The Free Tools Needed For Effective SEO

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”

Credited to John Wanamaker

So, what does this quote mean? In short, businesses don’t really know where their money on advertising is going, but there are free tools you can now use to measure the performance of your website.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a key part of SEO. Search engine marketing needs this tool to measure how businesses are doing, especially if you want to check the performance of your own website. It can track how many people have been on your site, the interactions carried out on the page which includes a potential bounce rate. The bounce rate calculates the amount of people going on to your site or website page and exiting without any interaction. A high bounce rate is never good, so you want to avoid this at all costs!

But it can also do so much more, you can track daily, monthly, weekly and even compare time frames from previous years to see if your views have increased or decreased. It shows the pages that are most popular on your website by page views, the bounce rate, time on page and so on, along with where your traffic came from. This could be organic search, social, direct, referral or other, which can help you measure which channel is bringing in the most traffic through customer engagement.

Google Analytics provide such in depth information that is easy to analyse and will advise you on what pages need improvements through identifying high bounce rate pages with no engagement, or pages that aren’t getting any views at all. This is when SEO comes into focus, keywords can be used to get these specific pages ranking better so more customers are finding them and more views are generated.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner can make your life a whole lot easier, it can help you select the best words and long tail phrases that currently have a high search volume and provide alternative ideas that may rank better than the keywords you have executed. You can even compare these keywords against your own website, this can help recognise why some pages aren’t performing well if that keyword isn’t being searched for often on search engines.

As previously noted, Google Keyword Planner can also provide differentiation’s of words and phrases that you have plugged in, offering better performing words that can be used throughout your H1 tags, SEO titles and meta-descriptions. These three elements on your content management system (CMS) will assist in getting that page higher ranking by inserting those high-volume keywords in these elements of the backend system. This also shows how well the keywords you have implemented in these elements are doing against the content on that page. A green light means your SEO is doing pretty good!

I forgot to mention the fact you can specify your keyword research to locations and remove any negative keywords that could be associated with the words you have selected. This allows your research to be even more targeted to get the right keywords for you to improve your website rankings. However, this is an ongoing process. Keyword search volume changes constantly, meaning you need to keep up to date with new and improved variations of the words you have implemented. You may need to change your keywords every month to keep your rankings ahead of your competitors.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords isn’t exactly free, but it allows campaigns to be created to market your businesses products through text ads or videos. Although this comes at a cost, you can pick the budget you are willing to spend for each campaign or ad group. The Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool when creating ad campaigns in Google AdWords, as you can create ads that include they targeted keywords that have a high search volume.

A benefit of using Google AdWords is the information it provides, it allows you to see the Click Through Rate (CTR) for each ad group or campaign, with anything above 2% being a bonus! It also shows the impressions and views for each ad, as well as the search terms people used that brought them to your ad. This can be shown by selecting ‘dimensions’, going to the ‘view’ drop down menu, then select ‘search terms’ or click the keywords tab and the search term button should be displayed. This is another way to recognise more key words that could better target your ads from what people have already searched.

To summarise how this relates to the quote, a lot of the money spent on advertising is normally wasted due to a lack of understanding of where the money goes. However, Google Analytics and Google Keyword Planner are just some of the free tools that will effectively measure your marketing. Google AdWords will promote and raise more awareness of your business, as well as engage with customers and you have the freedom to pick the budget you are willing to spend. These tools mean you no longer need to question where your marketing efforts are going as you can measure and identify various aspects of your businesses marketing that couldn’t previously be recognised.

But why not get The Covey Agency to do this all for you! We can use these free tools that your business needs to effectively measure your marketing, we also specialise in SEO services, so we can implement effective SEO strategies suited to your business using these free tools.