In the world of search engine optimization, it’s imperative to track metrics for your clients. You always want to know how their websites are fairing in the rankings so that you can measure the success of your SEO campaign. Here are some critical tools used for measuring and improving SEO.
SERP Workbench
The SERP Workbench is a great tool for tracking the rankings of keywords for all of your clients. Simply add your client’s URL and all of the keywords that you’re tracking for your clients, and this Google Chrome extension will begin tracking your progress. Complete with stats and graphs, the SERP Workbench also allow you to monitor how your competitors are ranking on the keywords that you’re optimizing towards.
Open Site Explorer
SEOmoz, one of the leaders in SEO tools and news, offers this tool for free to the world. As we all know, links are everything in search engine optimization, and having a good method of measuring the number of links pointing at the sites of your clients is critical. Open Site Explorer will tell you how many links a site has pointing to it, as well the number of root domain to root domain links (crucial metric to have!). It also goes one step further by providing both page authority of the and domain authority, a metric created by SEOmoz that is a very accurate predictor of how a site will perform in the search engine rankings.
Check My Links
Another browser extension, Check My Links, helps you with on-page optimization. Every SEO company needs this tool; having a broken link on a page is bad for the user experience, meaning search engines won’t like it either. Find broken links by simply clicking on the Check My Links extension, which will tell you exactly which links on your current page are broken.
**Tip!** This is a great way of getting an “in” for a new client or a link back to your own website. Log on to a random website and run Check My Links. If you find a broken link, email the webmaster and let him know! He or she will be thankful you pointed this out to them, and at this point you can ask them for a link back for your help or perhaps to have a quick conversation about what else you can do for them!
WebPageTest.org
Google’s Panda algorithm is aimed at lowering the rankings of bad websites with unpleasant user experiences. One of the factors of the Panda algorithm is page speed. If a website loads very slowly, wouldn’t you leave that page in search of one that’s faster? Google believes you would, and as a result you want to make sure that all your pages are loading quickly. Enter WebPageTest.org! Just enter a site’s URL into the prompt, press start, and you’ll see a few things pop up: a number of grades, A-F, telling you how well your site ranked for speed, as well as the really cool part, the waterfall chart, which displays how fast each item on your page loaded. This means you can see exactly what’s slowing your page down, and address the issues.