How to make your blog successful? Of course, quality content and the blogger who runs this blog. But we should include our own set of tools and services that help you stand out. I am, as a blogger, always searching for valuable tools that can make my job much easier.
I decided to ask 15 famous bloggers about their favorite tools and I am interested to share their lists of tools with you here.
Vick Parchani
Vick Parchani is a marketing specialist and founder of Magicdust Pty Ltd. You can contact him at Twiiter @ magicdust.
Here is the answer:
Moz Pro tools
For ranking – Rank Watch
For back link analysis – Ahrefs
Dave Schneider
Dave Schneider is a co-founder of blogger outreach software NinjaOutreach and manages his own blog called as Selfmadebusinessman about a successful online business. You can find him at Twitter @ SelfMadeBM.
Here is the answer:
The must have tools I use to manage my campaigns are NinjaOutreach, Google Docs, and HootSuite.
Sue Anne Dunlevie
Sue Anne Dunlevie is a website owner of Successful Blogging and a blogger who helps beginning bloggers make money online and get a success online with their blog. You can connect with her at Twitter @ SueAnneDunlevie.
Here is the answer:
I’m a huge follower of Backlinko.com and have taken Brian’s "SEO That Works" course and wrote up my own case study here on how I increase my traffic by 300%.
I also build quality links with fellow bloggers through blogger outreach. And I make sure to do on-page SEO tactics like this infographic explains.
Atish Ranjan
Atish Ranjan is a founder of TechTricksWorld and has been blogging since 2010. You can find him at Twitter @ atishranjan.
Here is the response:
When it comes to SEO helpers, I mean SEO tools, I am very selective in this regard because we cannot trust each and every tool that we find on internet.
Here are 3 SEO Helpers of Atish:
Long Tail Pro (LTP): I don’t see any other tool for keyword research when I have LTP. It is more than amazing to do extensive keyword research and beating the competition. I use LTP every day.
Ahrefs: When it comes to link analysis of a site, I cannot find any tool better than Ahrefs. I use it to analyze my own blog’s links, and even I use it for analyzing the competitors’ sites as well.
SE Ranking: I have been using SE Ranking for more than 6 months now, and I am very much impressed with its reporting. I mainly use it to keep a track of the keywords ranking of my blogs. I have just set the keywords and search engines, and I get updates in my email in the form of a PDF file with detailed report.
Razvan Gavrilas
Razvan Gavrilas is the Founder & Chief Architect of cognitiveSEO & BrandMentions, tools to help you monitor, research and improve your digital marketing. Razvan has over 15 years of internet marketing experience and has improved the digital marketing strategy for both small businesses and large enterprises. You can find him at Twitter @ razvan_gavrilas.
Here is the response:
" One of our strategies at cognitiveSEO is to publish amazing content on our blog and on others.
To do this correctly, it’s important to understand what type of content works in our niche at a specific moment in time. One technique I use to generate ideas is to track the fresh content that appears on the web. Let’s take the example of "content marketing". I track this topic on a weekly basis.
I focus on the most shared posts. Using this method I can understand what the market is looking for at a specific moment in time. This method helps me to generate new & relevant content ideas.
One I identified the successful content I try to create better & remarkable content on the identified subtopic. For tracking fresh topic mentions I use Brand Mentions. ( it’s great for tracking our brands mentions also ). After I publish the new post I track it’s efficiency over time. I use sharedcount.com for tracking the shares of all my posts (most useful on guest posting where you do not have access to traffic data). This can be automated using Google Sheets and their API in order to extract the counts every-time you look into the sheet. It’s also important to do A/B testing to increase visitor satisfaction and decrease bounce rates. For this I use Marketizator.
For Twitter outreach I use ContentMarketer.io. It’s helpful when I have to outreach to more than 10 people because the manual process is time consuming.
The last but not the least: I massively use cognitiveSEO ( eating my own dog food ) to track the evolution of the link profile, the rankings and the content on our site. I stay up to date with critical SEO issues that might appear for our sites with the email alerts that the system generates."
Kristi Hines
Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, copywriter, content marketer and business blogger of Kikolani. She helps creating high-quality blog content, ebooks and web copy for your business. You can connect with her at Twitter @ kikolani.
Here is the answer:
I’m loving Impactana lately! It’s the fastest way to find the most popular content for outreach purposes in terms of social popularity, link authority, and traffic. It also helps when I’m looking for great places for my ghostwriting clients to guest posts as I can assure them they are truly authoritative sites all around.
