Today’s digital marketers manage a bunch of different projects, wear more than one hat and can be in charge of many marketing campaigns run simultaneously , in particular, search engine optimization, content marketing, social media management, email marketing, etc. Luckily there are a lot of tools available to easy up the marketer’s life. Here is a review of some of the SEO tools every marketer should consider.
In order to find new capabilities, track the overall SEO progress and save time you need to have right tools at your disposal. I’ve compiled a list of must-have SEO tools that I used in my career to manage my daily responsibilities. Some of them are new and some ones are familiar to everybody, but I hope you will find them useful to advance with your marketing efforts.
1. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a great all-in-one tool that monitors how your keywords are ranking in search, checks competitors’ rankings and backlinks, group thousands of keywords with search volume, analyzes sites on hundreds of SEO related parameters, shows a list of short-tail and long-tail keywords and helps you to do SEO independently in percentage equivalent. The tool has a wonderful visual layout of the dashboard that I think is one of the best in the industry.
Key Features:
Positions tracking, including mobile and Google maps rankings
White Label with professional SEO reports
Backlink monitoring
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools integration
Keyword suggestion and grouping
Comprehensive website audit
Social media management
Online marketing plan
Cost:
Personal: starts at $4.20/month
Optimum: $39/month
Plus: $89/month
Enterprise: $189/month
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free web service tool to keep track of websites’ performance and understand what search engines think of your website. With the help of this tool, you can see any alerts, bugs and indexing issues. You can also make adjustments to review website links, keyword data, submit sitemaps and robots.txt files, and much more. To get the more detailed analysis of your keyword data you can associate your account with Google Analytics.
Key Features:
The ability to add and verify your site
Add and check a robots.txt file
Find out website errors and bugs
Add and check a sitemap
Increase your website appearance
Get detailed reports about search traffic (keyword impressions, top pages, and links)
Review website status in search
Learn about security issues on your website
3. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a simple research and monitoring tool that helps to find the most shared content in social channels and related influencers, do a competitor analysis on content and receive alerts based on domain, links brand name and keywords. The tool has a user-friendly interface that works well to get the most shared content in the niche. It’s a perfect tool for content marketers.
Key Features:
Find the most shared and interesting content
Build a list of influencers to reach out
Make a list of alerts for trending articles
Set-up real-time monitoring
Get a content analysis report
Review competitors’ content
Cost:
Pro: $99/month
Agency: $299/month
Enterprise: $699/month
4. Piktochart
Piktochart provides a quick and easy way to create and share design-worthy infographics. You don’t need to be a designer to create a masterpiece, as the tool has a pretty user-friendly interface. All infographics are stored in your account and you can edit them at any time. The tool includes categorized icons, interactive maps to use, design-driven charts and resizable canvas. One of the benefits is the ability to view how your versatile infographics are for different projects whether for a website, social media or office and provide you a pro tip how to use them effectively.
Key Features:
Themes and templates of high design quality
Embed videos from Youtube and Vimeo in your design
The ability to edit anything and everything with ease
High-quality PDF exports
Image upload limit increased to 400mb
Large database of designed icons and images
Cost:
Lite: $15/month
Pro: $29/month
5. WorkExaminer
WorkExaminer is an employee-monitoring software that gives you the ability to monitor all the important internet activities of your employees in silent or transparent mode. Although, there are lots of buzz about online activities monitoring, but if you are a large company and you want to improve your work productivity, it can be important to keep them track on daily tasks. Make sure if you want to monitor in stealth mode, it won’t be easy to install this program.
Key Features:
Ability to block certain content
Internet tracking
Monitor internet activities in real time
Keylogging
Instant Messaging
Screenshots capture in real-time and recorded playback mode
Cost:
Standard :$60/lifetime
Professional: $60/lifetime
6. Trello
Trello is a good visual collaboration tool for effective project management, issue tracking, budgeting, task management, notifications, reporting, and much more. You can easily make boards for each project, create lists to record your progress on a certain project and create cards that define each task. The tool provides a free subscription and professional package with the privacy and administrative settings on the request of large companies. It is easy to use and learn.
Key Features:
Easy organization with tags, labels and categories
Drag-drop functionality
Integration with Mailchimp, Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, etc.
Data filtering
Easy collaboration in real-time
Email notifications and activity log
Unlimited card creation
Attach photos, drawings, sketches, and mockups
Cost:
Business Class: $9.99/month/per user
Enterprise: $21/month/per user
7. Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the best online data backup services that allows you to access files in the cloud wherever you are and your team can view or edit your files. This software is really useful if you have many offices in different locations. Moreover, you can easily integrate your account in Dropbox with 100 000 3rd party apps. The backup speed and the restore speed is quite fast in comparison with other tools.
Key Features:
Fast backup speed
2-16GB free storage
File syncing and sharing
Unlimited third-party integrations
User controls and permissions
Password-protected links
Deleted file recovery
Cost:
Pro: $8.25/month
Business: $12.50/month
Enterprise: contact for pricing
8. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a great crawling tool that helps you to index the overall website and find out broken links, bad tags, and much more. The program is easily installed on any desktop: for PC or Mac. You can use the tool for free with 500 URL restriction per crawl, or you can get it with the full version at £149 per license per year.
