SEO Software 2020: A Beginners Buying Guide

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engines (like google, bing) continuously try to optimize their ranking algorithms to show the most relevant results for their users. Optimizing your webpage by these guidelines to appear high in their rankings is referred to as SEO. The traffic from this process is also called organic, free, natural traffic.

SEO helps to increase high-quality traffic as the intent of the audience is high when looking for information on search engines. It also pushes up the quantity of traffic as search is the most common discovery mechanism for most users. Ultimately, what matters is your content is high quality, highly relevant to the target audience.

How does SEO work

Daily over 2 million blogs get published. Add videos and websites, and images, etc. All this new content comes to these search engines every day. Google, Bing, Duck Duck go, Yahoo, etc do the hard job of ranking these pages and showing us the most relevant results. Your website/content is also one of them.

The search engines will scan, crawl and try to understand (user-friendliness, content quality, ease of navigation, etc) all the new websites. Based on its parameters, it tries to identify high quality and high relevance websites across search queries and rank them accordingly. The process of optimizing your website to rank higher in their search results is called search engine optimization.

What are the factors that Impact SEO?

Source: moz.com

On-Page SEO

These are factors that you control and hence can show faster results. Authority and usefulness are the top things search engines look for based on following -

Content

The quality of content on your website is one of the biggest factors in deciding your website rank. Search engines look at the content quality and depth, font size, images, interactive elements, video, ordered lists, readability, etc to determine your content quality.

UX - Design / navigation

Another time extremely important to google is how the users are experiencing and liking your website. Search engines look at tIme on site, bounce, click-through rate, etc to estimate if your website is user-friendly. Hence it becomes critical what to show first, how to show it, how to make users interact with your content etc.

Technical / Tags

Finally, the technical factors like performance, https, Title tag, meta description, Heading and Subheadings, internal links, Alt tags, etc are crucial to tell search engines how to crawl and understand your website. Without this, it is extremely hard for them to rank your website even if you have everything else right.

Off-Page SEO

These are factors that you have very little control over and hence may take time to build.

Backlinks

Trust is an extremely crucial dimension on which search engine ranks websites. One of the most critical factors for determining trust is how many high-quality websites refer to you. This process of other websites linking to you is called building backlinks. Search engine rankings are very sensitive to backlinks from high-quality websites. Building high-quality content and relationships with influencers/fans are the best way to get backlinks.

Social

Another way to build trust is by having quality shares from influencers. Social signals like likes, shares, comments, etc influence your page rankings.

What is SEO software?

SEO software helps you get free traffic by giving you tools like keyword research, link builder, SEO audits, rank tracking, content optimization, etc to rank at the top of the search results.

These tools together help you build your domain authority, page authority and performance in the eyes of search engines. They help you optimize the keywords on which you should win and strategize which search terms to go after. Overall, their main job is to help your website build trust so that you can rank higher for your target audience.

Who uses SEO software?

Seo software is mainly used by digital marketers. The top two profiles of people who use SEO software include

SEO Analyst

The analyst is the person who uses the tool thoroughly to leverage its capabilities to the fullest. They are responsible for keyword research, link building, rank tracking, etc. SEO analysts work alongside the technical teams (or something they are adept with front end technologies) to implement the SEO audit changes. They may also work marketing teams to come up with user research, content ideas, and market analytics.

SEO Manager

Managers are responsible for driving the company’s SEO strategy. This involves regularly monitoring the KPIs and metrics the team is responsible for and staying up to date with the latest changes in SEO. They mainly use SEO tools for reporting, analytics and dashboards to be on top of team deliverables. Occasionally they do some keyword research to understand the user but regularly use it to understand the market needs and trends. They are also responsible for most of the heavy lifting on the off-site SEO strategy around link building - building relationships and getting backlinks.

Content marketers

Content marketers’ primary KPI is to produce content (blogs, videos, images, etc) to drive traffic to the website. And for content to drive traffic it has to win on search engines and hence SEO becomes a key part of their strategy. These tools help them plan their content better and analyze their performance as well.

Acquiring New Customers

Most of the online users go to search engines for their discovery needs and click on top 5 search results. This is the raison d’etre for SEO software. Its main job is to help your website get free, the high intent audience to your website. Since these users have come from organic search, they are usually high intent and usually have good conversion metrics, boosting your website’s credibility further. Free is usually understated. You may be acquiring customers from multiple sources and SEO is the source that usually helps your lower your blended cost of acquisition. If you can start winning on SEO and bulk of your traffic/users start coming from search engines, you have a drastically low cost of acquisition which directly impacts your bottom line.

Visibility and brand

Users trust search engines. Hence they regularly go there for their discovery needs. If search engines rank you high, the users automatically trust you. Once they start coming regularly to your website because of your good SEO ranking, they start bypassing search engines and your brand starts to build. You also get good visibility in front of your target audience (and competition too) if your rank is good. Also, link building is a part of SEO which makes you build relationships with influencers and fans. This helps you build a stronger online brand in the mind of your audience.

Great UX - Website design and performance

The SEO strategy is tightly linked to having a good user experience and usability of your website. Over time, search engines have learned how to evaluate good user experience in terms of design and user metrics. So if your ranking high on search results, it's likely that your user experience will be well reflected by your superior engagement and conversions. You have to improve the performance of your website and the quality of content as it is one of the factors that contribute to ranking which ultimately results in good user experience.

