E-commerce is a very competitive field nowadays. Even if your store focuses on very niche products, there’s a high probability that you have a competition to deal with, especially when it comes to SEO. Search engine optimization can become very complicated very quickly, but fortunately, many e-commerce businesses can get away with using just a set of SEO tools.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the tools that you’ll need in your arsenal, in order to make sure that you e-commerce startup will rank high in Google’s search results. These tools and services will keep you updated with a broad spectrum of metrics that are essential to SEO. Let’s dive right in, shall we?

Research is key

Any SEO-related, whether it’s on-page or off-page, starts with research. It’s essential to have an in-depth understanding of your competitors’ approach to SEO. First off, this has to do with keywords — namely, the keywords they optimize for. The keywords they focus on will reveal a lot about their strategy, intentions, and goals.

Understanding where your competitors stand will allow you to better calibrate your approach and understand the greater context of the market you’re trying to enter. Below, you’ll find some useful tools that will allow you to study your competition’s keyword strategy.

Ahrefs

This is a really cool SEO tool that will allow you to get a better understanding of how your competitors are doing from a traffic and SEO viewpoint. Similarly, you’ll be able to conduct thorough keyword research.

Ahrefs allows its users to gather insight on key difficulty, search volume, the rates of return, and a host of other central metrics for the keywords you might be interested in pursuing.

Along with understanding your competitors’ keyword strategy, you’ll be able to gather a lot of information on the sites that place links to their website. This can reveal a lot about the businesses they collaborate with and will allow you to potentially adjust your link building strategy accordingly.

Ahrefs starts at $99 per month and can grow to $999, depending on the plan you choose.

Keyword Revealer

This is an excellent tool that will allow you to collect a wide array of useful data, especially when it comes to search marketing, as well as SEO. Besides simply researching keywords, this tool will allow you to brainstorm potential keywords you can focus your SEO strategy on.

Keyword Revealer has recently changed its pricing policy. The tool used to have a free option, along with a $10 monthly membership. However, today, you’ll be able to buy lifetime access at $59 for a “Consultant“ membership and $219 for an “Agency” account.

SEMRush

SEMRush is arguably among the best tools for tracking your site’s SEO performance. The tool is very data-oriented, which makes it an excellent choice if you’re ready to take a deep dive into the analytics and the data that it has to offer. Furthermore, not only will they provide you with the essential data on your and your competitors’ performance, but they’ll also give you valuable advice on how to better organize and structure your SEO strategy.

Besides SEO, SEMRush provides businesses with valuable suggestions on PPC, content strategy, approach to social media, and a variety of other facets of running an online business.

The most affordable SEMRush plan starts at a few cents short of $100 per month and will escalate to $400 for businesses.

Moz

Moz has been around forever. It was initially branded as SEOmoz and originally hit the market over 15 years ago, in 2004, when the internet resembled the Wild West, rather than a regulated environment.

This tool is famous because it intends to provide its users with a holistic approach, by covering all the essential areas of SEO like crawling, keyword research, and planning, along with page optimization. The metrics that they’ve introduced back in the day remain relevant today, and it’s safe to say that they’ve now become somewhat of an industry norm amid the professionals that use their product.

Let’s not forget about content

Research is just one part of the deal when it comes to SEO. It’s also imperative to create valuable content for your customers. While it’s safe to say that the central rule of SEO writing is just “write well,” there are many important details that we need to take into account when writing e-commerce blog entries to improve your ranking. Below, you’ll find a set of tools that will help you optimize the content you publish.

Yoast’s content analysis tool

If you’re trying to optimize your text to the latest SEO writing standards — it’s essential to make use of this tool. Yoast’s real-time content analysis will let you calibrate your text so that it abides by strict standards, based on a set of readability scales like the Flesch-Kincaid score, Gunning Fog, SMOG Index, and others.

Ah, it’s also very important to stress that this particular tool is absolutely free, and not using it should be considered a crime!

Grammarly

Chances are you’ve heard a lot about Grammarly. This tool is known to have a clean and intuitive design. More importantly, Grammarly has recently introduced a set of exciting features that allow you to change your tone to “neutral,” “optimistic,” “analytical,” “friendly,” and a host of other adjectives.

Along with that, Grammarly uses Machine Learning to improve your spelling in a very precise manner, which allows it to be lightyears ahead of any spellcheck you’ll have access to in any text editor.

A premium monthly subscription will cost you around $30, while an annual plan will cost you about $140.

Many content writing services like WOWGrade now use Grammarly as a standard tool, that allows them to deliver spotless articles and blog entries that are also voice and tone-optimized.

Conclusion

As an e-commerce startup, you’ll have to deal with cutthroat competition on a regular basis, especially when it comes to SEO. E-commerce startups need to invest a considerable amount of time in thorough keyword and competitor research — this information is essential when it comes to defining the most suitable SEO strategy in your particular niche.

More importantly, content plays a vital role in ensuring a fruitful online presence and excellent ranking on search engines, which is why all your content also needs to be accordingly optimized.

Good luck!