Simon Kloostra
Simon Kloostra is a web designer, SEO specialist and website owner of Joomla SEO. He provides SEO Audits for Joomla sites. You can contact him at Twitter@ simonkloostra.
Here is the answer:
My favourite tool is the Search Analytics part of Google Search Console, as it already helped me discover keyword opportunities that I would never have thought of myself. Sorting the tool on Impressions often brings up very interesting keywords that you already rank for without actual clicks yet. Some simple improvements on the page or metadescription can already significantly increase CTR then.
Another great tool I like is Onpage.org. I often perform technical SEO audits for clients and Onpage really helps me to find the most serious issues around this. Of course I also still use Screaming Frog SEO Spider for this, like almost anyone in the SEO field.
As an overall SEO tool I like SEMRush, as it helps me find information about keywords, but also quick domain overviews, while they also offer Technical SEO Audits and Rank tracking.
For dedicated rank tracking I also recommend SEranking, as it tracks rankings very accurately in multiple search engines on a daily basis. Especially the option to re-check on request is very nice for projects that I am focussing on.
Adam Connell
Adam Connell is the founder of Blogging Wizard and a marketing director at UK Linkology. You can find him at Twitter @ adamjayc.
Here is the answer:
SEMrush – This tool manages a lot of different tasks, but it’s competitor research functionality is excellent. It tells you exactly which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
BuzzStream – If you want to manage outreach campaigns, this tool will do it. It’s perfect for teams or individuals. Strangely, I find it works equally well as a CRM and it fits my workflow better than any other regular CRM tool.
Ahrefs – Backlinks are still a big part of SEO. With Ahrefs you can do a lot more than finding which backlinks are pointing to a website/specific page. There’s now a big cross over between SEMrush, but I still prefer Ahrefs for checking backlinks & SEMrush for site auditing & keyword research.
Jordan Kasteler
Jordan Kasteler is a digital marketing strategist, social media marketer, speaker and blogger of Jordan Kasteler site. You can connect him at Twitter @jordankasteler.
Here is the answer:
SEMRush – for organic ranking history
SpyFu – for Paid Ad intel
Majestic – for link Intel
Linkdex – for client reporting
Screaming Frog – for site crawl intel
URL Profiler – for various site intel
BuzzSumo – for social share and influencer intel
Wayne Barker
Wayne Barker is the head of Boom Online and specialist at SEO, analytics and link building. You can connect him at Twitter @ wayneb77.
Here is the answer:
Day to Day
Liquid Planner – this is where we keep all clients work organised across the entire company. It goes that little but further than basecamp or asana, it helps us track time and keep clients on budget and staff at the right levels of work.
Trello – we use this for more specific campaign management, that might be a content calendar or tracking technical changes to a site.
Buzzstream – organising contacts for outreach is a mammoth task and Buzzstream is the bees knees for this.
Advanced Web Ranking – despite what you may have heard rank tracking is still super important and AWR has it nailed. In the last year that have added loads of features that make it essential including research functionality similar to SEMrush.
More recent additions:
Botify – this is like Screaming Frog on speed in the cloud. Incredible software for identifying and isolating technical issues. You can crawl on set dates and compare crawls. You can set up segments for each of your sites so that you can identify problems in certain areas. Brilliant.
Sistrix – the original visibility tool and one that we have only recently added to our toolbox. Quickly becoming essential for finding canonicalisation issues, ranking issues, market visibility, competitor research and pitching.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams is the founder and Chief SEO Trainer for Zen Optimise. You can connect him at Twitter @zenoptimise.
Here is the answer:
Technical
Google Analytics and Google Search Console: ideally these should be linked together and this helps in identifying the "low hanging fruit" keywords which you already rank in the first two pages but not in the top three positions.
Screaming SEO Spider: great for doing a technical SEO audit. Although I find the Inlinks and Levels particularly useful as you get an idea of how link juice is flowing around a website.
Yoast SEO WordPress plugin: if you use WordPress it just makes your SEO life easier and it has many feature updates enhancing it further.
Keywords
Semrush: I’ve been a long time fan and have written an in-depth Semrush review before. I love the competitor keyword research it offers and if you can afford the Guru package, the historical keyword ranking data can be a god send for diagnosing SEO penalties for client work.
Positionly: a keyword ranking tool. It’s not the cheapest or most expensive but it has a good level of features while maintaining an Apple like level of simplicity.
Google Keyword Planner: if I could only have one tool for keyword research, it would have to be this tool. You have to think creatively to get the most out of it and not just rely on keyword ideas from a few seed keywords.
