Here is our list of the most useful SEO tools and software:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics a free digital analytics tool, and is available free to anyone wanting to use it. It is by far the most useful tool in this list and gives you answers to almost any question that you have about your site performance and how users are interacting with your site’s content.
Google Analytics lets you discover meaningful insights, and can help you improve your SEO by helping you to discover the top landing pages for search traffic, pages driving the most traffic, which sources are sending the most traffic, top exit pages and much, much more.
This is the kind of insight that can be translated into simple actions to improve the quality of your landing pages, effectiveness of your funnel, optimisation of your outreach & communication programmes.
A no brainer, Google analytics ranks as our top tool for SEO.
Google Search Console
Next on the list, and offered for free to everyone with a website, Google’s Search Console lets you monitor and report on your website’s presence in Google SERPs.
All you need to do is verify your website by adding some code to your site or going through Google Analytics and you are away.
As a keyword mining and keyword performance tracking tool, Search Console can help you understand how Google and its users view your website and allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results.
Google Search Console lets you see what keywords your site ranks for, helps you discover new keywords and find underperforming keywords, making it the greatest keyword and search performance tool available anywhere. Armed with this data, you can optimise CTR from search by targeting strong keywords, you can see what Google is seeing through the array of added info that Google provides within the console such as backlinks, errors and mobile page speeds, and best of all, this data allows you to guide Google on how best to crawl and index your site.
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues.
The SEO Spider is a powerful and flexible site crawler, able to crawl both small and very large websites efficiently and is kind of an x-ray of your site – it shows you everything that is going on in the backend of the website. https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/
Screaming Frog will check your site for broken links, help you discover duplicate content, extract data to check the implementation of code, generate XML sitemaps for you, lets you connect to the Google Analytics, Search Console and Pagespeed Insights APIs for greater insight into your site’s performance, it will crawl javascript websites, visualise site architecture and much much more.
Any decent SEO will have Screaming Frog in his SEO toolkit.
Gap Analysis/Visibility report
A Content Gap Analysis is the process of evaluating existing content on a topic and discovering “gaps” in that content to improve upon. Algorithm has developed a gap analysis and visibility report that drives SEO content strategies forward.
This tool is crucial to setting up a winning SEO strategy and our Content Gap Analysis gives you the information you need to focus your efforts. By identifying where we can provide more value to our customers, this SEO tool gives us the edge over our competitors.
Once you’ve discovered your content gap, you can begin brainstorming topics and publishing content that will help to fill it.
By using the SEO tools mentioned here and getting strategic about the content you create, you can discover — and start to narrow — the content gap between you and your top competitors.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It’s second in reach only to Google when it comes to scale, and every 24 hours its crawler visits over 6 billion web pages and updates Ahrefs’ index every 15-30 minutes.
These stats make this an indispensable competitive SEO tool that offers a whole lot of extremely useful data.
From a competitor analysis perspective, Ahrefs is the best tool for monitoring your competitors and can be used to determine your competitor’s backlinks and can also show you what content your competitors have that is performing well through its content analyser.
You can also use this SEO tool to find the most linked to content within your niche, taking a lot of the guesswork out of content strategies and ideation. Goog SEOs use good tools, and Ahrefs is definitely a great piece of SEO software.
Keyword Finder
Keyword research is an SEO practice of finding, analyzing and using the phrases that real people use to search for information on the internet, Performing keyword research is critical to SEO success and is probably the most important SEO activity there is.
As our favourite SEO keyword tool, KWFinder helps you find these keywords, and can tell you if they are any good. You will get keyword suggestions, autocomplete keyword options and you can even search questions related to your topic. KWFinder is excellent at discovering long-tail keywords that have a lower level of competition which are exactly the type of keywords that we want to be focusing on.
All of these SEO tools work together and can help you put together a really strong SEO strategy, and used wisely, will help you achieve the results you want.
Author : Peter Jooste
