Search engine optimization is without a doubt one of the most influential methods for generating low-cost, passive traffic to websites, blogs and businesses. With most people using search engines on a regular basis to find what they need, targeting relevant results for your brand can ensure a steady stream of traffic is always finding its way to your website.

This, when combined with existing loyal audiences and other marketing tactics, can help grow even the smallest of brands into powerful entities over time. There are many tools geared toward SEO that can help you improve performance: let’s take a look at four today in the first of our two-part series on great SEO tools.

SEMRush

A huge element to the undercurrent of SEO revolves around learning what your competitors are doing. By dissecting what it is they’re doing, who they’re targeting for what niches they’re ranking for, you can improve your own SEO efforts and more effectively challenge them on every front.

SEMRush is a popular and versatile utility that helps brands discover which keywords their competitors are targeting. In just a few seconds, you can unearth all of the keywords that competitors are targeting. This not only helps brands uncover where the competition is focusing, but it will also help you start pinging links to new SERPs you hadn’t considered.

CanIRank

There’s nothing worse than putting in energy for SEO, only for it not to produce the desired results. This happens all too often when targeting specific keywords – especially for newer websites and brands – that are too heavily contested by big names.

CanIRank is a great tool that gives you a simple assessment of whether the energy is worth the effort. This tool assesses the difficulty of ranking for any keyword or phrase imaginable, and tells you whether your website can realistically rank on the first page or in the top rankings.

Google Mobile Friendly Test

Being the biggest influencers of how SEO operates, it should surprise nobody that Google offers a variety of tools that can help webmasters, bloggers and businesses perform better. One such tool that is absolutely essential is its Mobile Friendly Test.

This utility assesses your website’s capability to operate efficiently under what is known as mobile-first indexing. With a majority of search engine traffic coming through mobile devices, search engines like Google have optimized SEO outcomes to prioritize websites that are mobile friendly. This tool will help you ensure your website is optimized for this reality.

SEO-Browser

It’s pretty obvious that search engines are not people, and as such, do not view websites the same way as people do. Nevertheless, building your website to be friendly both to search engines and people is crucial for good SEO performance.

SEO-Browser is a free tool that lets you see websites through the eyes of a search engine. You’ll be able to inspect each element, view tags and alt text, and be in a better situation to make judgement calls about formatting and optimization.

To ensure you’re pinging links, content and keywords appropriately, you no doubt need a variety of SEO tools. These four are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can help produce better SEO outcomes for your blog or website: in our next post, we’ll look at four more tools that can help even more!