website speed to load slowly. With extensions or plugins for your CMS, you can quickly fix the majority of these problems.
There are several ways to improve website speed, including:
Core Web Vitals are a group of particular elements that Google believes are essential to the overall user experience of a webpage. The three distinct page speed and user interaction statistics that make up Core Web Vitals are the largest contentful paint (LCP), the first input delay (FIP), and the cumulative layout shift (CLS).
Core Web Vitals are, in essence, a collection of factors that contribute to Google's "page experience" score, which measures the entire user experience of your page. This data can be found under "enhancements" in your Google Search Console account.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures how long it takes for a web page's primary content to load for website visitors. Google suggests an LCP of less than 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID): FID measures how quickly visitors can interact with a web page after their first visit. This includes button taps, link clicks, and custom JavaScript actions. An FID of < 100 milliseconds is what Google recommends.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures the number of layout changes that force the web page's main content to move unexpectedly. These changes impact the way your visitors interact with your site and read the content. A CLS score of 0.1 or less is what Google advises.
There are numerous website optimization tools available to assist in effectively optimizing your website. Tools for website optimization assist you in identifying your website's strengths and weaknesses. You can use tools to detect what is slowing down your website and to optimize the content that is already on it. Some of the top website optimization tools are as follows:
Screaming Frog is an essential tool for any marketer. It's impossible to mention all of this tool's features as it has so many. It gives you a plethora of useful data about your website and can assist you in identifying everything from duplicate content and helping find broken links, to meta descriptions and page titles.
Having all of this information in one place is quite beneficial for organizing your website optimization efforts. Screaming Frog can even be connected to your Google Analytics account to retrieve metrics on web traffic and viewer demographics, among other things.
Prices start at $209 a year for one to four licenses. The more licenses you purchase, the cheaper the payment plan gets.
The existing users of Screaming Frog SEO Audit Tool highly suggest it for crawling a large number of URLs on small to medium-sized websites. Users are afraid to use it on large websites as numerous users claim that the tool frequently runs out of memory. However, this problem is easily fixed by storing crawling data on drives as opposed to RAM. Overall, the greatest auditing tool to utilize in our opinion is still Screaming Frog.
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Your one-stop shop for collecting qualitative data is Hotjar. It comes with a number of features that make it easy to generate heat maps, surveys, user polls, funnel tracking, and everything qualitative.
Hotjar is easy to use, completely free, and provides webmasters and SEO experts with a wide range of tools to work with.
Hotjar has one free plan and three paid plans starting from $32 billed yearly or $39 billed monthly.
Digital marketers can optimize their conversion rates with Hotjar. UX designers, digital analysts, web developers, and product marketers all use this tool. Hotjar is currently a Contentsquare brand after being purchased by the company in September 2021.
Hotjar's innovative screen recording feature stands out as they allow you to record user sessions and pinpoint exactly what is and isn't working. Hotjar was the first to offer this feature and mix a variety of effective feedback collection features into a CRO platform. Now, its competitors are beginning to release features that are similar to it.
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The mobile-first strategy is essential for website optimization for both mobile visitors and for boosting your site's SEO. The Mobile-Friendly Test is useful in this situation. You can test how your website works on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices using this website optimization software.
The test runs in a matter of minutes and yields useful details concerning any issues preventing your mobile phone from successfully loading the web page.
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test is a free website optimization tool.
This web-based tool is free and easy to use for identifying problems with mobile usability on any website. It's helpful both during the stages of development and when creating new content. Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a practical solution for you if you want to improve your website for Google's search results.
Since it has an impact on the page's SEO and user experience, page load speed is very important. One of the tools for website optimization to examine and enhance page speed is Google's Page Speed Insights. Speed tests are available on both desktop and mobile web page versions.
This optimization tool generates insightful data on the possible reasons for the sluggish loading time of a web page. Although the results are very technical, they are nonetheless insightful.
Google Analytics is a free website optimization tool.
As Google shifts to a mobile-first and UX-based search algorithm, it is more crucial than ever to pay attention to your website's speed in order to rank organically. The Core Web Vitals, which affect your organic performance, has given PageSpeed Insights undeniable importance.
