Whether you plan on taking on the role of an SEO or Online Marketing Professional, or even outsource it to a Freelancer or SEO Specialists such as ourselves. Some or all of these tools will help you to better understand the current state of your SEO efforts, or those of the person or agency you have trusted to carry out all of the work for you.Some of the tools are completely free, some have a limited version available which should be enough for many small businesses to get by with. Whereas others will require a paid subscription in order to continue using them on a monthly basis. So depending on your requirements, you may be able to get by on the free, or limited versions. But the choice is very much yours to make.
If you haven’t created an account for your website yet and added the tracking code, you should do so right away. Google provides it’s Analytics tool, completely free of charge, giving you access to information about your visitors interaction with your website and other data across a number of different metrics.There are detailed breakdowns of information on your site’s visitors, where they came from (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc), where they’re located (City and Country) and what they did while on your website. Which pages on your website people visit the most, and so on. Without this information, it’s going to be difficult for you to understand both how many visitors you’re getting to your website, how long they stay around. This is especially important if you’re paying for your traffic (PPC / Adwords, referral fees for leads and so on).If you want to learn more Google Analytics, I’ve written a brief overview of it
here, with some additional links to further resources you may find useful.Find out more and sign up
here.If you need help setting up Google Analytics on your website, please
get in touch.
Another tool Google provide webmasters with is the Search Console, which gives us a window into how Google views our websites and what information they have to help us. The information within, will give you an opportunity to optimise your website by diagnosing potential technical issues that may arise. There’s a whole host of information Google provides within Search Console, giving users access to a number of features which include the ability to:
- Submit an XML Sitemap to Google.
- See how much of your website Google is indexing
- View a list of broken links crawled by Google
- View links and domains pointing to your website, as well as an overview of the anchor text
- View Google search queries and average rank positions
- and more…
If you want to learn more Google Search Console, I’ve written a brief overview of it
here, with some additional links to further resources you may find useful.Find out more and sign up
here.If you need help verifying your website in Google Search Console, please
get in touch.
Google My Business
A lot of the advice you will read may suggest that Google My Business is only for businesses serving local customer bases. However, my own personal opinion is that regardless of whether you serve customers locally, nationally or even internationally. Getting your business onto Google Maps helps to add both trust and authority within Google, as well as by showing your potential customers that your business is both trusted and verified by Google.As well as Google Maps, a search for your brand name in Google will also in most instances, show your business information to the right hand side of the search results.Find out more and sign up here.If you need help with verifying your business on Google My Business, please
get in touch.
Moz is an SEO and Marketing toolset which allows you to do keyword research, track keyword ranking, check backlinks, check competitor rankings*, and also do an on-page SEO audit of your website or blog.For a full rundown on the features, click
here.They also have a tool they call Moz Local, which enables you to search for your business and get an overview of which business listing sources your business may be missing from. It will also help you to better understand if there are any listings which may be outdated with the wrong information being displayed.For a full rundown on the features, click
here. You can also also use a limited set of the features to get a quick overview of your local SEO efforts.*
Unlike SEMrush (below), you will need to input the keywords you wish to track, rather being shown keyword rankings the tool is already rank tracking. Each competitor will need to be added a “project”, so smaller plans may not allow you to track all of your competitors on a month, by month basis. Majestic is one of best link research tools, allowing you to gather an in-depth insight of any website’s backlink profile. They have one of the largest indexes of fresh data outside of Google and Bing, which is routinely updated. The tool allows your to find an entire website’s backlink profile incredibly quickly, which is great for both mining your competitor’s link profile, as well as discovering links within your own backlink profile you may wish to remove or disavow.For a full rundown on the features, click
here.
Ahrefs, along with Majestic, is one of best link research tools, which also allows you to gather an in-depth insight of any website’s backlink profile. They one of the largest indexes of fresh data outside of Google and Bing, which is routinely updated. The tool allows your to find an entire website’s backlink profile incredibly quickly, which is great for both mining your competitor’s link profile, as well as discovering links within your own backlink profile you may wish to remove or disavow.They also include other tools such as “Site Audit” to “Analyse your website for common SEO issues & monitor your SEO health over time.” as they put it.For a full rundown on the features, click
here.
SEMrush is an SEO tool which allows you to do keyword research, track keyword ranking, check backlinks, check competitor rankings, and also do an on-page SEO audit of your website or blog.For a full rundown on the features, click
here.
SE Ranking is an SEO Tool in a similar vein to SEMrush, but currently with a far lower monthly price. There’s a whole host of similar tools to SEMrush which should enable small businesses to quickly get up and running. The tools include keyword research, keyword rankings, backlink checker, competitor rankings, and also on-page SEO website auditor.For a full rundown on the features, click
here.
This is a great tool if you know what you’re doing and looking for, but not so helpful to those who don’t. It allows you to manually crawl any website or domain from your own computer, in a similar way to a search bot crawler. It will help you to identify any issues such as duplicate or missing page titles, as well as duplicate or missing H1’s, broken links, redirects and more, which can take hours, if not days if you tried to do this by manually visiting a website. Especially when it comes to large websites, which have many hundreds or even thousands of pages, where manually checking each page would be practically impossible.For a full rundown on the features, click
here.
Which SEO Tools should you pay for?
Of course the easy answer is “all of them”, but the issue many people come up against, not just with SEO Tools, with many things in life is, the more tools you have access to, the less time you will spend better understanding how they will fit your workflow and how they will benefit your website or business. With many of these tools, you will get anywhere from around 7 to 30 days of free access to try them out for size and to get an understanding of the tools and features.The only tools that are absolute must, are Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google My Business. The others you can pick and choose from and decide which would be most suitable for not only your budget, but your website, your business and how you like to work.If you would like help conducting any SEO improvements on your website, with Outreach / Link Building, or with PPC setup and Management. Please
get in touch.