The Best SEO Tools You Should Be Using Right Now

With the abundance of SEO tools available in the market, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones are worth investing time and effort in. In this article, we will share with you 19 of the best SEO tools that you should be using right now, and how to use each one like an SEO pro.

Tracking Performance

When it comes to tracking performance, there are a few tools that reign supreme.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most critical tools for tracking organic search traffic growth and conversions. With the new backend version of GA Four, or Google Analytics Four, you can measure the organic search growth over time in the Traffic Acquisition section, under Organic Search.

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another essential tool for tracking performance and technical SEO. You can measure performance in the Performance section, where you can see total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate, and average position. You can also use this section to identify opportunities to improve your SEO performance.

Furthermore, the URL Inspection section allows you to see how well each URL on your website is being crawled and indexed. The Index section shows how well your site is being indexed, while the Page Experience section allows you to see how your site is doing from a Core Web Vitals perspective.

3. Nightwatch

Nightwatch is a keyword tracking tool that stands out from the rest for its ability to track keywords on both the national and local level. With its ability to conduct a crawl that looks for rankings in a designated area, Nightwatch is a great tool for tracking local keyword rankings.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a vital part of any SEO strategy, and below are the tools to help you get started.

1. Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that offers a comprehensive suite of features for keyword research. To use Semrush for keyword research, start by looking at your existing keywords and break them down into groups. Focus on keywords that are ranking from positions two to 15, as these are considered low hanging fruits.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another popular SEO tool that is known for its robust backlink analysis. However, it is also great for keyword research. You can use the Keyword Explorer feature to find keyword ideas, analyze their search volumes, and identify related keywords, all in one place.

3. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool that allows you to find the right keywords to target for your website, based on search volume, competition level, and bid estimates. It is also a great tool for identifying long-tail keywords that are highly relevant to your business.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is critical for ensuring that your website content is optimized for search engines. Below are the tools that can help you achieve that.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that provides comprehensive on-page optimization suggestions. It helps you optimize your website's metadata, content, and images for search engines, ensuring that they are all set up correctly for the best performance.

2. SEOptimer

SEOptimer is a free SEO audit tool that provides a comprehensive report on your website's on-page optimization. It takes into account factors like the page title, metadata, content, images, and URLs, providing actionable insights to improve your SEO performance.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that allows you to quickly audit a website for technical issues that can negatively impact SEO. With its ability to crawl through the entire website, it helps you identify broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, and duplicate content.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks play a crucial role in SEO, and below are the tools that can help you analyze and monitor your website's backlinks.

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful backlink analysis tool that allows you to analyze your website's backlink profile, including the number of backlinks, referring domains, and top pages. It also provides insights into your competitors' backlink profiles, giving you an edge in your SEO strategy.

2. Majestic

Majestic is another backlink analysis tool that provides comprehensive backlink data, including the number of backlinks, referring domains, and anchor texts. It also offers a backlink history feature that allows you to track backlinks over time, enabling you to monitor your website's backlink growth.

3. Moz Link Explorer

Moz Link Explorer is a popular backlink analysis tool that provides valuable insights into your website's backlink profile. It allows you to see not only the number of backlinks but also their quality, providing a more accurate assessment of your website's backlink profile.

How to Improve Your SEO Rankings with Keyword Research

Keyword research is a critical component of any successful SEO strategy. It helps you identify the keywords that are driving traffic to your site and enables you to optimize your content to rank higher in search results. In this article, we'll explore three of our favorite keyword research tools and show you how to use them to improve your SEO rankings.

Start with the Positions Tab

The Positions tab in your favorite SEO keyword research tool can help you find the keywords that are already driving traffic to your site. Here's how:

1. Go to the Positions tab.
2. Filter the results to show keywords that are ranking between two and 15.
3. Focus on these keywords and optimize your content to move up in the rankings.
4. Start by improving the quality of the content, optimizing the page from an on-page SEO perspective, building more topical relevance, creating supporting assets, and acquiring backlinks.

Keep in mind that not all keywords are created equal, and it's essential to prioritize them based on user intent. For example, ranking for Clayton SEO Company or Santa Monica SEO Company is more valuable than ranking for Mathew Blanchfield SEO, as the former are likely to generate qualified leads.