Key Features:
Find duplicate content
Track the Meta Robots tag
Measure file size
Track Page Depth level
Track the Follow and NoFollow status of all links
Custom Source Code Search
XML site
Custom filter and search HTML source code via a website
9. Mention
Mention is a real-time media monitoring tool that shows when and where your brand is mentioned online. It is very useful to know who is talking about you on the web and social media, and find out when your competitors are mentioned. It has a clean, intuitive interface without any credit card required.
image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/mention.png
Key Features:
Real-time monitoring on the web and social media
Export data in PDF or CSV
Find out influencers talking about your brand or keyword
Collaboration with your team
Track and analyze performance
Monitor from any device
Cost:
Solo: $29/month
Starter: $99/month
Company: contact for pricing
10. Google Disavow Tool
Google introduced its free Disavow tool in late 2013, and it was a good way to tell the search engine directly what links are not yours in order to count for SEO of your site. It seems like you add artificially nofollow links leading to your site in order to be stronger in the search.
11. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is an essential tool for specialists that are serious about marketing. It provides tons of insight and data about your backlinks, websites, pages and competitors. Their database seems to be a fairly good and gives the ability to slice and dice this data to get better marketing decisions within the web interface. With this tool you can view interesting stats like new and lost links, the total number of links, referring IPs, unique domains, types of links, anchors, top referring content, organic keywords, and much more.
image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Ahrefs.png
Key Features:
Keep an eye on competitors
Find new content ideas
Build up quality links and increase shares
View top pages on their backlinks and social metrics
Cost:
Lite: $99/month
Standard: $179/month
Advanced: $399/month
Agency: $999/month
12. Copyscape
Copyscape is a quality plagiarism protection service with the focuses on user cost and quality. It becomes one of the most popular tools to check duplicate content around the world. Unlike other plagiarism detection tools, it doesn’t check files for plagiarism, only content on the web. You just need to enter a URL or text and you will find out where else that content exists online.
Cost:
Required minimum $5 purchase for 100 credits
13. Grammarly
Grammarly is an awesome grammar checker for proofreading articles and blog posts. It helps you to identify possible grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes and give useful solutions and explanations for your mistake. It is a good tool if you don’t write articles and posts often and English is your second language. It supports different document types and appears as a line of defense to make sure your writing copy looks accurate and easy-to-read.
Key Features:
Awesome online grammar knowledge base
Detect possible grammar, spelling and punctuation errors
Provide suggestions and explanations if required
Use free Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions
Plagiarism checker
Cost:
Grammar Free: free
Grammar Premium: $29.95/month
14. Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free web organization tool that lets you organize and schedule events with clients and workers. It is easy to manage personal and professional schedules, but you should have a Google account to access Google Calendar.
Key Features:
Keep track of video shoots, calls, meetings and reminders
Share the calendar with your clients and team
Use the calendar for different purposes (business, family, etc.)
Integration with other services
15. Google Drive
Google Drive provides a free complete set of office tools in the cloud. It is easy to share files, create and update spreadsheets. The tool can use the unlimited number of users and has a huge storage limit – 15GB. You can get the most out of everything, including a presentation builder, word processor and spreadsheet. It is easy to upload and share a document with your team in the Drive, but you should have your Gmail account.
16. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a good heat mapping tool that allows you see where, when and how users interact and behave on your website. Most of businesses produce better conversions using the heat mapping strategy to target and engage your website users. The tool offers 4 multiple ways (heatmap view, scroll, confetti and overlay) to see what visitors do on your site and get the overall picture of user behavior.
Key Features:
Get detailed insights into ROI changes
Show what parts of your website are most reading and completely ignored
Tell you how to position important elements and where to focus on your optimization
In-page analytics and design testing
Cost:
Basic: $9/month
Standard: $19/month
Plus: $49/month
Pro: $99/month
17. Soovle
Soovle is a free online tool to find the most typed keyword in major search engines based on your search query you enter in the field. It appears like a good brainstormer that shows a list of search suggestions to get more relevant and precise search results. The interface is very easy to use: just enter a keyword in the search box and view the results.
image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/soovle.png
Key Features:
Search for keywords from major search engines like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, YouTube, Yahoo, Answers, etc.
Free and instant keyword research with double click to see results
All search terms are stored during your browser session
18. MyBlogU
MyBlogU is one of the most exceptional tools to create and share epic content, connect with smart bloggers, build up quality links for driving traffic and improving SEO. It is a free tool, and once you join the community, you can use it in several ways: brainstorming, interview, articles and media features. It is a great forum to meet new members and help others to generate unique content.
Key Features:
Gather interviews and ideas from other members
Help in organizing and running Twitter chats
Give your insights into relevant topics and gain good links in the process
Build good relationships with bloggers and SEO experts
Get extra social media share
Find fresh ideas and improve your content
Cost:
Pro plan: $10/month
19. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides you top pages, top sources, visit page views, top locations and visitors on the website. All data can be exported to Excel, CSV, PDF and email files. The tool is easy to use and setup. It does a good job satisfying your analytics requirements.
Key Features:
The ability to track different websites and social networking activity
Measure activities like downloads, video views and mobile ad clicks
Monitor mobile phone users
Understand your customers by knowing what they need on your website
Identify visitor paths via your website
Analyze page load times through your sight
Cost:
Premium: $150/year
20. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth has one of the ugliest interface, but it’s a good tool to detect broken links on your websites, inclusively Gopher, FTP and email links. You download the tool for free and run it on all versions of Windows, but not on Macs. It’s very easy to generate a simple report of all issues on the site.
Key Features:
Detect broken links
Find your duplicate content issues
Identify largest pages and images regarding your page load time
Find pages with most outlinks
Detect images with the lack of Alt text
Are there other SEO tools you want to add? Do you like web tools or browser plugins? I’d love to hear your thoughts so please share them in the comments below.
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