Content and Social
Buzzsumo: with so many backlink analysis tools it surprising one wasn’t created for content and social shares earlier. This tool is great for researching successful content marketing campaigns and identifying key influencers in your industry.
Buffer: a simple but effective free way of sharing content with your social followers.
IFTTT: it’s great for social media and content marketers because it can post, save and do lots of clever things with content on all of the major social platforms.
Backlinks
Open Site Explorer: more aimed at beginners and intermediate level SEOs but I often find myself using it for light backlink analysis research because it’s so easy and quick to use. I also find its Page Authority and Domain Authority generally pretty accurate and useful.
Majestic SEO: if I need to go more in-depth for backlink analysis, this is my go to tool.
Ahrefs: much more than just a backlink analysis tool these days but close on Majestic’s heels as one. I don’t believe there will ever be an all in one SEO tool that is great at everything, but Ahrefs is trying to to prove me wrong and is having some pretty good success in doing so. Definitely one to keep an eye on if you’re not already.
Brittany Berger
Brittany Berger is the Content and PR Manager at Mention. You can connect here on Twitter at@bberg1010.
Here is the answer:
My favorite tool for managing campaigns is BuzzStream. At least for me, the hardest part of the campaign is keeping track of everything once we’re in the thick of it. Keeping straight who’s responded, who hasn’t, who said ‘no,’ who we need to follow up with, etc.
So our content team uses it as a CRM/contact manager for all marketing outreach – from linkbuilding to planning webinars. Since it’s built for marketers, it has features specifically for tracking SEO and content, which is really nice, and a Chrome plugin makes it really convenient.
Zac Johnson
Zac Johnson is a well-known entrepreneur and online marketer with nearly 20 years of experience and runs his own blogs like Blogging and Zac Jonson.
Here is the answer:
Three must have tools that I use for nearly all campaigns and websites are:
LongTailPro – Great for quick reports on keywords I might not already be targeting, while also keeping an eye on the competition.
SEMRush – A wide range of tools underneath one platform. Great for picking out keyword movement, keeping an eye on the competition and also for running SEO site audits.
MonitorBacklinks – Another advanced tool for keeping your competition under the microscope and seeing where they are creating new backlinks. Also good for your own link management as well.
Chris Evans
Chris Evans is a trained SEO and marketer who blogs for a living. He runs his marketing website Passiveresidualincomeideas.
Here is the answer:
My two main tools that I use on daily basis are Jaaxy and Scrapebox, they cover all my SEO and research needs. On occasion I use Google Trends to see what ideas are proving to be popular in my chosen niche – always full of good ideas if you are hitting writer’s block.
I don’t opt to use any of the ‘online’ autoresponders as they tend to be a little bit too fussy these days with links etc. Instead I have been using Atomic Mail Sender run off my own SMTP server over the last year and I can’t find any complaint with it!
For social media campaigns I always use Buffer – for such a small monthly fee you can’t really go wrong and once again, they have never let me down.
And finally WordPress – all my sites are built on this website builder. The choice of themes and plugins are second to none in my book.
That’s it really! That’s all I need to run my online businesses successfully. I do also use the more typical services like Google Analytics and Adsense but I didn’t think it was worth mentioning them ( everyone uses them! )
Pratik Dholakiya
Pratik Dholakiya is a digital marketing specialist, speaker and the co-founder of E2MSolutions.com or MoveoApps.com.
Here is the answer:
Ahrefs.com – I use their site explorer quite often to analyze backlinks profile of any website.
Moz Tools – All the tools by Moz are fantastic and I do use Open Site Explorer, Moz Analytics, Fresh Web Explorer and Followerwonk on a regular basis. They all help in easing my analysis and data research process for different types of work I do.
AdvancedWebRanking.com – This is my go-to resource to track rankings of all the campaigns I look after. Very user friendly and I’m in love with their interface.
BrandWatch.com – This helps me staying updated with all of my personal mentions on the web and the mentions about my companies as well.
These are my top four tools but at E2M we use multiple tools to execute our clients’ campaigns smoothly. I wrote a post about it which can be found here.
Conclusion
There you have it! This is quite a huge post with the best helpers used by SEO experts. I want to thank everyone who helped to create this list of awesome SEO tools.
Let’s quickly review the best SEO tools according to the recommendations of our professionals.
Now your turn. Do you find any SEO tools helpful? Could you recommend anything better? Please, feel free to share your point of view below.
The post 15 Famous Bloggers Share Their Best SEO Helpers appeared first on SEO Chat.