The Top 10 SEO Tools for Marketers

The Top Ten SEO Tools for Marketers

Maybe you know just enough about SEO to be dangerous, or your company hasn’t outsourced SEO to an agency like Fidelitas yet. CMOs will certainly be held accountable for search engine rankings as a key performance indicator of their job performance, regardless of who’s doing the heavy lifting. Entrepreneurs trying to manage tight budgets may find themselves in a similar position of needing to find their way to higher rankings without the resources to add an SEO agency to their budget. We’ve outlined the top 10 SEO tools for marketers to help you find your way through a complex SEO landscape:

1. Ahrefs

   Ahrefs is a go-to link exploring tool. The free version allows marketers to analyze a single website and perform a limited amount of daily queries, which should be more than enough for you to get started. Ahrefs recently added key features like a content explorer and position explorer. The robustness of Ahrefs could eventually render other SEO tools like SEM Rush and Buzz Sumo redundant.

2. Google Analytics

   If your brand’s website doesn’t already have Google Analytics installed, you should fire the firm in charge of managing it- you’ve got much bigger problems on your hands than figuring out which SEO tools are right for you. But having Google Analytics installed and actually leveraging all of the different insights provided by the free platform are two different things. All marketers should be paying attention to page visits, sources, time on site, and bounce rate. Marketers may notice that their traffic data is skewed by bot (spam) traffic- that can be cleaned up by accessing the admin settings and choosing to filter bot and spider traffic.

3. Google Search Console

   Found within Google Webmaster Tools, the Search Console is a critical component of a long-term SEO strategy. Marketers use the Google Search Console as a communication tool with Google. The Search Console detects various SEO errors within your site that, once cleaned up, will almost certainly lead to higher rankings. Cleaning up these errors is often a sort of “Ground Zero” for a new SEO campaign when Fidelitas onboards a new client.

4. Majestic SEO

   Majestic SEO is similar to Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs, except that Majestic has a larger index of backlinks. While marketers should be aware of duplicate listings and some dead links within the reports, every live link will be found within the platform for marketers to analyze. They also boast two metrics that are unique to their platform: Citation Score and Trust Score. At Fidelitas we find these to be quite helpful when measuring the success of client SEO campaigns.

5. Moz Local

   As its name suggests, Moz Local analyzes local citations for businesses with brick-and-mortar locations. There are thirteen directories that every local business should be listed in. Consistency across all thirteen directories are critical for local marketers trying to get their site to dominate the local pack on Google Search.

6. Ninja Outreach

   Ninja Outreach is newer to the Fidelitas SEO arsenal but is quickly becoming one of our favorites. Ninja Outreach helps automate link building for marketers, serving as an effective tool in blogger and influencer outreach and engagement among other things. The Chrome extension currently starts at $29 per month and claims to provide access to over four million influencers.

7. Open Site Explorer

   Open Site Explorer, provided by SEO stalwart Moz, is another link exploration tool. While it doesn’t have the largest link database, it does have, at least in our opinion, the best functionality. Marketers can use Open Site Explorer to analyze the Spam Score of a website as well as each of the links that website is receiving. This is great for SEO campaigns that are trying to catch up with more established competitors. Why reinvent the wheel when you can close the gap by learning what’s working (and what isn’t working) for your competitors?

8. Quicksprout

   Quicksprout gives marketers a top-to-bottom assessment of their website’s overall health and performance. The details behind the platform’s SEO and Site Speed Scores are quite beneficial when pinpointing problems to be addressed on-site. Need to share the data with your brand’s Founder to convince them to move the server out of their basement? Quicksprout offers downloadable PDF reports that analyze your brand’s website, SEO, Social Media, and Content. Marketers use Quicksprout to help determine which web pages are most shareable across social channels, too.

9. Raven Tools

   Raven Tools has been a Fidelitas Development staple for years. Raven Tools is most useful for automating tedious tasks like report generation, crawling websites to detect errors, and top-level Adwords campaign analysis. Raven Tools is offered in service bundles and starts at $99 per month- a small price to pay for the amount of time it will save you.

10. SEMRush

    We may have saved the best for last. SEMRush is a great tool for competitor research and the platform is constantly adding new features. SEMRush will track keywords, perform an SEO audit, and even has a weekly twitter chat on Wednesdays at 11am Eastern at #SEMRushChat – be sure to say hi to @_Fidelitas if you stop by!