Becoming an SEO expert can be challenging, especially when you’re just starting out. Fortunately, finding the best SEO tools can help you save time performing keyword research and data analysis, as well as providing site reviews and competitor reports. To help kickstart your efforts, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite SEO software and keyword tracking tools.
1
Yoast
We use the Yoast WordPress plugin every day to improve on-page SEO. Within any self-hosted WordPress site, Yoast makes it easy to control titles and meta descriptions, check readability, set targeted keywords and track how often we’re using them. The easy-to-understand scoring system (red, orange or green lights) indicates how every SEO factor rates and includes modification suggestions to help increase rankings.
2
SEMRush
It’s hard to pick a favorite feature from SEMRush, because it tracks so many things. For example, the Organic Research tool offers a single dashboard where we can see trends, top keywords, top pages, various SERP features and more. This gives us a quick overview as to what’s working and where we should optimize. Keyword Magic and Keyword Manager tools are more powerful resources for keyword research. We use them all the time to help us identify related and long-tail keyword opportunities as well as create, build and store lists in one convenient location.
3
SpyFu
This is one of the SEO tools we use in conjunction with SEMRush for competitor research. By searching a competitor’s domain, we can discover their most valuable keywords and newly ranked keywords. But what we appreciate most is the paid search feature that captures competitors’ most successful paid keywords. It provides a snippet of the ad, search volume, CPC, monthly cost, paid clicks and more.
4
Woorank
This quick, easy-to-use audit tool analyzes every page of a website, identifies problems and provides suggestions on how these issues can be improved. It illustrates what a site is lacking from both a technical and content perspective. What we really like about this nifty program is that we can instantly spot critical issues that could be affecting SEO.
5
Screaming Frog
A powerful, easy-to use SEO spider, Screaming Frog quickly crawls websites and delivers a broad overview of site performance. Its helpful, straightforward navigation is a huge timesaver when we’re looking for opportunities for fast fixes. Among the many audit results, the at-a-glance lists of title tags, H1s and meta descriptions (by URL) are a few favorites helping us to quickly identify duplicate or missing content.
We hope this brief list leads you to discover a new SEO tool to help improve your search strategy. If you’re looking for more advice, contact the SEO experts at Responsory.
