5. Yoast
With so many websites in WordPress nowadays, Yoast has become an essential tool for any SEO working on ranking their website across Google search. What makes Yoast so great, and why do so many people use it?
Yoast does a great job of touching all of the key parts of your website SEO. From easily connecting to tools like Google Search Console, to adding the ability to update meta information, Yoast works to bring SEO to the forefront of the WordPress experience. 
Yoast comes with a lot of functionalities right out of the box, and we are going to talk about some of our favorite features that come with Yoast. If you look at the screenshot of the feature here, you’ll see the extensive list of features that work to improve your SEO. Some of the best ones are the text link counter and the XML sitemap generator. Why does your website need a sitemap?
Importance of Sitemaps
Sitemaps help search engines read and index your website, and can alert search engines of changes that have taken place across your website. Yoast automatically generates a sitemap for your website, and you can work to submit that sitemap to search engines for better crawling. Awesome!
Optimize Your Meta’s & Titles
One of the best features of Yoast is the functionalities they give you to optimize meta and title tags across your whole website. If you are using custom post types, you can use Yoast to automatically set the title and meta tags across those posts. 
Looking at this screenshot, you can see how Yoast gives you the options to update the title tags and meta for pages that don’t have anything set. This can be beneficial for websites that have thousands of pages of content, spread around different post types.
Yoast is perfect for bulk updating your on-page SEO.
As your website grows more and more, you will want to customize the meta and titles tags per each page. This will help you optimize specific pages to rank well, and boost your overall organic keywords.
How do you update your website meta tag? Your meta tag is the hook for users across Google, and Yoast will help you tap directly into the code to update the text per page. In this spot, you can add relevant keywords, explain your service, and overall bring your potential click in.
2. SEMRush
I have been using SEMRush for over 5 years, and I recommend it to almost every SEM and client I work with. Why do I recommend SEO tools to clients?
My best SEO campaigns have always come from my client having a full understanding of what I am doing, how I got to those conclusions, and how they can work with me to focus our efforts. Tools like SEMRush are easy to get into and can be set up for you to see exactly what you need to be seeing, and then work to create optimizations.
Intensive Keyword Monitoring
Keyword monitoring was one of the first uses we had for SEMRush. We quickly learned that the software goes way beyond monitoring keywords, and can effectively generate suggestions and recommendations for SEO. SEMRush allows you to import a CSV or Excel sheet of keywords you want to target, and it will track and update your rankings every 24 hours.
We use this tool to closely monitor the keywords we are working on. From keywords we are targeting to keywords we targeted in the past, this helps us monitor and measure our progress as we add and optimize content across a website. This is very essential.
Organic Keyword Research
As you work to set up and create your SEO strategy for 2020, it’s important to consider two things:
- How many organic keywords does your website rank for?
- How did you main competitor get where they are in SEO?
