The SEO space abounds with tools and services that purport to make life easier for those working at the sharp end of the industry. Many SEO firms put together their own tools as a way of attracting traffic, and, as you might expect, those tools are of varying quality.
Weeding out the dross and building a workflow that makes use of the must-have tools for SEO professionals is no easy task, so today we’re going to put you on the right path by curating a list of the SEO tools that we wouldn’t be without.
While there are some great free SEO tools out there, we’re going to pick the best available tool in each category, regardless of the price.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a site crawler. It traverses all the links on a site and gathers together useful data. Spider software is extremely useful for SEOs because it gives them a Google-eye view of the site, and will report back on aspects that cause problems for Googlebot.
Among others, Screaming Frog collates data about:
- Broken Links and redirects
- Duplicate content
- Missing headers
- Faulty meta descriptions and title tags
- Canonical link elements
Data can be shuffled, sorted, and exported to Excel for further analysis. The free version should be more than enough for smaller sites, but SEO pros might want to buy a license, which unlocks various configuration options and allows for crawls bigger than 500 URLs.
MajesticSEO
MajesticSEO provides a free backlink checker with a plethora of useful information about a site’s incoming links. Maintaining a healthy natural backlink profile is important, especially in the wake of Penguin 2.0. MajesticSEO is an excellent tool for exploring the details of a site’s link profile, including anchor text and domain authority.
SEMRush
Keywords are the pillars upon which SEO strategy is build. Finding the right ones is both an art and a science. SEMRush is a keyword tool that will provide comprehensive data about your target keyword, related keywords, keyword search volume and competitiveness.
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
These are very different tools, but we’re going to compress them into one as they both come from Google and it leaves us space for one more.
Google Webmaster Tools allow you to check on your site’s relationship with the search engine and configure some of the ways that Google will interact with it. It’s also where Google will send any messages about your site.
Google Analytics is a huge collection of tools for tracking and monitoring your site’s activity and performance. It can be overwhelming for some, but the amount of actionable data to be gleaned from Google Analytics is unbeatable.
Pingdom Tools
Site speed is an important SEO factor. Slow sites tend to offer a bad user experience and have the bounce rate that goes with it, both of which are regarded poorly by Google. Pingdom’s Website Speed Test will show you how long your page takes to load and provide a breakdown of how much time each element is adding. It provides a great guide for speed optimization and it’s also useful for testing the effect that those tweaks have.
Everyone’s got their own opinion about the best SEO tools for professionals, and we’d love to hear what you think of our go-to resources, as well as the tools that you wouldn’t be without.