Digital marketers are often responsible for dozens of moving pieces, such as developing unique strategies, implementing digital marketing campaigns, tracking the results of their efforts, meeting with clients, and more. The tasks are endless!
SEO tools for agencies can automate manual tasks, collect and process information, and make it easier for digital marketers to manage and track all of their SEO efforts. But all SEO tools are not created equal. What types of tasks should SEO tools perform? What are the best SEO agency tools? Here’s what you need to know:
Types of SEO Tasks
SEO is an ongoing process that requires a great deal of work. Most SEO strategies involve a number of different components, including:
- Keyword Research
- Technical Audits
- Content Creation
- On-Page SEO
- Project Management
Keyword Research
Keyword research can help you learn more about your target audience’s search behavior so you can make your pages more relevant to their needs. The information you find while conducting keyword research should drive the rest of your SEO decisions. But the problem that marketers face is this information is constantly changing.
Your target audience’s search behavior may change by the minute, hour, day, week, or month. To keep up with these changes, you must continue to perform keyword research on a regular basis.
Every time you perform keyword research, you must update each of your client’s keyword lists to ensure they reflect the most recent data. But that’s not all. If there have been significant changes to a client’s keyword list, you may need to adjust their SEO strategy accordingly.
Conducting regular keyword research, updating keyword lists, and implementing changes based on these updates is a manual, time-consuming process. But certain SEO agency tools may help marketers automate and simplify this process.
Technical Audits
Performing a technical audit is an important part of every SEO strategy. As a digital marketer, you may need to conduct a comprehensive technical audit for every new client so you can identify issues that need to be addressed.
But your work isn’t over once this comprehensive audit is complete. You may also need to conduct smaller technical audits on a regular basis so you can immediately catch issues as they arise.
For example, say someone publishes a new blog on your client’s website but forgets to include a meta description or title tag. A missing meta description or title tag can hurt this page’s SEO. But if you don’t conduct technical audits regularly, you may not notice that this information is missing and the page’s SEO could suffer as a result of this mistake.
A comprehensive audit can take days, whereas a smaller audit can take hours. Once the audit is complete, marketers must spend even more time addressing all of the issues that were identified. This could mean assigning dozens of tasks to other members of the team, checking to ensure they are done correctly, and measuring the impact of these changes on each page’s SEO performance. Because audits are so time-consuming and difficult to manage, digital marketers often rely on SEO auditing tools to speed up the process.
Content Creation
Although content marketing is often associated with blogging, there are many other forms of content that can improve SEO, including case studies, white papers, videos, and infographics. It doesn’t matter what type of content you create as long as it is relevant to your target audience and properly optimized.
Search engines value websites that publish content on a regular basis. If you aren’t consistently creating fresh content, this could negatively impact your website’s ranking. Because of this, content creation is one of the most time-consuming SEO tasks.
On-Page SEO
As previously mentioned, publishing content on a regular basis is one of the keys to a successful SEO strategy. But it’s also one of the reasons why a digital marketer’s work is never done.
Marketers must implement on-page SEO strategies, such as optimizing each page’s HTML source code, on every new page of content that is published on their clients’ websites.
On-page SEO tactics may include writing keyword-rich meta descriptions, headers, and titles, adding alt text to each image, and including internal and external links within the content. This information must be updated on every single page of new content published on every client’s website. This means marketers may need to make these updates on dozens of pages per week. Even if they assign the task to someone else, they still must confirm that it gets done on time and correctly, which requires a lot of manual work.
Project Management
Implementing an effective SEO strategy involves completing countless tasks and working with multiple parties. This is why project management is such a big part of a digital marketer’s job.
For example, a digital marketer who is working on content creation needs to ensure that tasks assigned to the writers and editors are completed correctly and on-time. They may need to send the content to clients for approval, make edits as necessary, and confirm that the content was published on the appropriate date. Then, the digital marketer may need to analyze how the content performed once it went live to determine if any changes need to be made.
This is just one of the many tasks that digital marketers must manage from concept to completion.
Types of SEO Agency Tools
Digital marketing agencies rely on various tools to streamline their SEO efforts. Some of the most popular SEO tools include:
- SEMRush
- Google Lighthouse
- Google Search Console
- Google Data Studio
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive tool that can be used for keyword research, competitive research, site audits, gap analysis, and much more.
The keyword research dashboard displays a wealth of information, including keyword trends, traffic across mobile and desktop devices, and related keywords. You can use this tool to discover thousands of different short- and long-tail keywords to incorporate on your website.
You can also use SEMRush to conduct research on your main competitors. See what keywords they are targeting, how they are performing in organic results, and what links they are building around the web. This is a great way to think of new ways to improve your website’s SEO and nudge your competitor out of the top spot in the search results.
Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an auditing tool that is designed to help digital marketers improve the quality of their websites. You can use this tool to conduct audits for accessibility, performance, SEO, and Progressive Web Apps.
Running an audit on Google Lighthouse can help you identify crucial issues that need to be addressed to improve the site’s SEO. For example, an audit will tell you if the pages on your website are loading slowly. To do this, it will test your website as if it is a user visiting it from a slow device with a poor connection. A slow page loading speed could hurt your SEO, so fixing this issue could help your site quickly rise in the search results.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a valuable tool that is designed to improve your website’s performance within Google search results.
Google Search Console will send you email alerts when issues are discovered on your site that could be impacting your SEO.
The URL Inspection Tool helps you gain a deeper understanding of how Google views your page when determining its ranking. Seeing your site through the eyes of Google helps you identify issues you didn’t even know were there.
You can also use this tool to analyze your website’s performance. Google Search Console will provide various SEO metrics, including impressions, clicks, and position.
Google Data Studio
Many digital marketers use Google Data Studio to create informative reports and user-friendly dashboards to display SEO results.
These reports and dashboards can be shared directly with clients to help them understand how their investment in SEO efforts is paying off. All of the reports and dashboards are user-friendly, so clients shouldn’t have trouble interpreting the data even if their SEO knowledge is limited.
You can even use this tool to create dashboards that automatically update whenever new data is collected. This reduces the amount of manual work involved in reporting SEO results, so digital marketers won’t have to spend as much time pulling reports.
What is the Best SEO Tool For Agencies?
All of the SEO tools mentioned above help agencies complete specific SEO tasks. However, this means agencies may need to invest in more than one tool in order to complete all of their SEO tasks.
Gryffin is an all-in-one SEO tool designed for digital marketers by digital marketers. Because it was designed with agencies in mind, it is the only tool that meets the unique needs of digital marketers.
Unlike other SEO tools, Gryffin doesn’t just provide you with data. Instead, Gryffin helps agencies create, manage, optimize, and automate their digital marketing campaigns.
Every part of your SEO campaign can be completed within Gryffin, so you won’t need to switch back and forth between programs to do your work. Learn more about Gryffin and how it can help your agency by starting a free trial today.