Again, you could come up with a good argument for a few different answers here. Ahrefs is great for competitor content and backlink research; Moz Pro’s content explorer is great for finding unlinked mentions; and SEMrush is great for rank and visibility tracking. The three share many overlapping features. It’s more a matter of preference than anything. Spyfu, AWR Cloud, and DeepCrawl are also worth

Say it with us: Plan for voice search! ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. Take a look at the number of articles published in the past year about “how to optimize for featured snippets

What have you done thus far? If the answer is nothing, you’re going to want to use one of the SEO tools I mentioned above to run a site audit. This will allow you to find and rectify any broken links, make sure all your meta tags are in order, and check page load speeds. Search Console also has a great “Crawl Errors” tool, in addition to other tools that help you diagnose your site’s speed and usability. Once your current pages are in order, get cracking on keyword research, and start putting out some content!.

Most of the SEO tools we’ve mentioned in this article have some form of keyword explorer. There’s also Google’s Keyword Planner; and, for SEO’s elite, WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool. Once you settle on a tool, ask yourself some questions: What are some parent topics related to my business; related to a product I’m selling; related to a blog post I want to write about? Starting with broad parent topics allows you to generate large lists of potential keywords, then narrow them down by preference. Perhaps you’ve noticed that keywords with certain volumes generate the most traffic to your site, so you filter the rest out. Perhaps you’re looking for uber-low-competition keywords for which you can easily rank. Establishing parent topics allows you to start large, then get gradually more granular.

Yes! If you’re not familiar with HTTPS, it is essentially a more secure form of HTTP. Look up at the URL of this page. See the “https” at the beginning, and the word “Secure” to the left of it? Google looks on pages like these favorably. Not only does it index HTTPS pages first, but it also recognizes HTTPS as a ranking signal. HTTPS is also faster than HTTP, which can affect click-through rate. So yes, changing to HTTPS should positively impact your rankings!