In modern times, website has been a major asset of business. As a result of a blooming growth in web hosting business, having a good-looking yet professional online presence is never a difficulty for most people. Consumers of today are used to searching for a product or service on the internet for more details as well as customer reviews before they placing an order, online and offline. And according to the latest statistics, the total trade volume of online retailers is surpassing that of large retail stores and department stores in the near future.
If you’re running a business website, you will want to be the first link consumers see when they make a search. However, if not, you need go right ahead to perform SEO on it then.
Standing for Search Engine Optimization, SEO involves a series of steps that are performed on your business website with the purpose of ranking it higher in the search engine results. Having high rankings means your website may well appear in the first page of the search engine results, attracting more clicks and possibly more revenue.
No matter which method you choose to perform the website optimization—on your own or hiring professional SEO technicians to help with it, the main SEO strategies that could be used to boost the rank of your website on the internet include:
- Link building
- Content marketing
- Social media optimization
- Targeted keyword discovery
- Use of Google AdWords
- Optimizing title tags, image descriptions and headers
Fortunately, all these strategies can be accomplished with the assistance of a multitude of different tools and software. Most often, you would have to make use of different SEO tools for different tasks. But don’t worry, software developers have made it easily to find a suitable SEO tool via a simple internet research.
6 Types of SEO Tools for Improving Your Site Performance
Though many of SEO tools are offered free of charge, some need you to shell out a few dollars if you really want to get the best. Here we group the most important SEO tools that can significantly improve your site performance into six different categories, free or paid.
Link Building
Usually, the process of putting links to your own website from any other websites is called link building. As one of the most common SEO strategies, link building is of great importance to help search engines improve your website ranking in the search engine results pages.
The process of link building could be extremely arduous and time consuming as you are required to make a survey in advance of the links that you want associated with your site. And link building tools are designed to help with automating the process by prioritizing the links based on both relevance and importance.
Paid—Buzzstream
BuzzStream is hands down the best enterprise class outreach management tool integrated with modules that concentrate on speeding up research prospects, sending personalized, efficient, relationship-based outreach, and managing link building projects. It is highly regarded by industry leader Search Engine Journal, and becomes a rare program of its type that costs customers only $24/mo for the starting plans, along with a 14-day free trial. All these combined together makes BuzzStream a great solution particularly for beginning webmasters.
Freemium—Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is a website browser that enables you to have a view of how all the websites on the internet link to each other in the help of the largest Link Intelligence database on the planet. By entering the domains or URLs of your site and those of your competitors, you can have access to detailed information of the trust flow, citation flow, referring domains, indexed URLs, external backlinks, class C subnets, educational referring domains, referring IP addresses, plus educational external backlinks on both websites, allowing you to determine where to beat them in the SERPs while identifying new opportunities to build links back to your site.
Free—LinkMiner
LinkMiner takes broken link checking to the next level. You can use it to help uncover more about links being checked by yourself so as to make a starter as well as quicker decision. In the help of LinkMiner, you now can check a page for broken links on-the-go, get data of link and social on any link on a page, display link data on the page itself, and even export all of that information about those links as a CSV instantly. You can also utilize LinkMiner to find out how many total or external links are on the page you’re viewing.
Backlink Analysis
Backlink analysis tools are useful for checking the incoming links of a specific page. It can also be used to help evaluate the quality of that link in addition. More importantly, you can benefit from this type of SEO tools through analyzing the link building strategy of which your competitors are taking advantage to optimize website performance, which can be used to help improve your ranking in turn.
Paid—Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the best of the best SEO tool on the market for backlink analysis. Once sign up with Ahrefs, you can get benefit from:
- Site Explorer: Get a detailed backlink profile for any website or URL. You’ll see what websites link to it, what anchors they use, how strong the backlinks are, and more.
- Content Explorer: Find out what content is getting the most shares and backlinks so you can build a winning content strategy.
- Ahrefs Alerts: Get an email notification whenever you or your competitors get a new backlink or lose one. You’ll see exactly where any new backlinks are coming from.
The starting price of Ahrefs is set at $82/mo, with 20% discount off monthly billing. Besides that, you are enabled to try all of Alhrefs premium features free of charge for 14 days.
Freemium—Linkody
Like all webmasters know that, tracking backlinks manually is time consuming and nearly impossible to keep up. Linkody releases you from the whole process by making everything automated, letting you know when and where you lose or gain links, giving you insights in competitors’ strategies of linkbuilding, helping you identify and modify bad links with ease, and making linkbuilding more efficient with the neat interface.