Google doesn't want to direct users to slow websites, therefore the faster your site loads and displays content, the higher your search ranking will be.
The same score that Google uses to evaluate your website is provided by PageSpeed Insights, which is really helpful in this instance. Even better, it identifies the specific factors that are holding you down and lowering your score, allowing you to go back and correct the problematic sections.
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You can use metrics and figures in Google Analytics to evaluate the outcomes of your site optimization strategy. For the purposes of SEO and marketing, Google Analytics offers statistical and analytical data on the effectiveness of the website. You can monitor changes in visitor engagement and page rankings over time, measure sources, top-performing content, web page visits, and other metrics on time charts.
The information is displayed statistically so you can instantly get a bird's-eye view of the overall condition of a website.
The free version of the Google Analytics website optimization tool is a freemium service that offers essential analytics for both small and medium-sized businesses. However, Google 360 costs $150,000 per year or $12,500 per month if you need more advanced features. Google Analytics has two pricing tiers: free and 360.
The most popular online analytics tool in our opinion is Google Analytics. Even as a free product, it's still widely used. Although it lacks some enterprise-level functionality compared to its rivals in the space, the introduction of the paid Google Analytics Premium edition is likely to close the gap.
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A set of tools for website optimization called Google Search Console makes it easier to track and fix your site's performance in Google Search results. It is a set of tools for tracking search queries, website traffic, ranking, crawl data, and other indicators for website optimization.
The best thing is that it offers extensive data about the site's visibility on the SERPs and is free to use. Business owners, SEO experts, and web developers can use this tool to understand how Google views its website.
Google Search Console is a free website optimization tool.
You can use the Google Search Console web optimization tool to submit your sitemap to ensure there aren't any mistakes, check for security, use site analytics to evaluate the performance of your website, set preferred domains, verify robots.txt files, and improve the exposure of your website, just to name a few. All of these make sure your website ranks higher.
One of the most popular ways to improve your website is through experimentation, and Google Optimize is one of the best website optimization tools for this. To make data-backed decisions, Google Optimize lets you test your website content, layout, and design. To increase conversions and visitor engagement, you can develop several experiments to test various website features.
In our opinion, Google Optimize is the best free website optimization tool on the market right now. The upgraded version of Google Optimize - called Optimize 360 - offers a few additional perks. Where advanced A/B test experiment building is required, it performs better than Google Optimize's free version. In order to use detailed customer behavior and segmentation, it also integrates with Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360 (an upgraded version of Google Analytics). Google Optimize costs $150,000 per year or $12,500 per month.
Native integration with Google products such as Search Console and Analytics
If you're just getting started with A/B test experimentation, purchasing Google 360 right away might not be economically sustainable for you. Utilize free A/B testing tools, such as the free version of Google Optimize, to evaluate your requirements. If less expensive options don't meet your needs, Google Optimize 360 might be the right tool for you.
Google Optimize 360, on the other hand, is intended for individuals who are familiar with the capabilities of an advanced testing tool and know how to make the most of them. It's perfect for businesses with a big budget who need a tool to manage A/B testing on a regular basis for their optimization efforts.
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SEMrush is an excellent SEO tool that provides you with all the crucial information you'll need to successfully optimize your website and bring in more website visitors. Its link-building and site auditing tools, which provide you with a great 'CRM' style approach to creating backlinks and an incredibly simple checklist of methods to enhance your technical and on-page SEO, are its highlight features in our opinion.
A special mention should go to its "search intent" feature, which enables you to focus on producing content for the target keywords that are most likely to result in sales and conversions.
SEMrush has three pricing plans starting at $99.95 billed monthly.
SEMrush is a vital tool for businesses that are serious about online presence and website visitors. It offers more than 55 products, tools, and add-ons across online visibility management, including tools for search, content, social media, and market research, data for over 142 countries, and seamless integration with Google and task management platforms.
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Ahrefs is an on-page optimization tool and SEO software suite that includes tools for site audits, link-building, keyword research, ranking, and competition analysis.