Use Keyword Overview for Keyword Research

The Keyword Overview tool helps you find new and untapped keywords that you're not currently targeting. Here's how:

1. Input your primary keyword.
2. Use the filters to sort by difficulty level and value.
3. Prioritize keywords with high commercial intent.
4. Improve the quality of your content, optimize pages, and acquire backlinks to rank higher for the new keywords.

When selecting keywords, it's essential to prioritize those with the highest commercial intent first to ensure that you generate qualified leads.

AlsoAsked.com for Building Topical Relevance

AlsoAsked.com is a free tool that scrapes Google's People Also Asked section to help you build topical relevance. Here's how:

1. Input your primary keyword.
2. View the questions offered.
3. Create new assets to target keywords and build topical relevance.
4. Optimize content and acquire backlinks to rank higher for secondary keywords.

Lastly, it's essential to prioritize keywords based on user intent, which is key to building a successful SEO strategy.

Answer the Public for Identifying Long-tail Keywords

Answer the Public is a free tool that can help you find long-tail keywords that are relevant to your primary keyword. Here's how:

1. Input your primary keyword.
2. View the related keywords.
3. Identify long-tail keywords with low search volume but high relevance.
4. Create optimized content to rank higher for long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords may have low search volume but are essential to building topical relevance and driving traffic to your site.

Keyword research is a dynamic and on-going process. By using these tools, you can stay ahead of the competition, increase your rankings, and generate more organic search traffic.

The Importance of Granular Keyword Optimization

When it comes to SEO, many people make the mistake of only focusing on high search volume keywords. However, as demonstrated by the example above, it's important to consider the intent behind the keyword and optimize granularly to fully satisfy that intent. This can lead to better rankings and targeted traffic, even for less competitive keywords.

Building Topical Relevance

Another important aspect of SEO is building topical relevance. By creating content and optimizing for related keywords, you can establish your website as an authority on a particular topic. This can improve your rankings and attract more relevant traffic. It's important to keep in mind that it's not always about driving the most traffic possible, but about attracting the right kind of traffic.

Technical SEO Tools: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

One of the best technical SEO tools available is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This tool allows you to crawl websites and identify technical and user experience issues, as well as content related issues on a sitewide basis. By integrating Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other API tools, you can use data to make educated decisions about improving your website's performance. Screaming Frog SEO Spider provides a wealth of data, including crawl depth, word count, and more, allowing you to pinpoint areas that need improvement.

The Detailed Chrome Extension

Another useful technical SEO tool is the detailed Chrome extension. This tool allows you to quickly see the title, meta description, URL structure, heading structure, and more of any webpage. This can help you identify issues with the structure and content of your website and make improvements accordingly.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Finally, Google PageSpeed Insights is a critical tool for benchmarking your website's core web vital score. By analyzing your website's loading speed and other metrics, you can identify areas that need improvement in order to provide a better user experience and improve your rankings.

Speed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a crucial tool for benchmarking the current core web vital score of your website. To use this tool, all you have to do is enter any URL and see what it comes up with. The score is what matters here and it should be looked at on both mobile and desktop. Ideally, you should aim to get into the green range for maximum website loading speed and user experience. However, it's essential to stay out of the range where you'll see ranking decreases. At least getting into the orange range will keep you neutral or average, and you're unlikely to see a decrease in performance. But it's still recommended to aim for a score of 90 to 100 to maximize loading speed. This tool is only the foundation for optimizing for core web vitals, but it's where you can continually test and try to improve.

Best SEO Tools for Content Creation

1. AM Institute Headline Tester

The first SEO tool that the author recommends for content creation is the AM Institute Headline Tester. It's a favorite tool that's used almost on a daily basis to create attention-grabbing headlines that appeal to the readers and make them want to consume the content. This tool is especially helpful for subject lines on emails, Twitter posts, and blog posts. The headline is an essential part of any content or page and it has been said that 80% of people don't read past the headline. Therefore, you need to use this tool to improve your headline. The tool's criteria for being considered a professional copywriter is to get a score in the range of 30 to 40%. This minimum range is where your headline should be at least. To improve the score of your headline, you should use different types of words and phrases to add emotional appeal to it.

