<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1293146794101744&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">

SEO Tools Every Digital Marketer Needs

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a marketing strategy that focuses on optimizing elements of your website to improve your brand’s presence online. Luckily, there are various SEO tools that can help leverage data and scale implementation efforts, even for beginners. In this article we’ll review helpful websites, apps and Chrome extensions to enhance your SEO strategy under the following umbrellas:

  • Keyword tools
  • On-Page SEO tools
  • Off-Page SEO tools
  • Technical SEO tools
  • Reporting tools

Keyword Tools

In order to publish great content and improve your organic visibility on search engines, you need to have a keyword research tool. What should you look for in a keyword tool? The best tools allow you to see metrics like:

  • Current search volume
  • Search volume over time
  • Keyword competition
  • Keyword variation ideas
  • Competitor keyword rankings
  • Search result opportunities 

Another helpful metric these platforms often include is cost-per-click. This metric helps you visualize how much it would cost to get immediate visibility for your chosen keywords through a pay-per-click strategy. Many of the best keyword research tools also include data on backlinks and other local key SEO elements.

There are many options you can choose from, but we narrowed down our list to the three most informative SEO keyword tools our team uses.

  • SEMrush: SEMrush is a great keyword tool if you’re a visual learner. It provides multiple reports to view crucial metrics when choosing the best keywords to use on your website. Keeping it visual, the graphs are color-coded when you're reviewing internal keyword ranking research, which helps to digest all of the data into easily consumable information.

SEM Rush Dashboard

 

  • Moz: If you’re having trouble strategizing whether a keyword should be included in your strategy, Moz offers a ‘Priority’ metric that calculates the value of a keyword based off search volume, Click-through-rate (CTR) trends, and competition level.

Moz Platform Dashboard

 

On-Page SEO Tools

When working through your on-page SEO strategy, you’ll be updating signals like title tags, meta descriptions, headers and more. You can use certain tools to pinpoint which pages should be updated and what they need. Afterwards, there are additional SEO tools that can help you implement these changes.

 

Yoast SEO Plugin

WordPress sites can utilize plugins like Yoast SEO to add in elements like title tags and meta descriptions. Streamline your workload when you’re optimizing a page by being able to optimize your meta data all within the same framework.

 

SEOMofo

SEO should not be a guessing game. Search engines like Google have put recommendations into place for pixel limits and character counts, so it's important you stick to them. SEOMofo can help you remain within pixel limits so your meta data is optimized. This tool also lets you visualize what your meta data will look like on the search engine results page (SERP).

 

SEO Meta in 1 Click

Auditing a page can take precious time out of your day. Thankfully, there are platforms that allow you to easily view meta-data and other SEO elements without having to log in to your CMS or view the source code. SEO Meta in 1 Click is a Google Chrome extension that you can easily add to your browser to view quick information like:

  • Title tag
  • Meta description
  • URL structure
  • Canonical link
  • Author (for blogs)
  • Publisher (for blogs)
  • Hreflang tag attributes
  • .xml sitemap
  • Image alt text
  • Header structures & counts

SEO Meta in 1 Click Dashboard

 

Off-Page SEO Tools

Off-page SEO has a lot of moving parts. Unfortunately, off-page tactics are often forgotten about, as marketers are usually referring to on-page efforts when discussing strategy. Don't let your off-page SEO strategy sit on the back burner. You can leverage these tools to analyze your authority against the competition and implement updates to improve your visibility.  

Google My Business

Brick and mortar businesses looking to scale their local SEO should utilize a free Google My Business (GMB) listing. This is how you can rank in Google’s local 3 pack results. GMB has fields that allow you to optimize and add in your keywords like:

  • Business categories
  • Business products and services
  • Service areas
  • GMB posts
  • Description field

Hunter Chrome Extension

The Hunter Chrome extension allows you to analyze a potential link-building prospect and view email addresses that are otherwise hidden from their website content. If you can’t find contact information on the About Us page, Contact Us page or any ancillary pages, the Hunter Chrome extension will provide you verified email addresses to use. This is crucial to gaining more backlinks as you'll know who to talk to. 

 

Moz Local

Part of off-page SEO includes making sure your business information like your brand name, address and phone number are accurate and consistent across the world wide web. Moz Local is a tool that streamlines a list of which directories your business is missing information or which sites have inaccurate business details. With a subscription, you can use Moz Local to automate changes and update listings like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and more.

 

Technical SEO Tools

Technical SEO encompasses improvements to the crawling and indexing experience of your website. In order for your site pages to rank, your website needs to be crawled and indexed, making technical SEO an important factor in improving overall performance. For larger websites, tools become necessary to easily view all of the information for each page of your site.

 

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a web crawler that can help you audit the SEO health of your site. The free version allows crawls for up to 500 pages. A paid license is available for larger websites. This tool allows you to view any broken links, server errors or redirects on your site and also allows you to diagnose gaps in missing meta-data.

 

Google Search Console

Luckily, Google provides a free webmasters tool called Google Search Console to analyze the crawling and indexing of your site. There are various reports included in this tool, such as:

  • Coverage report: Information including how many pages Google has crawled and if there are any pages blocked from the indexation process is available in this report.
  • Sitemaps report: This is where you can view the last time Google has read your sitemap. You can also resubmit your sitemaps to entice Google to view any recent changes.
  • Mobile usability report: This is where you can see any pages on your site that are not optimized for mobile-devices.
  • Core web vitals: Here is where you can view site speed metrics and inspect which elements of your website are contributing to slow load times.
  • Performance report: View information like clicks, impressions, CTR and ranking position for keywords and pages related to your site on this report.

 

Page Speed Insights

Google introduced speed as a ranking factor back in 2018. In May of 2021, Google introduced page experience and speed broken down into three metrics known as the Core Web Vitals. They refer to this algorithm change as the Page Experience Update.

SEOs can use the Page Speed Insights report to diagnose Core Web Vitals and view areas of opportunities to improve load times and page experience.

 

SEO Reporting Tools

Part of having an on-going SEO strategy is constantly monitoring performance and adjusting strategy as changes happen in search volume, user behavior, and search engine algorithm changes. There are two free tools that can help analyze data to help guide your strategy.

 

Google Analytics

Adding a Google Analytics tracking code to your site will give you insight on data like traffic, page views, user behavior, engagement metrics, conversions and more. This helps you understand how pages are performing or contributing to your ROI. You can also evaluate how your SEO efforts are contributing to your overall revenue or lead generation goals by cross-referencing traffic and conversion performance.

 

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a free tool that allows you to pull in Google Analytics data to interactive dashboards to make reporting on the most important KPIs visually appealing and easy to interpret. Utilizing these dashboards is especially useful for client conversations and key stakeholder presentations.

 

We’ve Got The SEO Tools You Need For Your Strategy

With a mix of free and paid SEO tools, you can certainly get bogged down in the plethora of reports and capabilities of each tool. Our SEO agency team members are experts in the tools mentioned above.

Reach out to us to chat if you’re looking for recommendations on which tools are best for your business.

CONTACT 

267.982.4044
info@moderndrivenmedia.com
1105 Industrial Blvd., Southampton PA

Badge