Understanding Visitors, competitors, and market

This is almost a prerequisite to winning in the SEO game. You have to understand your users, their needs, their searches and their behavior across channels if you want to rank high on SEO. You can also use these tools to understand your competitor’s marketing and SEO strategy.

SEO software is usually packaged as a small number of tools put together. Some software only solves a one-pointed problem which some provide a combination of them. Most popular tools include

SEO Audits

This tool helps you with your on-page SEO. This requires the crawler to be really good to dig out deeper issues on your website. You can do a detailed audit of your website, analyze ranking factors for your website, identify areas that need improvement, give actionable recommendations and prioritize issues that need your urgent attention. It also gives detailed analytics into AMP implementation, security issues like https and detailed comparisons with top performers on search engines. They also have alerts so that the system can monitor as soon as it discovers a new issue.

Keyword research tool

This is the most used tool. It is primarily used to answer two questions in which users (and search terms) are coming to my website and which searches should I go after next. It can help you find search traffic for keywords, related phrases to your target keyword, competitor keywords, new keyword ideas, keywords across languages, competition on those keywords, etc. All this can help you understand your users, market, and competition to craft your SEO strategy.

Rank tracking

Some tools provide the ability to track your rank for search keywords (local, national and global). This helps you understand where you are winning, where you are losing, users with which intent are coming to your website. You can use all this data to design your website and content strategy. It also gives you information about who are your competitors, which keywords and phrases your competition is winning for, what is their SEO strategy and insights into their marketing strategy as well. This information comes in hand in differentiating your company from the competition. Having this information over time keeps you on top of keywords which you continue to dominate and the ones where new competition is taking your pie.

Link building / Backlink Monitoring

The tools help with off-site SEO by giving capabilities that can help you make a good backlink strategy. They give an in-depth link analysis, domain authority score, page authority score, check for backlinks, geolocation of links, etc. They also flag the potentially dangerous backlinks and give a spam score to each, thus maintaining a clean backlink profile for your website. You can also keep a tab on where the competition is getting their backlinks from.

Reporting

Finally, It gives reporting capabilities that you can use to customize your reports with drag and drop features. You can automate the report creation and mail to desired recipients.

Content Optimization

These tools help you measure content SEO and social performance. The content audit tools look like your content and report the user metrics (Sessions, CTR, bounce, time on page etc), social engagement metrics (like, share, comments, etc), websites linking to your content and identifies issues which can be preventing your content from being visible to search engines. Finding the best author, best article, comparing them on various dimensions, etc helping you decide which topics your writers should focus on. Apart from the performance of your content, some tools also help you monitor your brand reputation on social media.

SEO toolbar

It gives you your website heath and authority scores for the websites you are interested in.

Most of this software either go deep into any one of the above capabilities or do a good job or all of them. So depending on what your need is ( you are an expert and want to go deeper into one or you are starting out and want to do everything in one place) you need to select your tool. Below we list down the key considerations before selecting SEO tools:-

When do I need to buy an SEO tool

How deeply you get involved with SEO is directly dependent on how important traffic from search engines is to you. If that is a big part of your customer acquisition strategy, then buying an SEO tool makes sense.

Who should buy an SEO tool

Any company that is dependent on traffic from search engines could buy an SEO tool. B2B or B2C, small or big, Financial or technology matter is much less than the above criteria. Beyond that other thing to look at:-

• A large number of online pages

• Large online marketing team size with each team needing its own set of accounts

Horizontal vs pointed

Seo tools come in various shapes and sizes. Some tools specialize in any one area of SEO like keyword analysis or backlinks etc. These tools go deep into the topic and should be used if you are looking to specialise in one domain of it.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a tool that does all the bits together, then some tools are one-stop-shop for all areas of SEO.

For example, If you are a big company with multiple business units and over a hundred thousand pages, you may want to specialize in each area for all your businesses. It would make sense to buy specialized tools for each area.

Which metric to look at while deciding on tool capabilities

To evaluate the capabilities of tools capabilities, look at the following parameters -

SEO audit - Technology audit

• How well the crawler can crawl your website and

• How well it can identify/prioritize the SEO issues

Keyword research

• Depth of the keywords, related keywords, accuracy of the search volumes matter.

• Most importantly how well they can give competitor data is critical

Back-links

• How large is the link database/link index

• How frequently they update this database

Rank-tracker

• The frequency with which the tracker can show you the changes in your rank

API

• If API exists or not

• What quantity of data it allows you to interact with

Community and support

• Obviously while using the tool you will have questions and that's where the community and support will become critical

Some tools offer capabilities of local SEO software that help winning in local listings, local search, etc while other software helps you provide tools to optimize PPC, paid search, ads, etc.

Pricing

Usually, tools have followed a freemium model. They offer a free version for a small time period and then ask you to pay. Some software offers small tools free as a means to acquire customers for the full set of offerings. The pricing is usually a function of users and their usage.

TTV

SEO is usually a long term game. It needs a good amount of time before these tools start to bear fruit. You may start seeing early results within a month but the full-fledged results only bear after 3-4 months. Unlike other customer acquisition strategy, SEO is slow, but deliver high-quality results for a long period of time.

Top Challenges using SEO software

Different rules for different engines

Google, Bing, Duck Duck go, etc all search engines have different rules to rank websites. Having a website and doing SEO for each of them can be time cumbersome. Hence it makes sense to prioritize the search engine where the bulk of the traffic is coming from.

Changing SEO guidelines

To complicate matters further the guidelines of each of these engines are continuously changing. Every new update released by the search engine, you have to rework on the website to make it compliant with the new guidelines.