SEO is an ever-changing landscape and the tools that you use to optimize your sites. There are always new tricks coming out but the tools that you need to be successful are really just a select few. Here are a few of my favorites for SEO success:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most complete, powerful and affordable link building tools around. It’s also easy to use.
It has an extensive database of more than 1 trillion links and looks at more than 100 billion pages every day to find new data and update existing information on your site.
With Ahrefs you can:
- Find backlinks to your site; backlinks are essentially recommendations from other websites that they think are worth checking out (and they’re usually backed up by a clickable link). A large number of backlinks means that others have found your content useful or interesting enough to share it with their own readership; these are some of the best ways for search engines to determine how good a page really is!
- View detailed reports on competitor rankings so that you know which keywords or phrases competitors rank for, where they rank for them (page 1 vs 10) and what type of content ranks higher than yours does (hint: if someone else ranks above you on “how-to” searches, maybe it’s time for some fresh material!). Ahrefs’ reports include all aspects including organic traffic from Google Search Console too so there really aren’t many other tools out there quite like Ahrefs when it comes down to finding relevant data points within one spot.”
Google analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track your website’s traffic. This is an important function for any business, as it gives you information about what content is popular with your audience and where they are coming from. From there, you can make informed decisions about how best to allocate resources and change up the way that your site functions.
Moz
Moz is one of the best tools out there for keyword research. It’s not just a tool that will help you find keywords, it also offers a lot of other great information.
Moz has some awesome free content analysis tools as well! You can use these to check your page for errors and see what needs fixing before going live with your new post or page.
This is great because if there are any issues, we can go through and make sure everything looks good before publishing anything live on our website. We don’t want people seeing things like spelling errors or broken links – those things could turn off potential customers!
SEMrush
SEMrush is a powerful keyword research tool. It also has backlink, competitor analysis and social media monitoring capabilities.
SEMrush’s keyword research functionality is on point, with the ability to quickly generate lists of keywords for any given topic or industry. It will also tell you how many other sites are ranking for your chosen terms, their traffic volume and estimated monthly ad spend.
If you need to do competitive analysis (i.e., figure out what your competitors’ best performing content is), SEMrush will give you all the information you need to get started – including top organic keywords and long-tail ones that aren’t necessarily on page one of Google’s results but still bring in decent traffic nonetheless.
Lastly, if you’re looking at building links or getting more traffic from social media campaigns then this tool has got those bases covered too!
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a desktop software tool that crawls and parses websites. It’s one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, and it helps you analyze your website for many factors that could be affecting your search rankings.
The tool can be used to find broken links, duplicate content, meta descriptions and title tags. You can also use it to check if there are any redirects or 301 errors on your site.
GTmetrix Website Speed & Performance Optimization
The Google Toolbar is a simple, easy to use browser extension that provides several powerful features including a website speed test. All you have to do is install the toolbar and then click the “Speed Test” button on its control panel. You can also run it using your search engine or through their website.
Google PageSpeed Insights is another great tool that checks your site’s load time and gives recommendations for how to improve it by pointing out problem areas such as image compression, minification of JavaScript and CSS files, optimizing DNS lookups, etc. These are things that aren’t necessarily obvious when you’re just looking at your website but can make a huge difference in how fast (or slow) it loads!
Alexa website rankings and traffic share analysis
Alexa is a web traffic analysis tool that provides website rankings, traffic share analysis and audience demographics. Alexa Rank measures and ranks websites based on page views and users.
Alexa Traffic Rank is a free service that lets you check the relative popularity of web pages on the internet. Alexa Traffic Rank analyzes the traffic flow to a website by tracking all visits to that site, as well as all links pointing to it (inbound). It then calculates various statistics for those sites such as: How many unique visitors did each site receive? How long did the average visitor spend on this site? What country was most popular with this audience?
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free webmaster tool that helps you understand your website’s performance in Google Search. It helps you manage the crawling, indexing, and ranking of your site. It also provides diagnostic information to optimize your website for search results.
You can use Google Search Console to:
- Track and diagnose issues with websites’ pages, crawl errors and security problems with URL parameters or redirects on a domain or subdomain level;
- Check if any issues have been fixed following a manual action received from Google Webmasters tools;
- Verify ownership of domains across multiple accounts;
- Get data about how often pages are indexed on Google Search (i.e., indexed by canonical link);
Conclusion
We hope that this guide has been helpful in showcasing some of the best tools available for your SEO toolkit. Whether you’re just starting out with a website or have been managing several sites for years, there are tools here for you to benefit from.