You can track backlinks on any page, analyze link profiles on your website, search ranking keywords, and more. One of the greatest tools for creating and optimizing website content for SEO and visitor intent is Ahrefs.
Ahrefs has four main pricing plans starting at $99 billed monthly, or $83 per month billed annually. There is no getting around the fact that website optimization tools like Ahrefs are quite pricey when compared to many other SEO tools.
That is somewhat understandable, though, with these kinds of solutions, you pay for access to massive amounts of data, including competitor intelligence, in addition to functionality.
Ahrefs is a well-known SEO software suite with a long list of capabilities, such as technical SEO audits, keyword research, and backlink analysis. Ahrefs has become a market leader in SEO software thanks to its combination of an excellent user interface and world-class data.
Overall, Ahrefs has our highest endorsement. It's one of the leading website optimization tools available right now, in our opinion.
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One of the few free website optimization tools that provide in-depth analysis of your site's organic and local SEO is Moz. It emphasizes keyword research to determine customers' intent, increase website traffic, and raise SERP rankings. Moz analysis is an essential component of your website optimization arsenal as it allows you to watch competitors, execute audits, and determine what is working for your website.
Additionally, it offers the Mozbar Chrome addon for mobile SEO metric tracking.
Each of the four price tiers for Moz Pro provides a different amount of data limits. Their plans start at $99 billed monthly, or $79 per month billed annually.
Like many software providers in today's market, Moz Pro offers a free trial. You need to input your credit card details while signing up in order to access their 30-day free trial.
You will automatically be subscribed to their Medium price plan, which costs $149 per month if you join up for it after the free trial completes. It's vital to remember that other types of plans are not eligible for a free trial.
The main Moz Pro interface is clean and easy to use. While still part of the Moz Pro suite, it can be disjointed in other areas, with tools like Open Site Explorer providing a separate user experience.
By overlaying information on Google search results while you browse, the superb MozBar Chrome extension integrates Moz Pro's tools into your browser. Any newcomer to the world of organic search should download the Moz SEO toolbar as a minimum standard.
Overall, Moz Pro is among the most user-friendly tools available for beginners who want an overview of key SEO metrics.
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The industry-leading platform from Optimizely provides a full suite of technologies for improving the digital user experience, including personalization and experimentation powered by AI that includes server-side testing, A/B testing, and multivariate testing.
Optimizely has four pricing plans. Their Start plan is free and their Manage plan costs $79 per user per month, while their other two plans (Create and Orchestrate) require custom quotes.
Specifically catering to enterprise customers, Optimizely is an experimentation platform. They provide a robust solution that is aimed at businesses that take testing and personalization seriously and have high-traffic websites.
You can safely run several tests on the same page with their Web Experimentation product.
In order to improve your complete customer experience, you can even use Optimizely outside of your website and on other platforms such as mobile apps and messaging platforms.
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The capabilities of behavioral analytics and website testing are combined in one platform with Crazy Egg. To gather behavioral data, it offers eye-tracking tools, creates heat maps, and monitors user clicks on your website. After that, you can use this information to create testable hypotheses for your experiments.
To optimize your website for conversions, you can use the tool to set up various tests without writing any code. Crazy Egg might be considered one of the greatest website optimization tools on the market, as it allows you to record visitor behavior on web pages using session recordings in order to collect data both before and during the test.
Crazy Egg has five plans, with their Basic plan starting at $29 per month.
Using Crazy Egg technology it's possible to track clicks, identify hotspots, and determine where visitors stop scrolling. It also links different traffic types with clicks. Crazy Egg has more features than Google Analytics, making it the perfect alternative for web managers, UI designers, and digital marketers looking to optimize their capability to track visitors.
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User experience, traffic, ranking, accessibility, and conversion rates all improve as a result of website optimization. Our list of six website optimization strategies includes improving content marketing, improving SEO, and getting feedback from customers.
After putting these methods into practice, be sure to monitor and evaluate your website's performance. Your website's conversion rates, traffic, SERP ranking, and customer retention are among the data you should look into.
To assist you in putting these strategies into practice, we have also included 12 website optimization tools. These tools are all focused on different aspects of website optimization.
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