The key to a successful online business is one thing. Traffic. Essentially, you want as many eyes as possible on your products and your website.

While paid traffic via ads is one way to do this, it can be expensive and often does not convert into sales as well as organic traffic. Therefore, the ideal is to rank your website at the top of search engines like Google, so people can find you organically.

This article will explore some of the tools you can use to help you rank your website at the top of Google.

Yoast

If your website is on the popular WordPress platform, then Yoast SEO is a fantastic free tool to help you get a higher ranking.

As you write your content (whether it be a blog post, page, or product information), Yoast will scan it and give recommendations on how to make the page more search engine friendly.

These suggestions can include anything from text formatting, link building, or title tags.

It is probably one of the best free software around for on-page SEO optimisation. It also has a premium option with even more features!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks all of the activity on your website. It will break down everything from where visitors come from, what devices they are using, how long they stay on your website, and what pages they visit.

This is extremely useful, as the data can help you optimise your site for optimal performance.

Because the data is coming from Google, any recommendations made are going to help you rank your site better.

You have to think outside of the box a little about what the information is telling you and how it is impacting your website's performance and rankings. For example, if your bounce rate is high on mobile devices, then perhaps the mobile optimisation of your website (such as display, ease of use, etc.) is not the best.

Websites with high bounce rates or ones that are not optimised as well for mobile are not going to perform as well in search engine rankings.

The downside of Google Analytics is that it does have a learning curve, as it conveys so much data in different ways. With this in mind, if you’re going to use it, then you should take Google’s free course on how to get the most from it.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a premium tool; however, it does have a free option that allows you to crawl 500 URLS a month, which is usually enough for a standard user with one website.

It is a great tool for performing site audits.

The user interface is a little outdated, but it is extremely easy to use with a simple start and stop button.

It will then crawl your site and display all of your website links, text displayed in search engine feeds, head tags, and main keywords.

It is a great wait to see your on-site optimisation at a glance and check that the keywords you are optimising for on any given page match the one used in your link, which will benefit you when it comes to search engine optimisation and rankings.

Answer The Public

Answer the public is an amazing online resource, where you can type a keyword and it will give you suggestions of keywords people are searching for.

This information is invaluable as it will then allow you to create content around search terms people are looking for, helping you to rank.

Often the search results from Answer The Public return questions. For example, if you were to type in the search term ‘search engine optimisation’, a result to create content around might be ‘How to do search engine optimisation.’

Mobile Friendly Test

More than 50% of traffic now comes from mobile devices, so it is extremely important to ensure your website is optimised for these visitors.

This is for two reasons. Firstly, Google and other search engines will penalise websites that do not meet their requirements.

Secondly, if your site is not optimised, then your users could bounce straight off your website. This means they are not going to get to the point of purchase, which is the whole point of driving traffic.

With this in mind, you should use a tool like Mobile Friendly Test, which will test your site’s mobile compatibility against Google’s recommendations and makes suggestions to improve.

Summary

These free tools are fantastic to help you rank your site in the search engines and keep as much of your traffic on page as possible.

What is Mobile-Friendly & Responsive Web Design?