How Do I Check my SEO Score?

Search engine optimization reigns supreme nowadays with online content creators. It simply isn’t enough to write stunning articles or analyze the latest trends with lightning speed. To get noticed, and by extension, paid, it’s crucial that you maintain good SEO habits to consistently rank among the top pages in Google or another platform’s SERPs. But how can this be done? How can you make sure that your content is optimized for Google’s crawlers? It’s actually easier than you might think.

Using an seo analyzer can help evaluate where you stand in the mix of similar content outlets, but knowing your “score” is not enough to ensure continued high performance. Using a toolbox of free SEO tools — an analyzer as one among them — can help you to either build a competitive platform that consistently ranks highly in results or maintain your well-established position. Your score is made up of various of factors, from domain authority to user experience, and each of these metrics is vital, so you can’t afford to ignore anything in the process of improving your optimization practices.

First and foremost, you need content, the driver of all the rest. Bad or boring content cannot be cured by SEO practices, so writing compelling content should be your primary goal, no matter what you’re writing about. However, using this copy to drive higher traffic can be accomplished once a pattern of good writing is established on your page. Targeting keywords through keyword research is one way to accomplish this. Simply put, keyword research is the process of seeking out information about what your readers are clicking on, searching for, and digging through once they find it. Research here can help establish buzzing keywords and combinations of similar genres. Also, keyword research can help you target specific iterations and develop a strategy for working those phrases into your content for optimal crawler interest. This improves something called your domain authority, or the relevance of your content to its functional keywords. High domain authority is one of the primary markers of highly rated content that appears near the top of a search results page.

User experience is also important to developing interesting copy that engages your readers. This one is a little harder to pin down, because each user will interact with and feel differently about your page and its content. However, building an intuitive platform that your readers want to engage with will build a loyal following better than any other measure you can take. Using SEO tools to examine cursor placement, average page-viewing time, or time of day metrics can give you a better sense of where your strong points are, and more importantly, a lesson in where things can be improved. User experience is a long-term game. It won’t drive new viewers to your page, but it will keep them there once they find your content. Optimizing loading speed is one quick and easy way to ensure the highest conversion rate from first-time reader to loyal subscriber.

Search engine optimization can be a difficult game. The rules change all the time — and without warning — and the competition is fierce. This just means that you must work hard at all times to maintain a high-quality offering that both attracts new readers and customers through competitive domain authority metrics, and keep those who stumble upon your content by using optimized user experience features. This is a double-sided venture, both types of clients are essential to the long-term health of your endeavor, and using SEO tools can help you get the job done.