Website performance optimization should be a priority for every marketer. You might have a fantastic-looking website but if it is not converting, then you won’t meet your business objectives. With the increasing online competition, you must provide an excellent user experience to increase click-through-rate and also boost conversion. If your site visitors are finding it hard to load pages, you will experience high bounce rates and eventually your site will not appear on the first search engine result pages (SERPs).
To guarantee that your site is optimized for search engines, it is important to hire an SEO consultant. While there are many resources on DIY SEO, you will realize that most of these tools require technical skills. Your SEO consultant has the time and resources to monitor your pages and diagnose any technical glitches that might be affecting overall speeds and performance.
To do this, it is important to perform a web audit is to reveal individual page load speeds and find suggestions on how the performance can be boosted. By increasing load speeds, your website’s ranking on SERPs will improve and this will then help you meet your business objectives.
Some of the common tools used by these experts include:
1. Über suggest for Keyword Search
While Google Keyword Tool still remains a favorite, you need to consider the changing keyword trends. Most analysts say longer tail keywords will help your target customers find you more easily and increase your ranking on search engines. Über suggest helps you mine longer tail keywords that have not been frequently used.
2. Website Grader
Hubspot is one of the leading sources of free tools to improve website performance. The Website Grader helps the SEO expert to appreciate how your site is performing against the competition. The information provided also suggests what can be done to improve performance. This comprehensive tool assesses traffic and also on-page and off-page SEO. More importantly, technical factors are taken into consideration in assessing the performance of your site.
3. Google Analytics
This is one of the most useful albeit most ignored website performance tools. This is a free tool from Google and your SEO specialist must use it in order to evaluate traffic sources, track site usage, identify top performing content and much more. The information your SEO specialist gets will go a long way in helping him build a solid SEO strategy.
4. Anchor Text Over-Optimization Tool
Google has done a lot of improvements on its search bot and if you are over-optimizing keywords, you will end up getting penalized. An SEO expert can use the Anchor Text Over-Optimization Tool from Remove Em to check keyword density and ensure you are not at risk of having your site devalued. This tool might not have the capacity to remove the keywords but it helps an SEO specialist know where to start. The process will also greatly improve the quality of content on your pages.
5. GTmetrix
If your site is suffering slow load speeds, you risk losing most of your customers. In the contemporary business environment, every lead should be nurtured and this can be done by improving your site speeds. GTmetrix helps to analyze your site’s speeds and also recommends ways to make it faster. You can even track speeds of up to 5 websites and get different recommendations on how to enhance your site’s performance.
6. SEO-Browser.com
If you have ever wondered how search engine crawlers view your page, this is the tool to try. It shows you the site without graphics and pictures. You will get overview stats such as load page speeds, Meta-information, data on number of images and much more.
7. Pingdom Tools
This tool might not be highly visible but it is an amazing secret weapon which an experienced SEO specialist must use. It monitors your website and gives free speed tests. Your pages will be graded based on various factors and this will help an SEO consultant plan the way forward. To monitor uptime, speed and performance, Pingdom is a tool that your SEO consultant must use.
Of course there are many other SEO tools that an expert can use to enhance performance. These include Google Keyword Tool, SERP Rank Tool, Screaming Flog, AHREFs, Moz Pro and SO Sorcerer among others. Your SEO strategist will choose the most suitable tool for your site.
