Want to try and boost your SEO presence for your site this year? Then you need the right tools to do the job. We spoke to a number of SEO experts who attended Affiverse’s Bootcamp last month, to get the insider view on what tools they use in their daily battle to rank higher for their sites and client sites too. You’ll be surprised to see that many of them are free and only require a bit of time and research to get things right.
Google Analytics
Within the Google Analytics suite, there are a whole range of different site monitoring tools that you can use to assess your SEO and content marketing efforts. These reports and tools will give you the information that you need right from the horse’s mouth. This will show you where you rank, as well as which keywords are on the rise in terms of popular search terms. With Webmaster Tools, you can really put your site through its paces, as the data is derived directly from Google.
Integrate Google analytics on your website by adding a unique tracking code to your pages, you can even use Tag Manager to make this easier. It’s a free tool, once you have it integrated you can pull reports on traffic, position, rankings and more.
With this reporting, you can get hints and tips from Google on how to improve your site. It will tell you if there is a significant loss of traffic for example, then you can get to work on figuring out why that is and how you can fix it. This tool gives you all of the analytical data that you need to assess your key word and marketing campaigns. You can create tracking links in here too for simple campaigns to see how they are driving traffic to your site. If you’re making changes to your site and want to figure out the affect that they are having, then you need this tool to be fully integrated.
SEMRush
SEMRush is a tool that is primarily used for keyword and content planning. You can explore your competitors’ keywords, trending ones and even use different locations to assess your own site strategy. You can also assess your domain and historical ranking – all in one place.
This tool uses data from Google and other sources to provide a comprehensive keyword assessment from the web.
SEMRush gives you an automated look at the world of keywords, with cutting edge analysis. When compared to the Google Keyword Planner tool, it gives you more in depth, interesting data that you can use to really niche down and find pockets or area’s of content that can help you drive more users to your site.
If you want to figure out which keywords will offer you an opportunity to grow your site visits, then this keyword research tool can help. This will help you to add to your content on site that is relevant and ranking to get you the visibility that you want. The tool is also free to use, though you can purchase a subscription if you need more in depth analysis and reporting.
Check My Links
Keeping up with operator promotions and ensuring your campaigns are always up to date is a full time job. A broken link can be detrimental to your site SEO, so you should be vigilant on removing these. Moving a page or changing the URL can have a big effect on your site and it can take a while for you to figure out where all of these links are. Check My Links does that for you automatically and alerts you to any broken links so that you can fix them fast and ensure your customers have the best user experience.
This tool crawls through your site and highlights any links that might be causing you SEO issues. It may take you a long time to look through your links manually, so this will save you valuable hours and help automate a simple administrative process. Use this regularly to audit and remove broken links, which is especially helpful when you change your site or rename pages.
SEO Report Card
This tool from UpCity shows you all of the areas that you need to improve on your site, in a simple and straightforward way. The SEO Report Card runs through a series of checks and then reports the results back to you. It takes into account your rank, technical SEO, site experience and trustworthiness too. This allows you to create a list of your most important tasks, which you can then use to improve your site overall.
You can use this as a onetime assessment or check in often to figure out whether your site is improving. If you don’t know where to start with improving your site then this gives you practical advice, in order of importance.
You do need to share your contact information with this site in order to get your results, but it’s worth it to see your SEO information in a condensed version.
Screaming Frog
This SEO staple is used by some of the top ranking sites in the iGaming industry and beyond. It gives you the chance to simplify your processes and get to the root of any SEO issues. When you use these tips to your advantage, you can quickly fix issues that may have taken you hours to diagnose, never mind fix. Screaming Frog’s search spider will make its way through your site and give you the problem data in an easy to scan format. It looks for a range of factors to improve your SEO from helping you develop site maps to analysing page titles and meta descriptions during a crawl and identify those that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your site.
Your time is valuable and this automated tool helps to save it by assessing your site to tell you what may be broken so that you can quickly action a resolution. If you’re focused on improvement over time, then you need this tool. Run it regularly to highlight issues that are holding you back. Whether you’re paying for traffic or working on big SEO strategies, this gives you the information that you need to go forward. Best of all It’s free, though some of the more advanced tools can only be used with a paid subscription.
Remove’em
Penalties from bad links are real and if you’ve managed to incur one, then your rankings may be in free fall. Get rid of those spammy links using this tool to slow down the impact that they’re having on your site. Remove’em goes through your backlink profile and cuts out the ones that don’t make the cut. You can then disavow these through the tool or if you’d prefer to disavow them manually using Google tools, then you can export a list of the spammy links. Keeping your backlink profile clean will keep you out of trouble with search engines despite them saying that links are no longer affecting rankings. You simply don’t want to have connections to sites that are not relevant for you benefit.
If you’ve been link building for a while and know some of your earlier ones are spam, get rid of them now. You can also assess the value of links to figure out which providers are best for you to work with.
Found’s SEO Audit Tool
Another free tool that can help you out, this SEO audit tool will compile a range of features about your site before serving them up to you.
It takes into account content issues, external links and any technical issues that might be plaguing your site. These are then generated into a PDF file that you can share with the relevant teams. This can help you to segment the data before sending it off to those that need to take care of it.
This audit tool gives you all of the right information that you need in an easily digestible PDF report to work through at your own pace. You have a reference that you can look back on and can run these reports regularly. Use them to create action plans and push for site ranking improvement over time. With these tools on your side, your affiliate site might become the rising star that you’ve always wanted it to be. If you’re not driving traffic through SEO effectively, then you’re missing out on a huge amount of visitors that could be making you more commission.