2. Hemingway Editor

The second SEO tool that author recommends for content creation is the Hemingway Editor. This tool is used multiple times a day to improve the readability and efficiency of content. It's used for every piece of content that's created, including YouTube scripts, blog posts, Twitter posts, and LinkedIn posts. The Hemingway Editor will not only provide suggestions but also make you a better writer by showing how to write efficiently. The tool has a readability score that should be kept below grade eight. The Hemingway Editor will identify and highlight adverbs in content, providing suggestions to improve the readability of the content. The tool is especially useful for refining content and making it much more efficient.

Improving the organic CTR of a website is crucial for increasing organic search traffic. The title tag on search results is the number one factor for increasing organic CTR. Therefore, optimizing the title tag on search results can significantly grow organic search traffic.

The Must-Have SEO Content Creation Tools

Creating high-quality SEO content is an essential part of any successful online marketing strategy. Your content needs to be engaging, informative, and optimized for search engines to reach your target audience. To achieve this, you need to have the right tools for the job. In this article, we discuss the must-have SEO content creation tools that every marketer should use.

1. Hemingway Editor

The first tool that we recommend is the Hemingway Editor. This tool helps you improve the readability of your content by highlighting sentences that are too long or have complex sentence structures. By simplifying your content, it becomes easier to read for your audience.

What we recommend doing is to write your content in a Google Doc and then paste it into Hemingway Editor for editing. For some content, we even write the entire thing in the Hemingway Editor to ensure readability right out of the gate.

2. Grammarly

The second tool that every marketer needs in their content creation toolkit is Grammarly. This tool helps you improve the quality of your writing by catching grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. It's easy to use, after setting your goals, all you have to do is paste your content into the tool and then go through the suggestions one by one, improving what makes sense.

Our aim is to get a perfect score on Grammarly but at least get it up into the nineties. By making Grammarly part of your content creation process, you'll improve the quality of your writing and optimize your content better for SEO performance.

3. Surfer

The third essential SEO content creation tool is Surfer. This tool helps optimize your content for search engines by analyzing what your competitors are doing and suggesting improvements.

We use Surfer only after we've written the content and put it through the Hemingway Editor and Grammarly. We aim to be the most relevant result for a keyword, but we need to find unique angles and to create a page that's different and better than what's on the first page. Surfer helps us do that.

Using Surfer

To use Surfer's SERP Analyzer, run your primary keyword through it, and then open it up to compare. Look at the different metrics, for example, missing common backlinks, and ensure that your content is the same as the first-page competitors for the topics they discuss.

By using these three tools - Hemingway Editor, Grammarly, and Surfer - you'll be able to create high-quality SEO content that stands out and performs well in search engines.

Tools for Link Building: Streamlining Your Process

Link building is one of the fundamental aspects of search engine optimization. However, it can be a complicated and time-consuming process. Fortunately, there are several tools available that can help streamline your link building efforts. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the most useful tools available to help you find link prospects, broken links, and opportunities to improve your website's rankings through powerful backlinks.

Data Miner Plugin

The Data Miner plugin is an extremely powerful tool available for free that can help you scrape any page to collect any type of data you are looking for. Specifically for link building, this plugin is useful during the link prospecting phase. It allows you to streamline the process of collecting link prospects quickly and easily by scraping Google search results for specific queries. Without Data Miner, you would have to go through each page individually and copy each link out, which would be extremely time-consuming. By using this plugin, you can quickly collect all of your link prospects to add to your link prospecting database.

Check My Links Plugin

The Check My Links plugin is another free tool that can help you find broken links on any page. It simply crawls a webpage and finds all of the broken links that exist on that page. This tool is useful for improving the user experience on your own site or finding link building opportunities through broken links. While this tool is useful for quickly finding broken links on a single page, for finding broken links at scale across an entire website, it's recommended to use tools like Screaming Frog or Siteliner.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best link building tools out there and is critical for link building. One of the most powerful features of Ahrefs is analyzing your competitor's backlinks to see all of their link opportunities. You can see all of the backlinks that any website has and filter those links to find your competitor's links. By finding their backlinks, you can see which links are driving their results and try to get the same links for your website.

Additionally, Ahrefs has other useful features to help you find link building opportunities like the link intersect section, which allows you to see who is linking to your competitor but not to you. This is useful for finding domains you could target for link building. The Best Buy Links section is another great feature for finding internal linking opportunities based on existing backlinks. These features, among others, make Ahrefs one of the best tools for link building.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an outreach tool that makes outreach at scale much easier. While there are many outreach tools available, Sendinblue has an excellent user interface and is an affordable option for organizing outreach efforts. While it's possible to do outreach without a tool like Sendinblue, using an outreach tool can help accelerate the process and keep you organized.

