If you have a website—and you should already have one at this point—you need to invest in search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is arguably one of the best traffic sources for any website:
- It’s free. At least once you start ranking.
- The traffic you get is recurring.
- The traffic has longevity. Unlike paid ads, where you lose most of your traffic the moment you turn off your ads.
- It offers impressive ROI.
When done right, your SEO initiatives can lead hundreds, if not thousands, of site visitors to your startup, which puts you in a great position to sell and explode your revenue.
To increase your startup’s winning chances at SEO, we’ve put together six of the best tools to support your SEO initiatives.
Let’s hop right in.
1. ahrefs
Image Source: Ahrefs.com
Right off the bat, we hands down need to talk about ahrefs.
It’s a swiss army knife-like SEO tool that can skyrocket your SEO initiatives to nauseous heights.
Ahrefs has truckloads, and I mean T-R-U-C-K-L-O-A-D-S, of features designed to rank its users’ pages on Google’s top pages.
Here are some of its most used features:
- Keyword research. Find relevant, less competitive keywords with decent search volume.
- Site explorer. Gain insights about a site, whether your competitors or your own. Learn the site’s top-performing pages, the keywords it ranks for, etc.
- Site audit. Uncover SEO gaps on your site in seconds using the site audit feature.
- Content explorer. It helps you come up with content ideas quickly and effortlessly. For instance, if you provide SaaS such as robust customer onboarding software, you can use the tool to create content topics such as “Top X Reliable Tools to Streamline Your Customer Onboarding Process.”
We’re just scratching the surface with the features mentioned above.
Ahrefs has hundreds of other features to help you create, execute, and track your small business’s SEO strategy.
Ahrefs’ most affordable pricing plan is $99. But considering the value you get from the tool, $99 is a small price.
2. Omnisend
Image Source: Omnisend.com
Email can have a massive impact on your SEO initiatives.
Think about it…
There are a handful of elements that significantly impact your page’s rankability.
One of these elements is backlinks.
The more quality backlinks you drive to your SEO content, the bigger its chances of ranking.
So how do you connect email software with backlinks?
There are a couple of ways, actually. You can use your email software to:
- Promote your SEO content to your email list. Depending on how you craft your email, there’s a good chance your email list will link to your SEO content, bringing your more backlinks!
- Send outreach messages for your guest posting campaigns.
- Send surveys to uncover your email list’s burning issues, then create SEO content around the keywords that often pop-ups so you can target and rank for them.
Omnisend has email scheduling, automation, and many professional-looking templates perfect for promoting your SEO content and generating backlinks.
It’s the perfect email software to supplement your SEO initiatives.
What’s more?
Omnisend has TONS of email marketing examples on their site to help their users create winning email marketing campaigns.
Omnisend has a free package which already contains lots of features. Using Omnisend is a no-brainer tool for people who want to get ahead in SEO.
3. Answer the public
Image Source: Answerthepublic.com
What’s a surefire way to provide value to your readers?
The answer: Answer their questions.
Most of the time, people search online to find answers to their questions. They have burning issues they’re looking to address, so they go to Google to run their searches.
Now imagine having SEO content that directly addresses the questions of your readers.
Let’s take this further.
Imagine having hundreds of these pages?
Can you see how sought out your startup website can become?
Can you see how much relevant traffic you can generate?
Lastly, can you see how much sales you can make if your pages are designed for conversion?
If only there were a way to figure out what questions your audience is asking.
Well, that’s how Answerthepublic.com can help you. 🙂
Just enter your keyword in its search box, and the tool will show you the questions your target audience is typing in when they’re on the search engines.
So here’s your gameplan:
- Step 1: Enter your target keywords in Answerthepublic.com.
- Step 2: Scrape/export the results.
- Step 3: Run your keywords in ahrefs to ensure they aren’t too competitive.
- Step 4: Create blog posts based on questions that aren’t too competitive.
For instance, if your target keywords are “cheap dedicated server”, search for common questions around your keywords on Answerthepublic.com and check for keyword competitiveness on Ahrefs.
Start creating blog posts and other content based on the results.
Answerthepublic’s paid package starts at $99. However, just using the free plan alone is almost always enough.
