10 SEO Tools Every Digital Marketer Needs
10 SEO tools every digital marketer needs. Have you ever wondered why you may seem to be doing awesome digital marketing (or at least you believe it is), but can’t seem to see positive changes in your search engine ranking or volume of site traffic? If that’s the case, chances are you’re not using the right tools to optimize your digital marketing assets and make it easily searchable by Google’s spiders and search engine users. So, if all you’re doing is hitting the publish button and plopping down into your comfy seat— at least now you know why you aren’t getting a positive result.
But not to worry, these 10 SEO tools every digital marketer needs that we will discuss in this post, will give your digital marketing campaign all the juice it needs for it to yield results.
So what kind of tools are we dealing with here?
10 SEO tools every digital marketer needs
I bet you have heard the phrase ”SEO tools”. Well, if you haven’t, these are basically tools used for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and as you may already know, the main goal of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of organic traffic coming to your blog or website.
Knowing this, how then does SEO support your digital marketing campaign? First off, It is very important to understand that digital marketing and SEO are inseparable.
SEO (On-page and off-page) an aspect of digital marketing ensures that your website ranks higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), which consequently drives more traffic to your site and potentially more business. However, without using the right SEO tools, how will you:-
- Research keywords?
- Track SERP rankings and analyze competitors?
- Measure ROI?
All important questions must be answered in other to get results. Of course, you can decide to handle these tasks manually, but that’s certainly a way to quickly become overwhelmed—and then eventually quit.
However, with the right SEO tools, you can automate the process of searching for keywords, tracking SERP rankings, analyzing competitors and measuring ROI. Having said that, let’s now review the 10 SEO tools every digital marketer needs to have in 2017.
1. Ahrefs
Category: SEO Management
A very popular tool amongst Search engine optimization specialists (SEOs). Ahrefs has a compilation of features that help you to improve your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche. This tool gives you insights to learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them.
The features in its suite are as follows:
- Site Explorer
- Content Explorer
- Keywords Explorer
- Alerts
- Rank Tracker
- Domain Comparison
- Batch Analysis
- Link Intersect
- SEO Toolbar
- Content Gap
- Backlink Checker
- SERP Checker
- Keyword Generator
- Broken Link Checker
Ahrefs and its SEO suite facilitate a digital marketing campaign by doing the following:
- Keyword Research: Ahref’s SEO tools are very useful for Keyword research. It helps you to identify the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and how to outperform them.
- Content Research: Content Explorer is a tool created by Ahrefs for discovering the most shared digital piece of information on a particular topic. You can research what content in your niche tends to attract backlinks and social shares and efficiently utilize it.
- Link Building: With Ahref’ you can find out where your competitors are getting their backlinks and constructively create web pages around it so as to give you more visibility.
- Web Monitoring: This feature helps you to monitor your competitor’s newly acquired backlinks. It also notifies you when someone mentions them online.
The pricing for Ahref starts at $99 per month with annual options. It may seem pricey, but it’s well worth the price tag. They also have a free version, although limited in functionality.
2. Long Tail Pro
Category: Keyword Research
Keyword research is a very important part of digital marketing — I believe most digital marketers/ SEOs will agree with me. Long Tail Pro is an amazing tool for researching “long-tail keywords” and one of the best in the market. It was originally one that was downloaded but has been upgraded to cloud-based software. Hence, you can use the tool right from your browser. This increases the functionality of the tool and gets you to use it for real-time keyword research.
This tool helps you find the high traffic, low competition keywords in your niche, giving you an edge over the competition.
As its name suggests, this tool is focused on long-tail keywords. This is so because such keywords are easier to rank and are generally less competitive. It is user friendly and extremely fast.
It has a trial version and paid versions of different costs, the lowest being $25 per month and the most expensive being $98 per month.
3. SEO Quake
Category: SEO Audit
This is a must-have tool for every digital marketer/SEOs. It is available as a FREE browser extension. A very powerful SEO toolbox for browsers i.e. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Opera. If installed on the browser, it can audit and provide you with key SEO metrics for any given website such as:
- Keyword analysis
- Page domain and backlinks details
- Alexa rank
- Data sources and types, including social media elements, like Tweets and Facebook Likes.
- Web page audit i.e. Title, meta, Headings, sitemap, analytics, etc.
As I said, it is a free tool, there is no pricing involved. Just download, install and use.
