When we think of SEO and related tools, the term ‘keyword’ immediately jumps to mind. Consequently, there is so much more to SEO than keywords.
Anyone involved in the world of digital marketing knows that “knowledge (data) is power”. The better your data, the better your marketing strategy will be. And, the better your SEO tools are, the stronger your SEO strategy will be. But, these tools are a dime a dozen. How do you choose which ones are the best? Or even which ones are the best for you? Well, we aren’t going to tell you which of them are the best; they’re all the best in their own different ways. But we are going to tell you which ones made it to the Enabler Space’s team top 5 for SEO research and monitoring.
Ahrefs
This is possibly one of the most well-known tools for backlinks and SEO analysis. They advertise themselves as an all-in-one SEO toolset and provide some awesome tools to back up that claim. The five tools they offer which we love are:
- Site Audit – finds issues and enables you to optimize your website.
- Site Explorer – analyze your own and your competitors’ backlinks profiles.
- Keywords Explorer – look into what keywords your target consumers are searching for and gain insights into traffic estimates.
- Content explorer – learn what content is currently being shared the most across different social media platforms.
- Rank Tracker – tracks your ranking performance for you across both desktop and mobile searches.
Ubersuggest
A simple, free Chrome extension, Ubersuggest provides the latest SEO data to help you increase your traffic right on the results from Google Search, YouTube, and even in the Amazon search suggested terms. Why do we like it? The data it gives us is perfect for doing competitive research. Let’s take a look at a few of the metrics and insights provided by Ubersuggest that gets it into our top 5.
- Keyword suggestions in the sidebar on the right of the most highly-targeted keywords according to country preference.
- Various metrics about the first 10 Google search results like Backlinks, Domain Score, and even some social media sharing data.
- A comprehensive breakdown of relevant data and demographics related to the search results page of Google and YouTube.
Screaming Frog
It’s a website crawler that extracts and audits data to find common SEO issues. That’s great, isn’t it! You can think of it as a simulation of search engine spiders and crawlers. Here are 5 things you can do with Screaming Frog that puts it into our top 5 SEO tools for research and monitoring.
- Find Broken Links
- Analyze Page Titles & Meta Data
- Discover Duplicate Content
- Generate XML Sitemaps
- Visualize Site Architecture
These are just 5 of the many things that this powerful SEO tool can do. It doesn’t matter what size the website is, Screaming Frog will crawl through it efficiently and allow you to analyze the results in real-time! Who doesn’t like instant gratification?
Google Search Console
Is everything about improving your performance on Google Search. Google Search Console (GSC), helps you measure the search traffic and performance of your website and fix any issues found. Other than the fact that it has “Google” in its name, why should you use this free SEO tool?
- You need to make sure that your content marketing actually aligns with what Google wants, and what better way to do this than with a Google tool?
- It doesn’t just tell you how often you’re showing up in search results, it also tells you which keywords the traffic to your website is coming from!
- The appearance of your website on desktops and laptops vs mobile devices can affect your reputation. GSC has a Mobile Usability Report that lets you know if this feature needs improvements or not.
- Most importantly, if you ever get any penalties or your website is compromised in any way from SEO attacks such as content injections, you can find out directly from Google via the GSC interface.
Did I tell you that it’s free? Yes, this free tool is easy to use and can only benefit you. It also links with Google Analytics and what better way is there for you to optimize your digital marketing ROI than making use of Google’s free tools provided for you.
LinkResearchTools
This is a set of SEO tools for reporting and analysis. What’s special about it? It allows you to go deep into tracking backlinks and website crawling like most other tools. But why do we like it? We already use quite a number of SEO tools for research and monitoring, why do we need this one? Here are a few reasons why:
- LinkResearchTools reduces the time normally spent on auditing and building links.
- This tool does a comprehensive analysis of all your internal and external links and gives you recommendations to help you learn which links you need to build, fix, or get rid of.
Why bother with backlinks? Because, they are one of the cornerstones of a good SEO strategy. By analyzing the backlinks that lead back to your website, you can gain insight into which of your pages are the strongest and weakest. There are many different tools provided in the LinkResearchTools set. Sure, there are many other tools that can do things similar to what it does, but we like this one because we feel it is simple yet powerful.
Why these 5 SEO tools?
We’d love to use all the tools out there, but it’s simply not possible. We do use others, and there are plenty more where they came from, but these are the top 5 SEO tools for research and monitoring that we like. They aren’t just useful for tracking links, keywords, or rankings. They also give you insight into what your competitors are doing and whether your SEO strategy is working or not. Most importantly, they can let you know what your ROI is from your digital marketing efforts. If you have any questions or would like to find out more, please contact us and consult with our team of Enablers.