Free—Open Site Explorer
A long time favorite of many marketing professionals, Open Site Explorer never falls short of your expectations. The primary goal of the SEO tool is developing a high quality inbound link profile for every user. You can use it for researching backlinks, finding link-building opportunities, and discovering potentially damaging links. One thing that also worth mentioning about Open Site Explorer is the fast speed it delivers. This has nothing to do with the quality or depth of the data, but everything to do with convenience. When you run a search, you can expect to receive results within seconds. Although signing up for an account will gain you access to more features, a free search is a great way to view the bones of your link profile.
Content Optimization
Content optimization is always a big factor when it comes to search engine optimization. As is well-known to most people, coming up with fresh and effective content daily seems quite difficult sometimes. But it is necessary to offer updated yet valuable content if you expect your site to stand out from competition. However, the good news is, there are already plenty of tools developed for helping you generate new ideas to write about and ensuring all your content are fully optimized for search engines before they are put online.
The SEO tools for content optimization mentioned below come in free and paid. You could get free stuff from different vendors or you could also pay a minimum amount to get an all-out performing application, all these will depend on your budget.
Paid—Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo comes with an incredibly user-friendly interface, on which you can identity what content performs best for certain topic while highlighting the key influencers to promote your content additionally. There are many cool features you can find with Buzzsumo. For example, it shows the share activity across all the major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, gives you an alert every time whenever there is an article mentions your keyword, whenever a specific author publishes an article, or whenever your competitor publishes a breakout post, offers a domain comparison reports so that you can compare the content performance of competitors, etc. If you purchase a yearly plan, you can save 20% off to make the lowest price of Buzzsumo at $79/mo. And all paid plans offers a 14 day free trial, no credit card required.
Freemium—Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
If you’re running a WordPress-powered website, you wouldn’t want to miss this awesome WordPress SEO plugin. Designed for ensuring the content going on your site is SEO friendly, Yoast WordPress SEO plugin incorporates everything from a snippet editor and real time analysis functionality to help you optimize your page content, image tiles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. Even better, if you demand for more features like a redirect manager, internal linking, premium support, social previews and more, there is Yoast WordPress SEO Premium plugin out there to go with.
Outdated Content Finder is part of Greenlane and was developed as a response to the shifting state of the content industry. As a content creator, you job is keeping offering fresh and useful content to attract as much traffic as possible. But it is also inevitable that the content hosted on your website may become outdated sometimes. The Outdated Content Finder can be a good help in identifying the outdated copy on the basis of the dates you enter. Therefore, you can provide alternative copy in time and ideally earn more links as expected.
No matter what kind of advanced operators you tend to use on Google, they are ensured to be accepted by the Outdated Content Finder, for instance:
- “top 5 apps” inurl:technology
- “guest post” online usability (site:*.com OR site:*.net OR site:*.org)
Keywords Research
Keywords are not only necessary for SEO management, but also useful for pay per click and other marketing strategies. However, finding keywords was still a frustrating manual process until the development of keywords research tool. As time goes by, even keyword research nowadays is never a thing. What you need is the right SEO tool and simple clicks.
You may wonder the way of discovering the best SEO tool for keywords research. Normally, if a tool helps you find a keyword that is of high quality to be used for your content and to bring back good SEO effectiveness, it can be called the best SEO tool to rely on. Moreover, before beginning researching keywords, you need to be clear about some terms that you’ll come across in the keyword research process, including keyword, traffic volume, organic search, paid search, phrase match, related keywords, average CPC, competition density, results, and so on.
Paid—SEMrush
SEMrush, technically, is an all-in-one suite of digital marketing tools, which is especially popular among professional SEOs. It includes almost every tool you’d need to manage a successful organic online marketing campaign. Just in the case of keyword research, this tool not only helps you find the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns, gather phrase matches and related keywords, but also gives long-tail keywords and enables for exploring multinational and multilingual environments. As to pricing, if you subscribe to an annual plan, SEMrush allows you to save over 16% off monthly price, making the starter price at $83/mo.
Freemium—TermExplorer
TermExplorer claims to deliver the highest volume of relevant keywords and the most actionable competitive data available. Upon sign-up, you can get a complete picture of the competition with three parts included as SERP, Domain, and Page. Meanwhile, TermExplorer can be accessed via both PC and various mobile devices.