4. SEMRush
Category: SEO Management
SemRush is another popular SEO tool amongst SEOs. Based on the tool’s claim, it is an all in one marketing toolkit for digital marketing professionals. Reviewing it shows that the boast is not far from the truth. It lets you do keyword research, track keyword ranking, check backlinks, check competitor ranking and do a complete SEO audit of your website. They made competitor research a whole new experience giving you over 20 ways to research your competitors. Thus, with SEMRush, you are truly ahead of the competition.
That’s not all there is to this amazing tool, SEMRush gives you customized tips to drive traffic to your website via keyword suggestions, organic research, advertising, and backlink research. This is a freemium software. Hence you can use a free version and then subscribe to its premium version.
5. Authority Labs
Category: Rank Tracking
There are many rank tracking tools online, but Authority Labs apparently is the favorite amongst SEOs. This is one very powerful SEO monitoring tool. You might ask me, why? Well, the makers of Authority Labs understood the basic fact that keywords are the lifewire of SEO, and capitalized on that and gave us a Keyword Progress Monitor called Authority Labs.
This tool is a rank tracking and SERP monitoring tool that allows you to track results by country, city, or even postal code (I personally think that’s some great advantage).
It has a user-friendly interface, hence is super easy to use. Also, it is highly scalable and tracks all keywords on a variety of platforms, Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
A very important feature is the Now provided Report which combines rankings, Google Analytics, volume, and competition data to highlight your important keyword opportunities — Which you could optimize and easily add to your rank tracking so you know where you stand with your SEO efforts every day.
All these awesome features have to come with a price tag, right? Well, yes.
It is a paid tool with different price tags per category, the most expensive being $450 per month and the cheapest is $49 per month. Its most used category is $99 per month.
Trust me, it is well worth the price. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything better. I’m sure you’ll agree once you begin to use this amazing tool.
6. SEObility
Category: SEO Management
This SEO tool is designed to ensure your website gets better search engine ranking. How does it do this? It crawls and analyzes your website to check for grammatical issues on your site, broken links and any other thing that might prevent your website from getting better search engine rankings.
Other than just searching and identifying these errors, it gives you customized search engine optimization tips.
It does the following:
- SEO check
- Keyword Check
- SEO comparison between your website and your competitor’s
- It shows you where your website ranks on Google.
- It monitors your website to see the problems with your website and suggests solutions for you.
Such a tool obviously should be a paid tool. Alas, it has both free and paid versions. The free plan has some limitations while the Premium plan which is $36 per month gives access to more functionalities.
7. LinkMiner
Category: Link Building
Who wouldn’t love to be able to mine the links related to his blog or website? I’m sure you would. Well, there is an SEO tool designed just for that. LinkMiner is a browser extension that is designed for link building. It helps you check for broken links on your web page, taking your page link analysis to the next level. It helps you get social data on any link on a web page.
Use LinkMiner to find out how many external links are on the web page you are scanning for. The cool thing about this tool is the fact that it is FREE.
8. Advanced Web Ranking (AWR)
Category: Rank Tracking
AWR is an SEO tool that can be used for rank tracking, keyword research, website crawling, and ongoing position monitoring. It comes as a desktop application, cloud or browser extension. Apparently, its greatest strength is tracking the search positions for which your site is currently ranking, and whether you’re gaining or losing ground. This tool is said to be the best in automated position monitoring according to PC Mag.
9. KWFinder
Category: Keyword Research
I personally love using this tool because it’s affordable and easy to use. Quite similar to Long Tail Pro, KWFinder helps you to find keywords with low SEO difficulty which helps you to rank faster on Google search results. My favorite feature of this tool is the keyword competition score (difficulty of ranking) — which provides you with insight as to how easy or difficult you can rank for certain keywords. Other features include monthly search volume reports for any keyword, location-specific search results, Google search engine result pages (SERPs) and keyword suggestions.
10. Traffic Travis
Category: SEO Management
Traffic Travis is a standalone SEO desktop application for SEO management. This tool helps you to formulate SEO strategies by providing you with important data that are key to improving your website’s search engine rankings. It performs a full SEO health check on any given website, reveals technical mistakes that might affect your ranking, monitors your search engine rankings, finds quality backlinks for link building, analyzes your competitor’s web pages and keywords, all in the effort of maximizing your SEO campaign.
Bonus:
For link management and link building campaigns Linkio is a good tool to use, it will help you save time by automating tedious data entry and tracking your backlinks.
In conclusion…
As a digital marketer/ SEOs, you need to fully optimize your digital marketing assets. You need to use the right tools. The 10 SEO tools every digital marketer needs listed above are sure to give you success in your digital marketing/ SEO Campaigns.
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