4. ClickUp
Image Source: Clickup.com
You need a team that works like a well-oiled machine to succeed in SEO.
Alignment is crucial.
The person who does keyword research and content topic creation need to be synced. The keyword research findings need to be available for the writers to see.
Those who do content updates also need to know when to do the updates and what updates to make.
The link builders also need to know which SEO content is the top priority for building backlinks. Otherwise, they might build links for less important pages.
TL;DR: Running an SEO campaign can be a total nightmare. It has LOTS of moving parts.
That’s why you need a process workflow tool like ClickUp.
The software allows you to create diagrams, tasks, and automation and even has reporting features to sync your team’s SEO initiatives.
As you set up the tasks that need to be completed, whether it’s about ranking a particular page, building backlinks, and even setting up GitHub backups for your DevOps team, everyone can see the comments and status of the task, so they know its progression.
There is transparency.
And the information is centralized, therefore, easy to obtain.
All this makes your SEO campaign more cohesive and impactful.
ClickUp has a free plan. Its most basic, a paid subscription is $5 per member.
5. Surfer SEO Tool
Image Source: Surferseo.com
SurferSEO helps you create winning SEO content.
It analyzes Google’s top pages for your target keywords, such as the “top online church management software” to give you suggestions that will help you rank better.
Instead of guessing how to write an article that will rank well on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), use SurferSEO to base your assumptions on analysis.
SurferSEO offers suggestions on what keywords you should insert, the number of times you need to insert the keywords, the subheadings you should insert, and even assigns a content score on the pages ranking on Google, etc.
Your goal is to develop helpful content for your readers with a better score than your competitors.
Even SEO article writing companies leverage the power of SurferSEO. The tool offers comprehensive suggestions, and many of SurferSEO’s users achieved good SERP rankings even for highly competitive keywords.
SurferSEO has a myriad of other features that are worth mentioning:
- GrowFlow. This AI management platform gives you bite-sized tasks daily to improve your site’s SEO.
- SEO Audit. This feature reveals SEO gaps on your site so you can fix them and give the search engines more reason to rank your pages.
- Outline Generator. Get an outline generated by SurferSEO’s AI quickly and easily. This is perfect if you have several writers working for you.
SurferSEO has a free plan. Its most affordable paid subscription is $49 per month.
6. Vista Social
Image Source: Vistasocial.com
Vista Social is a social media management tool that agencies commonly use.
It helps agencies increase their clients’ visibility on social media by scheduling and automating posts, replying to messages from a single platform, and generating more views and engagements.
Can you see how any of those can impact your SEO?
If you answered “no,” then here’s how.
- Share your SEO content several times within a day by reposting them. That way, more people will see it, increasing their chance of linking to the post. (Remember how essential backlinks are for SEO?)
- Feature influencers in your industry to cozy up with them and develop some form of collaboration. That leads to all sorts of SEO benefits from backlinks to them guest posting, which then adds valuable content to your site, etc.
- Run contests. Make linking to one of your SEO content a requirement for joining. If your contest’s prize is enticing enough, you will build many backlinks.
It’s incredible how social media marketing can boost your SEO initiative, huh?
Vista Social is packed with social media marketing features that can boost your content’s visibility. You can:
- Use Vista Social’s scheduling feature to reschedule your TikTok videos, so you get more mileage and views out of them. Even if you’re new to TikTok, you can easily reach 1,000 TikTok followers just by following this strategy. The more followers you have on TikTok, the better your chances of bringing traffic and backlinks to your SEO content.
- Use Vista Social’s hashtag suggestions to find viral hashtags you can include in your posts. Adding viral hashtags can drastically increase your posts’ reach.
- Use Vista Social’s analytics feature to determine which time of the day you get the most engagements and views when you publish. That way, when you post about your SEO content, you can share them at the best time.
What’s next?
With the wrong SEO tools, your efforts to rank on the SERPs are greatly handicapped.
With the right ones, however, you can gain game-changing insights that can turn your SEO campaigns into absolute winners and obtain the crucial pieces of information in seconds and with less effort.
Invest in the right SEO tools to start ranking your startup’s website pages.
