In the world of e-commerce, a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is essential to the success of any e-commerce business. Whether you are a large company, a small business owner or a casual blogger, capitalizing on SEO allows you to maximise your website's profitability and establish the strong online presence required to sift out potential clients and customers. If you're not looking at your rankings or trying to be on top, you can bet that your competitors will be.

Under such circumstances, the most important thing about digital marketing and optimizing SEO is to get familiar with web analytics, which grants you access to metrics that measure the sales and traffic of your site. Having quality content is not enough to increase traffic to your site –  knowing the responsiveness of your customers, such as what keywords attract site visitors and what do they do on your site, are crucial information that should guide your content creation strategy. Be sure to understand user activities and cater your approach accordingly in order to be placed at the top.

Google Analytics

Google is jam-packed with powerful tools, headlined by Google Analytics which is a freemium web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic. This tool is exceptionally useful in helping to improve engagement and click-through for businesses of all sizes. Launched in November 2005, the service is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

Apart from measuring sales and conversion, Google Analytics also provides you with fresh insights on social media metrics and web visitors' information. For those who prefer to monitor their business on-the-go, you'd be happy to know that this software comes with a mobile app, giving you access to your dashboard and reports.

Google Analytics is free for all users who have a Google account, and comes with multiple add-ons that extend its functionality.

Apart from this, Google actually offers a wide range of tools that marketers should embrace in order to get more out of their social media marketing and search engine optimization experience.

• Google Pagespeed Insights: A slow webpage highly hinders users' experience, hence be sure to make use of this tool that analyzes the content of your webpage to look into suggestions that can increase the speed of your site.

• Google Adwords Keyword Planner: Discover the right words or phrases and keyword trends related to your business in order to reach the right consumers.

• Google Trends: Find out the latest search trends, visualizations and data with this feature.

• Google Mobile-Friendly Test: Majority site visitors are likely to be accessing your page via a mobile device. Ensure that your site is mobile-optimized using this test in order to enhance mobile usability!

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Before optimizing a website, it is useful to gain an overall view of the site. You can utilize a site audit software such as the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is a highly recommended software that allows you crawl websites' URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze SEO. Highly flexible and powerful, this software contains helpful functions that can facilitate the process of analyzing medium to large sites – this includes the ability to export your data to an Excel spreadsheet, ability to track Meta Robots tags and a Custom Source Code (CSS) Search.

Screaming Frog is free for indexing websites with less than 500 pages, while the paid version grants you access to many additional advanced features.

SEMrush

A popular SEO software trusted by many SEO agencies and professional bloggers. Whether it is keyword research, checking backlinks, following competitor ranks or SEO auditing, SEMrush provides you with a comprehensive set of tools for research and analysis. With this well-balanced SEO optimization platform, you can write quality content based on the keywords that put you in a better position in terms of marketing your niche.

SEMrush offers a free level account which allows you to conduct limited searches and tracking, and comes with tiered priced packages.

SEO Site Checkup

While SEO Site Checkup does not come with a freemium package for their SEO auditing software, they provide a variety of free tools that are extremely useful for analysis and monitoring purposes. Visit their website to make use of these useful and user-friendly features, including a Common Keywords Test, Competitor Domains, SEO Friendly URL Test and more!

Social media analytics

Finding meaningful statistics and insights on your social media marketing has never been easier with the wide variety of free online tools that tracks and reports data from your multiple social platforms.

Many social media sites come with their own analytic dashboards. Facebook Insights is useful for admins of company Facebook pages. It provides detailed post engagement metrics about your Facebook page. Twitter also has a built-in analytics tool Twitter Analytics, which displays useful information about the performance and engagement rates of your tweets. The same goes for the other major social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even Google+.

However, maintaining multiple social media accounts on different platforms may seem tedious, which is why you can utilize tools that allow you to compare the marketplaces all on one platform. Buffer and Hootsuite are such examples that allow you to analyze your various social media accounts all in one place.

To complement your analytics suite, utilize other free tools to enhance your gathering of data from the various media platforms, such as Social Mention, a social search engine. By typing in a keyword, the tool grants you access to a page of user-generated content from more than 100 platforms. It then engages in real-time social media search and analysis by tracking traditional and unique metrics, such as user sentiment. Another useful service is Keyhole, which offers a powerful free preview of its account, hashtag and keyword tracking service.