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Creating a new website can be scary. Even before creating one, you have to decide so many factors. You have to decide between webflow, WordPress, and old-fashioned javascript.
Once you make that decision, you have to hunt for a good domain. After thinking for days, you finally come up with a name, only to find out that the domain is taken.
SEO can be another headache. If not approached in the right way, you will spend weeks breaking your head over backlinks and keywords.
You end up giving up on SEO, and you end up hurting your website.
SEO helps your pages appear on Google when users search for certain keywords. As you improve your SEO, your website will start appearing on the first page.
The goal is to improve your website’s authority and increase traffic. It is important to use the right tools that will help you with on-page SEO, technical SEO, and keyword optimization.
The following tools will help you fast-track your website’s SEO performance and get your pages to the first page of Google.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools for a good reason. The impactful features justify the price.
When I first started my SEO journey, I was hesitant to get an Ahrefs subscription. Hundred dollars for the basic plan felt too much.
But after getting it, I was truly impressed by how easy it was to use and how much you could get done with it.
When you open the app, you land on the Ahrefs dashboard. The dashboard gives you a bird eyes view of all of your sites and their details, such as backlinks, ratings, traffic, and keywords.
From the dashboard, you can navigate to the site explorer. I used this feature the most.
In the site explorer, you get detailed insights about your backlinks, traffic, pages, and keywords. You can see all your dofollow and nofollow links. You can also see the page rating for all your linking pages.
The Keywords Explorer helps you find low-competition keywords with significant traffic. These keywords are great for getting initial traffic to a new website or blog.
The Site Audit feature tells you if your site has any issues, such as orphan pages, duplicate pages, etc.
Surfer SEO
On-page SEO is another important factor for SEO. It helps people find your pages when they search for particular words and phrases.
Surfer SEO is a great tool to optimize your blog posts. Using the content editor, you can target relevant keywords and add them to your blog post with a good keyword density.
The content score helps you avoid keyword stuffing — too many keyword occurrences.
Once you get a good score of around 80, you can publish it to your website’s blog.
The Surfer SEO extension is a great way to use this tool on your favorite editors, such as WordPress and Notion.
Google Tools
Since you are trying to get your pages on Google, using their tools is a good idea. Google Analytics is a great and essential tool for any website. You can integrate it using the Gtag on your pages.
Google Analytics is a great tool for understanding how users react to your page. You get page views and user reposts. You can compare your organic traffic with non-organic traffic. This is a great indication of whether your keyword research is working.
You also get detailed insights about button clicks, engagement, user behavior, and link clicks.
Google Analytics is also a must for startups to determine if their ads and marketing are working.
Pairing Google Analytics with Google Search Console will give you more insights. You will get your website’s total clicks, average CTR, average position, and total impressions.
You can submit your website’s sitemap to the Search Console to get your pages indexed. You can also see which pages are not optimized for mobile and fix the issues.
Sitechecker
This extension helps you optimize your on-page SEO. It helps you with your meta title and description. It also alerts you when you use multiple H1s by accident.
Sitechecker also helps you with your keyword placement as you get the keyword density of all your keywords. You also get information about internal, external, and subdomain links.
Semrush
Semrush is a competitor of Ahrefs. It offers similar features at a similar price. But Semrush helps your rank for keywords in particular locations. That’s why Semrush is popular amongst local businesses.
If you can afford only one tool between Ahrefs and Semrush, you can try each and decide which one to commit to.