Free—Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free suggestion tool that takes your keyword research to the next level with immediately offering you practically an unlimited list of keyword variations of the original keyword in order of alphabet and number, which can be used for SEO, PPC, and your next content marketing campaign. You are even allowed to add bounce house ab, ac, ad to bring out more keywords that can be potentially bidden on or used for your SEO purposes.
Technical SEO
Besides front end of your site, search engine optimization also refers to the back end of the site, without which the front end or the user interface is impossible to function properly. Generally speaking, the servers, applications installed as well as the database are involved in the realm of the back end. Unfortunately, most SEO platforms fail to provide good tools for a website’s back end.
To make up the shortfall, software developers have created plenty of technical SEO tools to be responsible for sweeping your site and checking for inconsistencies. The best technical SEO tool is the one that can give you a detailed and comprehensive report on what you can do with your site to be fully optimized after looking at all the links, pages, status codes, and meta descriptions.
Paid—DeepCrawl
DeepCrawl features with great flexibility and an intelligently prioritized, in-depth reports to help drive SEO and UX improvement to your site. There are numerous crawl types for you to choose from when starting a crawl. As well, you can also auto-schedule crawls if needed. All crawls are highly customizable, meaning that you can set the criteria for minimum/maximum links per page, title, content, load time, URL length, etc. accordingly. And it could be a good option to get it started with a free trial if you haven’t decided whether to shell out at least $79/mo for this technical SEO tool.
Freemium—Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an inevitable choice to consider in terms of desktop crawler. The tool has been around in this field for quite time now and prides itself on returning a bunch of info about a set of URLs such as Meta data, response code, duplicate content, and more. It also makes it super easy to setup and manage sites of all sizes. On top of that, you can even use it for free if you’re looking at crawling less than 500 URLs.
Formally known as Google Webmaster Central, Google Search Console has come a long way since its earlier days and can offer a fair amount of insights. What makes the tool welcomed by many SEOs are:
- It offers you estimates on your position for a keyword, plus the number of impressions and clicks for your site on that keyword in Google search results.
- It gives a good summary of things that matter, like number of pages indexed, broken links, page loading speed, correctness of HTML markup, etc.
- It’s free.
Rank Tracking
Getting you conversions and profits is the ultimate goal of every SEO tool. To achieve that goal, you need firstly rank top in the search engine results page. If you’re confused about where your links are in the results pages or wondering how to improve more on your SEO campaign, you should consider taking advantage of a rank tracking tool.
Paid—Moz Pro
Moz Pro includes a powerful rank tracking tool to retrieve search engine rankings for both pages and keywords, and store them in case you need an easy comparison later. As a subscriber to Moz Pro, you no longer need to manually check daily, as it will be in charge of tracking selected rankings data over time to see which efforts are making the most impact as well as scheduling automated reports to stay informed on changes. Also, don’t worry about the financial risks as Moz Pro enables you to have a 30 days free trial before diving into the service.
Freemium—Microsite Masters
With Microsite Masters, you can track up to 10 keywords for a many websites as you want. If you are looking for tracking more keywords or adding additional features like SEO scoreboard, rank alerts, API access, PDF and CSV reports, etc., you are recommended to upgrade to a paid plan. Microsite Masters only operates in an online interface, so you don’t need to worry about getting blocked by Google. It is great for anyone who would rather get alerted about their keyword rankings instead of manually going through and checking them. The rank tracking tool can email you daily reports on your best and worst performing keywords, so you can access your keyword rankings on the go.
Free—Traffic Travis
Sign up to Traffic Travis, and they will send you a link to download their software to your computer. As of today, you can set up 5 projects and get 500 free keywords to track with a free version. Traffic Travis also ties in keyword search volume data in a tab next to your keyword rankings, so you don’t need to head over to the Adwords Keyword Planner to get a sense of how many searches your keywords get every month.
The tools we mentioned above are judged on which do the best job of giving you the research-driven investigation tools to identity SEO opportunities ripe for growth, along with offering excellent flexibility and high-grade functionality, either at a reasonable price or free of charge. Whether one of these SEO tools is ideally fitting for your business should depend on if you have accurately made use of them, solely or combined together. Apart from SEO tools, there are a wealth of service and ways out there to give an edge to your site and boost your pages to a higher ranking in key search results. First and foremost, hosting your site with a reliable and SEO-friendly web hosting platform is the easiest yet most useful methods, however.