Ask HN: What are the best SEO tools for a startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best SEO tools for a startup?

15 pointsdanlewistech6 comments

Startup in question is www.digitalprofile.com. We have poor traffic and want to improve our visibility.

I'm not necessarily sure there are tools that will directly affect your rankings. I guess if you're using Wordpress the Yoast plugin is pretty good for helping to analyze/correct/optimize the content you're creating. But tools like SEMRush or Moz really only provide data and you need to understand what things to do to act on that data. Honestly, creating quality content (& making sure it's being crawled properly) and building backlinks are the most important tools to ranking.

Good SEO tools are things like SEM Rush, Moz, ahrefs. That kind of thing. These tools are good for monitoring but they're not going to help you go up in the rankings, or get more traffic.

There are really only two ways to get better rankings and more traffic:

1. Produce good content that keeps people on your page/site for a long time.

2. Get quality backlinks.

If you do (1) correctly, (2) should follow without too much difficulty (aka some manual outreach).

Be aware that having #1 is fine, but without #2 no one will find it via google.

Be more aware that google says if you manually acquire backlinks you may get kicked out of google or downranked. If you are in a competitive market, your competition will not link to you, and instead will report you to google for doing something. Then they may setup bad backlinks to you.

having to hunt around the web and ask people to take down backlinks is a thing.

Best advice, a stupid viral video that gets shared on fbok, insta, twitter, tiktok etc.. don't count on seo or google they are fickle.

These are the key points and I strongly believe we should add a third point: Web Performance.

The best tool for a small budget is ensuring that your on-page (or technical SEO) is in order. The best tools for that are page optimizer pro or SEO surfer, there is also CORA but its a lot more technical.

You should write case studies, how X used your product to get result Y.

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