It’s no secret that even the best digital marketing agencies must be armed with a variety of SEO tools. Regardless of how great your copywriters or content marketers are, there are a ton of marketing SEO tools out there that can send your content to the next level.
What are SEO tools?
Search Engine Optimization tools are a variety of strategies, techniques, and tactics used together to increase the number of visitors to your website. They do this by earning a high-ranking placement in the search results page: think Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. These search engines rank your website using a number of factors including: domain-level link features, page-level link features, content quality and relevance, traffic engagement, along with many other features. These SEO tools help you identify opportunities, issues, and even spark new ideas based on various data, trends, competitor behaviours. SEO experts use this data to make sure their website is the one at the top of the list. Getting the right amount of each ingredient can be a fine art, which is why SEO tools are extremely helpful in optimizing, project managing and allocating resources to internet marketing efforts. It is important to mine for data and verify / estimate the validity of your educated SEO marketing hypothesis and indicate how to shape your online presence so your online advertising dollars are best utilized.
What SEO tool is right for me?
If you’re worried about picking just one tool to do the job, don’t fret! According to WebMarketing School, 94% of digital marketers use more than one tool. Depending on what sort of results you’re looking for, it makes sense to pick a handful of tools that compliment one another.
Best Paid Tools & Services
Here are a few SEO tools to get you started and improve your company’s or client’s lead generation:
RavenTools
An all in one website marketing tool, this platform allows you to do SEO audits, marketing reports, keyword ranking, and even social media measurement. What’s cool about the SEO auditor is that it allows you to audit anyone’s website and really analyze the things they are doing well and not so well, so you can apply those insights to your own website.
SEMrush
SEMrush provides a lot of the same features as RavenTools, but it’s still important to note as it adds its own flavour to data and also provides features to investigate competitors. One interesting feature is the advertising research you can do with this tool, allowing you to see your competitor’s ad campaigns, budget, keywords, and copy. Also, you can get some insight on video advertising and learn how to make money with your videos.
Positionly
Think of Positionly as an ‘SEO coach’ for your website. The platform keeps a watchful eye on your site, giving you helpful tips and reports about your rankings, keywords, and traffic. They also provide you tailored suggestions based off of your site and your competitors, allowing you to make actionable changes right away.
Majestic
A paid tool well worth your dollar, Majestic’s strongest feature is their backlink intelligence. You can study backlinks to competitor sites and identify potential link targets for your own site. By having this competitive insight, you can find link targets to help boost your own search rank.
Best FREE SEO Tools For Internet Marketing
If you’re not ready to dive completely into a paid tool, you can get your toes wet with a variety of free SEO tools. Here’s a list of five to get you going:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the top dog when it comes to getting a ton of (free!) data on your website. You can see how many unique visitors come during a given time, where they clicked from, and also where they went next. If you’re intimidated by all the data, Google offers a free Analytics Academy for anyone looking to hone their skills using their program.
Google Keyword Planner
Getting the right AdWords is crucial to any digital marketing campaign or website’s success. The Google Keyword Planner focuses on making it easier for marketers to create ad groups and campaigns, to help them get off on the right food by coming out of the AdWords gates strong and keep climbing, rather than realizing too late that they didn’t choose the best AdWords for a certain campaign.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
Not for the faint of heart, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool is a desktop program you can install, which will scan websites’ links, images, coding, and apps and present them to you in tabs for your viewing pleasure. You can filter for common SEO issues or get even more in depth by analyzing the data in excel. With SEO Spider, you can quickly check out any site, no matter how big, quickly and easily. The end result allows you to make your own SEO recommendations and tweak your own site based off of your findings.
Moz Tools
Moz offers a handful of extremely easy to use inbound marketing tools, offering a really good range of digital marketing tools that can really help you look at your overall campaign health. “Followerwonk” will show you data on Twitter, while the “MozBar“ is a browser toolbar that quickly shows you Moz’s key features for any page you’re on. Open Site Explorer (OSE) gives you the backlink analysis with helpful metrics, with other tools allowing you to dive even deeper into data and analysis if you’d like.
Overall, there are a wide variety of digital marketing tools to utilize when thinking of how to optimize your SEO and campaigns. It’s okay to use more than one tool, as each provides different insight than the rest. Let us know in the comments which SEO tools your digital marketing agency uses!