4 Tools for Search Engine Optimization — People First Content

Has this happened to you? You’ve been working on this project. It’s an original idea, perfectly executed, that you know that your audience will eat up. You’ve created what is quite possibly your magnum opus.

You hit publish and spin around in your office chair, waiting for the likes, views, and shares to start rolling in.

And then… nothing. Crickets. Your baby is just there, languishing in obscurity, drifting in a sea of ignored content.

So what went wrong? 99% of the time, it’s poor search engine optimization (SEO). As content creators, we want to focus all our energy on our product.

But as the old saying goes, if content is published on the internet and no one can find it, does it make an impact?

So this is our list of tools to help your market find you!

What is SEO?

The term gets thrown around a bunch, but what exactly is search engine optimization? SEO is the process of changing the visibility of content in a search engine’s unpaid results, also known as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results.

For search engine optimization on Google, there are three steps:

• On-page optimization: this is the process of making sure that your site is as optimized as possible for search engines.
• Off-page optimization: this is the process of obtaining links from outside websites and social media platforms. This helps increase your page rank and can help you rank higher on search engine result pages.
• Technical optimization: this is the process of ensuring that your site loads quickly and tweaking the under the hood operations.

Cost for Search Engine Optimization

The price of hiring an SEO expert varies depending on what you need them to do, how much you need them to do, and how often. To give you an idea of the range of costs, you could pay $80 for an hour consultation to $30,000 for an extensive project.

If you’re looking to outsource the process, these are some red flags to look out for!

• Beware anyone who promises guaranteed ranking results! There is simply no way to ensure that you’re going to be on the front page for anything.
• There’s also no way to have instant results. Optimization is a process. Some things are quick fixes, but a lot of SEO is long-term work.

If you’re a small business or just looking to keep costs low, these prices can be prohibitive. The good news is there are a lot of free tools out there for you to use!

Free Tools

Since SEO takes a lot of different aspects of your content and website into account, you’ll need an arsenal to cover your bases. With that in mind, here are the tools that we at People First Content recommend.

As the most popular search engine, asking Google precisely what it’s looking for just makes sense. Google Analytics is a web analytics service by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for marketers and web admins to analyze their site’s traffic and improve their site’s performance. It allows the user to track the following:

• Number of visitors on your site, where they come from, how long they stay, what pages they visit, what links they click on.
• Your site’s conversion rate.
• Which landing pages or campaigns are generating the most conversions.
• What keywords people are using to find your site (this information can be used to focus your SEO efforts).
• Your site’s bounce rate (how many visitors leave after viewing only one page).

SEMrush is a powerful marketing tool that helps you find the most effective keywords for your website to increase your rankings on Google.

The SEMrush Keyword Tool is a free tool that provides keyword suggestions and competitive intelligence. It also helps you determine how much traffic you can get from search engines with a given set of keywords.

The SEMrush Competitor Keywords Tool lets you see how your competitors’ data all in one place. It shows you how they’re ranking for specific keywords and what their organic and paid search traffic is like. You can also use this tool to find new ideas for SEO content that will drive more traffic to your site.

SEMrush has a free version that offers limited features for up to 200 queries per day. The paid version has no limits on the number of queries per day. There are three different pricing plans — Basic, Pro, and Business — with additional features available at each level.

Moz is an SEO company that helps people with their internet marketing. They have various tools that are all designed to help you with your SEO.

They have paid services, but they also provide some free SEO tools that are extremely valuable:

Ubersuggest is an online keyword research tool that helps you find long-tail keywords for your blog. It has a database of over 1 billion keywords, meaning you won’t be running out of content any time soon.

You can use Ubersuggest to generate new ideas, identify related topics, and optimize the search performance of your website or blog posts. It also has a keyword explorer tool that will let you export all the data to Excel or CSV formats so that you can do more advanced analysis on it.

Ready, Set, Optimize!

SEO is one of the biggest hurdles between your content and your audience. Luckily, with these free tools, you’ll be on your way to being an SEO champ. Maybe you’ll even land a coveted first-page position!

But don’t forget that it all comes down to good content in the long run. It doesn’t matter how many tricks you have up your sleeve if your content is messy, inaccurate, and generally unhelpful. That’s why at People First Content, we always start with quality content. So if you’re looking for content for your website or blog, look no further and schedule a call today!

Originally published at https://www.peoplefirstcontent.com on February 8, 2022.