Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of crafting your business’s online presence to meet the needs of search engines. Put differently, SEO is meant to help you increase both the quality and quantity of the traffic your website receives. This is because if you want to generate more revenue, then you have to generate more traffic. At the same time, though, you also need that traffic to be relevant – that is, bringing you visitors who will actually use your website and make purchases instead of people who land on your site and realize that it’s not what they were looking for at all.
A lot goes into a strong SEO campaign, so an SEO platform can be immensely useful here. An SEO platform is a technology that can help you with all the different possible ways of gaining more relevant traffic. Perhaps you’re trying to improve the quality of your content, or maybe you’re trying to generate more demand for your services. Both these issues, and many more besides, can be addressed with a strong SEO platform.
What Functionality Should an SEO Platform Have?
When you are looking for SEO software, you’ll quickly find that your options come in many shapes and sizes. Some tools specialize in helping you track your search engine ranking, while others focus on helping you optimize your descriptions. Still other SEO tools can help you find the right keywords or generate high-quality links for your website.
Ultimately, you need to find tools that cover all the required functionalities that will help you meet your specific business needs. Consider the areas below: some tools can handle more than one function here, while others handle only one.
- SEO Audit: An SEO audit will review your website looking for areas that need to be improved. For example, this audit may help you uncover broken links that may be harming your rankings. SEO maintenance is critical, and an SEO audit tool can help you with that.
- Link Building: You should also find a tool that can help you build out more credible links. Internal links are important because they help describe to search engines which pages should be ranking for which keywords. Likewise, generating links back to your own website from other authoritative websites increases your website’s relevance and credibility.
- Technical SEO: When search engines are trying to categorize your website, they are going to use crawlers, or programs that decide how to index websites and decide how relevant they are to users’ searches. So, technical SEO refers to making your website easier for these crawlers to categorize and rank highly.
- Rank Tracking: You need to keep an eye on your rankings among search engine results. It is just as hard to stay at the top of that list as it is to get there. If your ranking starts to slip, then you’ll want to know so that you can do something about this.
- Keyword Research: You can probably think of a few keywords in your industry, but there very well may be others that you’ve overlooked. Keyword research is an important means of finding the right terms, in addition to understanding which terms are most often searched by customers.
- Content Optimization: Content marketing is the cornerstone of SEO, so you need to get the most out of every piece of content. Optimizing your content means making sure it includes the right keywords and communicates the important information.
Some top SEO platforms include:
- Ahrefs: This is a large, comprehensive SEO platform that excels when it comes to keyword research and building links.
- SEMRush: This is arguably the largest SEO platform available today. It excels at keyword research, and it also offers a free, informal resource library called SEMRush academy that will help you get the most out of this tool as you work on your SEO campaign.
- Screaming Frog: This is an SEO tool that will help you with technical SEO.
- Moz: This is an SEO platform that provides one of the largest sets of free SEO tools on the market. The tools included here can provide SEO support for domain, page, and keywords.
- Yoast: This is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress. One of its most popular features is that it will optimize your content as you write.
Enterprise SEO Platforms
If you are looking for SEO tools meant for large companies, then you need to find an enterprise SEO platform. This kind of SEO software can provide you with access to SEO techniques that can help you figure out how to do SEO on a larger scale.
When you are looking for an enterprise SEO platform, you may want to start with Google Analytics or Google Search Console. These are tools that can help you with:
- Content marketing, or the content that makes your brand and messaging visible to prospective customers
- Workflow, to make sure that your marketing and content creation processes are efficient
- Competitive intelligence, which will help you keep an eye on your competitors
- Predictive analytics, which can help you keep an eye on your investment returns
However, there are also SEO agencies and SEO firms that can provide professional help and support with SEO techniques and SEO tools. Some of these options that you may want to consider include:
- Brightedge: This is a large content marketing platform that will help you optimize your content, increase your traffic, and boost your conversion rates.
- SEOClarity: This platform is tailored to enterprise companies, providing you with the customizability you need as your website changes with your company’s growth.
- Conductor: This SEO platform provides access to both free and premium marketing tools that offer the versatility you need to make inroads into your market.
- Demandwell: Demandwell is an exciting new SEO platform that provides you with comprehensive digital marketing assistance. Ensure that your digital marketing campaigns and SEO are tailored specifically for your target audience and will meet your business goals with this full-service firm.
Whether you decide to brave SEO tools on your own, use an SEO platform, or hire an SEO firm to get that expertise, make sure you’re aware of how taking advantage of SEO platforms can improve your digital marketing campaigns.