My 3 favorite SEO tools for 2021
I can’t begin this post without saying the my job description revolves around my understanding and fully utilizing the full Google arsenal of tools. Google Analytics & Search Console especially as the basis for all SEO reporting as they give me first-hand knowledge of my overall website health, how its performing, and what I need to improve on. Investigating deeper into both of these tools can give me great understanding into how customers are interacting with my website, how long they are browsing, and if they are converting or falling off quickly due to a poor experience. They are not included because every SEO references Google as the Holy Grail of reporting data. So without further ado here are my 3 favorites for 2021 (editors note: this list is constantly rotating)
Mouseflow
In addition to the information I’ve gathered from analyzing Google Analytics, I also use Mouseflow to get a better idea of how clients are interacting with my content first hand. If they are hitting painpoints in the conversion process and say, not completing a transaction because there are too many confusing steps in the payment gateway, I can immediately diagnose those issues and ask my development team streamline the process for them. I’ve also found Mouseflow browsing traffic sources a variety of click-farms sending unqualified traffic to websites. With this knowledge I’ve been able to block that traffic via filters in Google Analytics to have better, less skewed, reporting data.
WooRank
This tool in particular has been a huge help in diagnosing various website issues that may be lurking just under the surface of your website. This all in one tool diagnoses SEO issues including some things you may miss like incorrect schema, missing alt tags, broken social media links, as well as mobile friendliness and performance cache issues.
If you don’t have the funds to invest in their paid platform the extension for Chrome is an excellent option
User Testing
This is a great new tool I discovered in 2020. User Testing takes UX and combines it with live user feedback to give businesses tangible action items to improve on. Think of it like this – Your business just launched a new e-commerce website during 2020 to help boost your profit margins. However, despite the pandemic confining most to online shopping, you realize that you are getting the traffic, but you aren’t getting the conversions you were expecting, or many of your customers have abandoned their carts. There could be a variety of reasons that this could be happening but unfortunately you do not have the means to survey your clients. This is where User Testing gets involved by crowdsourcing paid users to test your website and provide real-time feedback via video and screen recordings. It’s like having a quality control panel at your fingertips for a fraction of the cost.
If you are becoming interested in UX Design as a beginner or a college grad without a ton of experience, User Testing will pay you to test products and websites and become a part of their global user community. Once you sign up you will be asked to provide a quick video application showing them that you have a working microphone/webcam software and then for every 20 minute video you record you will get paid 10 dollars, not bad!
Hopefully these tools can also help you!