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Whether you have an SEO agency, freelancer, or manage SEO in house, there are a number of tools out there to help make search engine optimisation easier. Many of them are also useful for anyone managing a WordPress site day-to-day.
SEO (search engine optimisation) is an area of expertise which requires constant learning. It’s always evolving, and it isn’t something you can do once and then forget about. A business should have an SEO strategy in place as part of their overarching digital strategy, and this should be regularly reviewed and updated.
An SEO strategy is best created in conjunction with an SEO agency or specialist, and much of the work should be directed or implemented by them too. But it is also important for a business (a marketing manager or similar) to be armed with enough SEO knowledge to successfully manage that relationship, set realistic goals, to know what success looks like, and whether they are working with a trustworthy partner.
It’s also important to know enough to ensure that the work you are doing isn’t actively working against the SEO strategy.
A certain level of competence can also help you get the most out of any SEO retainer hours you do pay for. If you can make sure that you are doing certain regular small tasks, then these won’t add up to become big time-consuming tasks for your SEO partner. After all, their expertise and time are better utilised on more advanced tasks and strategy work.
In the next part of this series, we’ll take a closer look at some of these tasks you can be doing. But first, let’s look at some of the tools which will help you achieve them.
Keeping up-to-date with SEO news is always wise. You will benefit from the collective knowledge and experimentation of a huge and passionate community of SEO practitioners. You will also always be aware of major algorithm updates, Google news, and useful research and data.
Be selective in your sources though. Stick to trustworthy and well-respected outlets for SEO information.
Here are a few Twitter accounts and websites I’d recommend starting with.
Search Engine Journal is a long-running and well-respected search marketing news and tips website.
Search Engine Land is another well known and well-loved search marketing news and guides site.
Google Search Central is the home of SEO advice directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
This is the Twitter account for tweets from Google’s public liaison with the SEO community.
Aleyda Solis is a SEO Consultant with an amazing SEO newsletter you can sign up to for regular news, advice, tool information, guides and so on.
John is a Search Advocate at Google and hosts regular Search Central sessions over on Youtube, to answer questions from the SEO community.
There are lots of SEO plugins out there, but some stand out in terms of reliability, trust, and usability. Here are 2 we tend to install on every website we build.
Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin available for WordPress, and for good reason. It’s really useful, and can greatly simplify tasks like managing Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, and XML sitemaps.
It’s not going to magically optimise your website when you install it, but it can make the process of optimising certain aspects so much easier.
Redirection is a free and very useful plugin for managing redirects. It’ll also help you create 301 redirects, log 404s, and it’s very simple to use. A must have to keep your WordPress website in good order.
Google’s Search Console is a tool and reporting platform to help website owners and managers with their organic search performance. It has gone through many iterations but is an absolute must for SEO. It allows you to monitor which of your pages are indexed by Google, submit sitemaps, identify errors, view backlinks, monitor usability, find out if your site has received a manual action and much more.
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider won’t break the bank and is one of the most useful little tools out there.
It can crawl a website, like Google’s own spiders do, and extracts huge amounts of data that you can use to identify issues, and or areas for improvement.
They have a free version with limited features which can help you with some basic tasks, especially for smaller sites. Their paid version is £149 a year for a licence and includes an enormous range of features.
They have a full user guide here, and I’ll cover some of the tools uses once we start talking about SEO tasks.
Note.
Before I move on to the next couple, one warning I’ll give you is that you can ignore a fair few of the metrics these following tools, and others of their kind, use. Metrics like Toxicity, Authority Score, Site Health and Domain Ranking are all created by the tools.
They can provide you with some good information but focusing on scores for imaginary metrics will do you no favours.
That out of the way, here are two commonly used SEO tools. Use them wisely.
SEMrush can be pretty expensive for the complete package, but you can sign up for a free account. This will let you use a few of the tools, but with limited keyword tracking and crawl credits.
Among the tools are a site health audit, keyword tracking, domain analytics including organic keyword positions, backlink auditing, and lots of other handy features.
Much like SEMrush, Ahrefs can be pricey, but you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. This will give you access to some basic features from their platform.
This includes organic keywords, backlinks, site health, and a few others.
Both of these tools can be linked with Google Search Console, to add more data.
Tag Assistant is great for ensuring that your Google tags (for analytics, Ads, Tag Manager etc) are correctly implemented and that you’ve not got multiples of any tags firing. This can cause issues with data, so always worth a check.
Redirect Path from Ayima is a very useful little extension to help you check redirects and their paths. You can easily spot pages which have gone through multiple redirects, and it can flag 301, 302, 404 & 500 status codes.
Another useful little extension, Robots Exclusion Checker lets you know if any robots exclusions are preventing your pages from being crawled or indexed.
Last but not least, Google’s Lighthouse is an open-source tool. It can be used to run numerous tests on a page to help you identify issues and areas for improvement. The tests cover performance, SEO and accessibility. This includes Core Web Vitals and page speed.
Now you have some great resources and tools to take a look at. But don’t worry, we won’t leave it there. In the next part of this series, we’ll jump into some of the basic SEO tasks you can be doing on your WordPress website, and how to use these tools to achieve them.
In the meantime, if you have any WordPress queries, get in touch.
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This post is designed to help marketing teams and professionals without an SEO background, who have access to their company's Search Console account, and are daunted by the Page Indexing report.
