Do you dabble in a bit of SEO for your WordPress website? I would say I am addicted to SEO on this website and it certainly works for me. I am getting enquiries week after week and whenever I speak to a prospecting client they always say they found me via a Google search. This blog post looks at SEO tools that I love to use and I use them everyday. Do you have SEO tools that you use and you want to add them to this list? Let me know!
Here are the best tools for keyword research.
SEMRush is an awesome website research tool. You can check search engine or PPC stats on any website, see your rankings, or your competitors rankings. I love using it for keyword jacking.
Here are 2 ways you can use this tool in just a few min:
Quickest keyword tool ever! This will show strength values that come from majestic (TF & CF), & Unique linking IPs for the top 10 results, as well as PR. Awesome. You can use this in combination with all the keyword ideas you got from Semrush (item #1).
This is basically a google suggest scraper. Find all kinds of long tails with this baby.
Similar to Ubersuggest, but with even more! You can use this to find out what kinds of questions people are search for.
Ahrefs has come a long way and they just released their new keyword explorer. This has some interesting features that other tools don’t have like the “also rank for” feature.
Another very popular keyword suggestion tool.
Here are the best tools for on-page SEO.
Great tool for optimising your WordPress site.
See how fast your website loads and how you can improve it.
See if Google considers your website mobile friendly.
You can check the backlinks of any site with these tools. I use them for all of the following:
That all being said, these 3 tools do about the same thing but each one has strengths & weaknesses. Here’s what I think about all 3:
Best at catching backlinks. Most accurate checker.
Most commonly used statistics for judging website power or strength, however DA & PA metrics scale with spam so you really need to look at the actual backlinks too.
Best for determining websites trust / strength.
This cool toolbar will automatically run stats for you on all the websites you visit and put an overlay in search results if you want. This is the quickest way to check stats as you’re browsing around.
Want to check a bulk group of domains? With this easy tool, you can throw a bunch of domains into a Google doc and quickly get the moz DA / PA for them.
Here are some great link building tools.
I had to include this here because Ahrefs has stepped up so much in the last year. If I were to pick one tool, this might be it.
Need a huge list of guest post websites? This is it.
Makes link outreach easy. You can search for influencers and reach out all in one tool.
A very highly rated outreach tool. You can use this to score guest posts, submit to link roundups and more.
Not a tool, but an awesome resource with all kinds of link building strategies.
Awesome link prospecting tool.
Here are the best tools for tracking.
Use this to track all your campaigns and get a detailed look at what’s going on with your visitors.
The grand standard. I just use it on all my money sites
A Google Analytics alternative.
Easy rank tracking for national and down to the local level. You can start for free and they have plans all the way up to the thousands of keywords.
Nice & easy tool for rank tracking. Just plop in your URL, keywords and location and it will do all the tracking for you. They have a free plan as well if you’re just getting started.
Similar to serpfox but with nice white label and automated reporting.
Here are the best tools for local SEO.
This is the industry standard tool and it’s awesome. Basically you can drop in your main kw and city, it will go out and find your competitors and see what citations they have, rank the citation sources by DA (Domain Authority) and show you which ones you are missing.
Nice and easy checklist to make sure you have the bases covered + more.
Validate that rich snippets are working on your local site.
Creates schema.org microdata for your local site.
Quickly check where you stand with citations, duplicates, errors etc.
This will monitor your reviews, and you can track reviews of your competition.
Cool tool to get all the categories you should be in on Google Places.
Call tracking for SEO & PPC + Call scoring
Call tracking, text messaging, voice response, and more.
Here are the best tools for penalty research.
You can connect your Google Analytics account and it will display when google updates happened so you can see if drops in traffic match any Google updates.
You can check to see if you’re over optimised for any of your anchors.
The industry standard in checking for toxic links. Be careful though, this tool likes to classify links as toxic even if they are not. Use this as a baseline but judge each link individually.
Here are the best tools for social media and expanding your presence.
Registers your brand name on the top social media websites in the world.
Use this tool to get more social shares on your blog.
This a cool social media share box.
Schedule posts for your social media accounts.
Automate your instagram marketing. Tweepi Automate twitter marketing.