The Importance of Processes in SEO

In the world of SEO, organization is a key factor in scaling link building efforts. Fortunately, there are various tools available to help streamline the SEO process and make your campaigns more efficient and effective.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an outreach tool that provides a range of capabilities at an affordable price point. It's a highly recommended option that many professionals rely on for their link building efforts. While there are many other outreach tools available, the key is to choose the one that has the interface you prefer and fits within your budget.

Process Street

Process Street is not an SEO tool in the traditional sense, but it's an invaluable tool for systemizing your SEO process. Building a standardized process will help you refine and improve your SEO campaigns over time, leading to better results.

The Three Parts of a System

SEO, as a concept, is a system that is comprised of processes, which are in turn made up of procedures. Standardized procedures help ensure that every SEO campaign follows the same steps, making it easier to optimize and refine your efforts.

Example Procedure: Finding Low Hanging Fruits

To illustrate this point, let's take a look at one procedure in the keyword research process: finding low hanging fruits. This procedure is part of an overall process that includes a campaign overview, keyword research, SEO content audit, SEO action plan, technical SEO optimization, and creating and acquiring new content, among other stages.

By breaking down each procedure into a step-by-step checklist, you can tweak and optimize your process to maximize results. This is where a tool like Process Street comes in handy, providing a straightforward way to document your procedures and ensure that each step is followed consistently.

Scaling an SEO Business

Standardized processes are not only helpful for optimizing your own SEO campaigns, but they also make it easier to bring on new team members to do the work. It's crucial to build processes that are efficient and easy to follow so that others can deliver consistent SEO results.

The Importance of Structuring Your Day with SEO Tools

When it comes to executing SEO tasks, knowing how long each task will take is of utmost importance, especially for those who are new to the process. Over time, experienced individuals learn how long each task takes, but for newbies, it's crucial to structure their day appropriately. Fortunately, there are many SEO tools that can help users accurately estimate how long tasks will take.

One such tool is Process Street. Using Process Street, users can go through each part of the SEO process with screenshots and a video demonstration. By doing so, users can understand and execute each task with ease. Process Street's video demonstration is available in Gotch SEO Academy, which offers access to the entire SEO system, all procedures, and processes, and video demonstrations on how to properly carry out these procedures. The process laid out in this article is exactly what professionals use in their agency, refined through feedback from campaigns and hundreds of people in Gotch SEO Academy.

Another valuable instrument in the SEO toolkit is SEOTesting.com. The tool empowers users to run tests, document them, and analyze data sets easily. For instance, after running a test for a backlinks blog post, SEOTesting.com was able to monitor Google Search Console data and determine an increase in clicks per day based on the changes made. By having definitive data points, users can gauge whether their SEO actions are producing successful results, as opposed to simply guessing. This tool is highly recommended for individuals who want to be more scientific about their SEO actions.

InInvesting in the right seo tools can significantly impact your website's performance. with the tools we have presented above, you can conduct keyword research, track performance, perform on-page optimization, and analyze your backlink profile to improve your website's search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic. By optimizing granularly, building topical relevance, and utilizing technical seo tools, you can improve your website's performance and attract more relevant traffic. it's important to remember that seo is a long-term strategy that requires continual optimization and improvement over time. Seo tools are beneficial for optimizing and improving website content. the tools discussed in this article are necessary for proper benchmarking, creating attention-grabbing headlines, and refining content to make it more efficient and readable. by using these seo tools, you can significantly improve your website's search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website. There are several tools available that can help streamline your link building efforts. by using these tools, you can find link prospects efficiently, find broken links, analyze competitor backlinks, and make outreach more manageable. while these tools can't do all of the work for you, they can certainly make the process much more efficient and ultimately lead to better results for your website. For those looking to succeed in the world of seo, standardizing and documenting your process is key. while there are multiple tools available to help streamline your efforts, it's important to choose the one that works best for your team and budget. implementing successful processes will lead to scalable and consistent seo results over time. , knowing how long each SEO task will take is necessary for structured and effective workdays. With the help of tools like Process Street and SEOTesting.com, individuals can perform each task with ease, document and track progress, and analyze results definitively.