Working as a freelancer can be an independent and rewarding career choice that allows you to achieve your goals on your terms while earning. That is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in a truly exciting and innovative method of digital marketing with the right tools can drive oneself to greatness.
In order to develop a website and optimise the content successfully you need to be using the right tools as guidance. You must focus on SEO:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics purpose is to provide insights into a website’s traffic such as user behaviour, tracking clicks, channel sessions and devices which can measure your SEO campaign success overall. Using this information you are able to identify ways to improve your SEO strategy through analysis of the data provided you are able to identify your target audience and optimise your content to meet the needs of your potential customers.
This is an essential part of SEO and is used by digital marketing agencies all over the world, therefore as a freelancer, it is crucial to adopt this as a part of your SEO decision process whether it is to target a short-tail or long-tail keyword or to change your keyword completely, optimise a certain page on a site all to remain competitive.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool accessible to all provided by Google that helps website owners and SEO professionals monitor and manage their site’s presence in Google’s search results on desktop and mobile. Google has made it convenient now that you don’t have to search your website every day and any problems with indexing an alert is sent to you. This further assists your decision-making process to help maintain a high ranking.
As a freelancer, it would be silly not to use something that’s completely free and useful, as Google is known for crawling websites and identifying indexing issues it can easily keep you updated and give you the opportunity to fix a problem on your own convenience keeping your website search appearance fully optimised.
Keyword Research Tools – Moz
Moz’s keyword research ultimately allows you to understand what content to create to assist with your business goals and target the relevant market and traffic. This tool overall helps you discover and assess relevant keywords search volume, competition and potential.
Picking and choosing between relevant keywords whether they are short-tail, long-tail or both, in order to be successful in trial and error on keywords for your site is crucial to ensure your website ranks high in search.
Effective keyword research is arguably the foundation of SEO and should be adopted by every SEO freelancer. This paves the way and starts off the thought process for relevant strategies to be in place. Not only that it allows you to optimise your on-page content and monitor your competitors.
There are alternative sites to conduct keyword research such as Ahrefs or SEMrush.
SEO Audit Tools
There are a vast amount of SEO audit tools available to digital marketing professionals that can make the audit experience smoother and easier such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. An SEO audit is an assessment of a website’s content, site structure and off-page factors such as reviews or anchor text that may influence your search engine rankings.
This tool helps identify problems with your website off and on-page and allows opportunities for improvement. This is a perfect SEO for freelancers to adopt as this can create comprehensive audits of the sites and uncover the issues such as broken links, and missing meta tags without much effort. This is a time-efficient and effective tool that provides reports that assist with optimization.
Backlink Analysis Tools
A backline analysis tool is a thorough evaluation of websites that link to your domain or specific content, this analysis is more than just the number of backlinks but the quality of sites. Backlinks can simply defined as ‘votes’ from other websites that tell search engines if the content is valuable, credible and useful’. The more votes the better for the rankings of your website on search.
Backlinks play a crucial role in SEO which allows freelancers and other SEO professionals to the tool to assess their own backlines, identify broken links and monitor their competitor’s backline strategies.
Tools available to conduct backlink analysis consist of Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz.