In today’s competitive market, it is important for business, both small and large, to use all of the available SEO tools they can get their hands on. Technology and search engine algorithms are constantly changing, some of which prevent “old” SEO strategies from being effective. So, as a business owner, you have to stay up to date with the latest techniques in SEO.
However, as someone who is running a small business and doesn’t have a large marketing department (if any at all), this means you have to devote more of your time and energy on advertising. This will prevent you from giving extra attention to other important aspects of your business like sales, paying overhead costs, website optimization, customer relations, product development, maintaining relationships with any shareholders, among many other things that give business owners headaches.
That’s why, if your resources are limited in the marketing department, you should use tools that will make life easier for you. SEO tools are always ahead of the curve when it comes to adapting to new search engine protocols and ever-evolving SEO methods in general. To get you started, we’ve curated 10 of the best tools for SEO currently available on the market.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must-have for any business that has a website. It’s free and yet it’s one of the most powerful and helpful tools you can have in your SEO arsenal. Google Analytics can be integrated into any web host and CMS. This SEO tool allows you to track website traffic and monitor trends. That way, you can see which pages are performing well and which are ghost towns. You will gain valuable insights which can help you develop successful marketing and content strategies for your business.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another tool that is valuable and also free. It should be used in conjunction with Google Analytics. Google Search Console is an SEO tool that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for the Search Console to be included in Google Search results.
However, Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site. This is an important aspect of SEO and will allow you to test various strategies, so you can discern which type of content, ad campaigns, and SEO techniques are working for your website.
3. Google Keyword Planner
To complete the Google Triumvirate, you should include Google Keyword Planner in your SEO Arsenal, along with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Content is the foundation of SEO, but having random content on your site will not cut it in this competitive business world. You have to develop and execute the best content strategy for your website. That’s where Google Keyword Planner comes in.
This valuable SEO tool will help you research keywords for your search campaigns. Like the other Google SEO tools, it is free to use. Keyword Planner will help you discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of the searches they receive and the cost to target them.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is like a name brand in the SEO world. Marketing nerds like me worship in the houses of Ahrefs and Moz, with the latter being one of the pioneers of SEO tool development. Although Moz is not included in this list, simply because our marketing firm uses Ahrefs more, their SEO tool suite is definitely worth looking at.
Now, on to Ahrefs. It’s a tool that’s primarily utilized to analyze a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, as well as its SEO health. Additionally, Ahrefs is used to conduct keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon. Many people use Ahrefs to find content that has performed well on a specific topic, such as the amount of social shares and links.
5. Rank Ranger
Another favorite SEO tool of our sis Rank Ranger. Rank Ranger is an SEO software as a service (SaaS) platform designed for (but not limited to) marketing agencies. Rank Ranger offers a comprehensive online marketing platform which tracks and monitors organic, local, mobile, app and video rank on hundreds of search engines.
Rank Ranger also helps you validate and monitor backlink data. This SEO tool allows for the integration of marketing metrics from a wide variety of third-party software and services. Rank Ranger also features an option for fully-personalized white label reporting. For example, Rank Ranger features a brandable drag-and-drop web marketing dashboard which can be customized to match any site’s design.
6. SEMrush
Ahrefs and Moz aren’t the only pioneers on this list. SEMrush has proven to be one of the most innovative SEO tools out on the market. Its popularity and being constantly heralded as the best SEO tool suite available is evidence of their commitment to developing the best SEO tool for novice and professional marketing strategists alike. SEMrush is an SEO tool that does your keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition.
SEMrush also conducts SEO audits of your website and looks for backlinking opportunities, among other helpful features. This Swiss Army pocket knife of the SEO world also helps you run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and manage social media assets. SEMrush is a powerful tool that any serious business owner should include in their tool box.
7. Screaming Frog
UK-based Screaming Frog has been making quite the splash in the SEO world for the past few years. It features general search engine optimization and helps manage pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. We want to highlight a particular tool in Screaming Frog that we like the most. It’s Screaming Frog’s “SEO Spider” is one of the fastest and most advanced SEO site audit tools available on the market.
Screaming Frog is used to crawl through both small and large websites. Have you ever tried manually checking every webpage in an expansive website? It’s quite labor-intensive. Screaming Frog’s crawlers makes this important task easy for you. This SEO tool will help you find redirects, meta refresh and duplicate page issues while you’re brewing some coffee.
8. DeepCrawl
Another option for site crawlers is the DeepCrawl. It’s essentially a cloud-based web crawler that you can control. You can set this powerful SEO tool to crawl your website, staging environment, backlinks, external sites, analytics data, sitemaps and URL lists. On top of that, you can use a wide range of flexible crawl types.
DeepCrawl can also assist you with analyzing your website architecture, which will allow you to understand and monitor technical issues. This is an important aspect of improving your website’s SEO performance. Additionally, you can use it to manage website migrations and redevelopments, as well as competitor intelligence and analysis. When it comes to technical SEO, DeepCrawl can do it all!
9. Long Tail Pro
Long tail targeted keywords are important in content strategies. Long Tail Pro will help you find the best long tail targeted keywords that will allow you to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This SEO keyword tool uses a built-in engine that calculates the Keyword Competitiveness (KC) for any niche. Once the tool generates long tail keyword ideas, you can then conduct a website competitive analysis of the top sites that appear in the SERPs.
10. Link Research Tools
The new trend in today’s SEO strategy is link building. It’s an important and popular technique because it’s a big factor in how Google ranks web pages. Google themselves stated, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
For this reason, Link Research Tools (LRT) has become a trusted SEO tool for many marketing firms and business owners wanting to get an edge on their competitors. LRT combines link data from over 25 link data sources to give you a complete link profile analysis. LRT then cleans, re-crawls and verifies the link data for you. That great thing about this SEO tool is that you receive a new crawl with every report you create.