Most people have heard the term “SEO” before. Yet, most people who are just starting out, to even marketing industry veterans don’t really grasp the importance SEO can produce for your company’s bottom line. No matter what type or size your business is, SEO should be a core focus for your growth. Using the right SEO tools can not just help you execute SEO strategies that can improve your business performance, but using these SEO tools combined with SEO expert growth partners can completely alter the growth projections of your business by generating a ton of new customers & revenue at a far lower CAC, while producing a higher CLTV within just months of executing more advanced SEO campaigns.
Mastering the math, science, and art of Search Engine Optimization can seem daunting to achieve. And, it is. SEO is not easy to succeed in, and if it was, anyone and everyone would have their websites ranking in the top of organic search results on Google for many of the most difficult keywords to rank for, which in turn would drive many millions in new business to millions of companies via their websites. The SEO tools experts use on a daily basis combined with their talents are what sets their businesses and client’s apart from their competition.
Our Short List of The Best 15 SEO Tools
This is a list of SEO tools that are free, free trial, and premium plans for simple, yet robust SEO software and platforms that will help your company discover technical SEO issues that may be hampering your growth, uncovering dozens to thousands of keywords your target audience is searching to find your product or service offerings, link building opportunities, help with content SEO strategies, to tracking keyword rankings, monitoring your competition, spam links to you, and so much more. Together with your SEO agency who would be on top of this, you’ll be able to see first-hand into the world of SEO and actually tie in tangible results to your overall SEO campaigns too.
1/ Google Search Console
This is primary and a must-have SEO tool. Google’s Search Console tools and reports will help your business to better measure your website’s organic search traffic and performance, fix issues, and more to help improve your keyword search rankings & results. You can better optimize your content with search analytics, fix technical SEO errors throughout your website and on mobile too. Submit your sitemaps and individual web pages to Google for better crawling. improve Schema markup, AMP pages, and more to boost your SEO performance.
2/ Google Keyword Planner
Another primary SEO tool we always use is Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword research, volume, and even the CPC per keyword (AdWords). This SEO keyword tool will help you discover new keyword opportunities to optimize your content for in order to reach the searchers you want. You can also have Google crawl your website’s content or a certain web page and have Google reveal what they think your content is about which will reveal a list of keywords and their range of monthly search volume on Google and by location (ex. US, Worldwide, New York City, SF Bay Area, Europe, etc.)
3/ Google Analytics
GA (Google Analytics) is another must-have SEO tool for all those serious about turning SEO into a great success for your business. Google Analytics helps you look deeper into your website’s performance, yet even deeper into SEO too. You can see where you’re acquiring traffic from, web pages that get the most organic search impressions, CTR, average SERP, traffic, web conversions, and even dollar values applied to each conversion.
4/ Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Mobile first strategies are the way to go and this SEO tool is a must-have if you want to achieve and hold higher search rankings. Over the past few years, Google has decreased rankings for websites that do not provide a good mobile UX for users. Now, your brand can stay on top of being mobile-friendly for SEO with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool for SEO.
5/ Google PageSpeed Insights
Google uses your website’s loading speed as a ranking factor for search results. Whether your website is snail-slow or lightening fast, Google’s PageSpeed Insights will tell you how you perform. Even better, this great SEO tool will give you (+ your developer or dev agency) actionable recommendations to fix the technical SEO issues you may have. Often, even the best developers will have several questions about the insights, so it’s good to team up with a technical SEO expert to help prioritize and monitor the fixes with your company.
6/ GTmetrix
This is a great technical SEO tool. Google PageSpeed Insights is a great SEO tool that checks your site’s code and offers high-level and more in depth recommendations. Yet, GTmetrix actually loads your website and gives you the real loading speed of your website and deeper insights into fixing any/all technical SEO issues to really speed up your site’s load time performance. This is a go-to SEO tool for SEO experts on the technical SEO side of things.
7/ MOZ Pro
MOZ’s SEO software has been an authority in the SEO world for many years now. From using their SERP tracking features to track & monitor your target keywords, to technical SEO issues & crawl errors, competitor monitoring, domain authority monitoring, keyword tool explorer, backlink monitoring & analysis, web page content insights, and more. MOZ is a great SEO tool to use daily for your success in SEO. They also have a bustling community of SEO experts and offer great insights into the world of SEO. This is a top SEO tool of choice for SEO agencies too.
8/ Google Trends
Using Google Trends as an SEO tool can provide great value to your brand too. It allows you to keep up with the latest search trends going on and can help you with content production of current events and to even get ahead of new and growing content trends so you can position your content to be published and promoted before the search trend becomes more mainstream. This will help your brand get a good head start on first to index content with keywords that could prove to be very high volume and a large traffic driver to your site for week and years to come.
This great SEO tool allows you to easily search for keywords in any country and get information like the top search queries, rising search queries, query interest over time, and the geographical locations depending on interest of the search query. If you aren’t sure which search trends are the ones for your business, then this is the best SEO tool to use to get those search insights most valuable for your growth.
9/ Screaming Frog
According to many SEO experts, this is a great SEO tool that helps to quickly analyze your website and perform deeper site audits. Most SEO experts that use Screaming Frog appreciate the speed of results it generates with delivering in depth insights quite a bit faster than most other SEO tools available. This helpful SEO tool also informs you of duplicate content, technical crawl errors to fix, bad redirects (redirect chains, etc), and improving your link building campaigns too. SEO experts consider their SEO spider tool as a top-rated feature too.
10/ SEM Rush
SEM Rush is often a fan favorite within the SEO community. SEO Experts and internal SEO marketers at brands like having the ability to easily assess your keyword search rankings daily as well as identify changes needed to improve rankings, while also finding new keyword ranking opportunities to take advantage of. Domain Vs Domain analysis is popular SEO tool in their suite and this allows you to easily compare your website’s SEO performance to your competitors.
SEM Rush also provides straightforward search analytics reports that will help you better understand the search data from your website, in regards to search traffic (+ your competitors), and compare your keywords with domains too. Their On-Page SEO Checker tool will help you easily monitor your target keyword rankings and find some recommendations on how to improve your website’s overall SEO performance too.
11/ Ahrefs
Another fan favorite SEO tool used routinely by SEO specialists everywhere. Ahrefs SEO tool is only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawlers. SEO experts really love their Site Audit feature as it’s really great for SEO analysis. This helpful SEO tool highlights what sections of your website will need improvements to if you want it to rank higher in search engines for your target keywords.
Analyzing competitors SEO strategies, backlinks, performance, and more is pretty easy too. You can also use this SEO tool to improve your content, fix broken links, and other technical SEO issues that may hamper your SEO traffic growth efforts too, while getting great data insights into your best-performing web pages that are driving traffic too.
12/ Incognito
Using incognito mode to run search queries with Google can help you get an unbiased snapshot of what searchers see when searching for keywords relevant to your brand. If you use the autofill option, you’ll see some great semantic keyword suggestions related to the search query you used as well. Incognito is a great free SEO tool you can use to see how your brand’s web pages rank for certain keywords visually at a certain day and time, yet you can also get a good grasp on how the top 10 search results look as well for your most high value target keywords.
13/ Dareboost
Dareboost is a helpful website performance tool that can help improve SEO results. This helpful SEO tool will point out site speed and precise recommendations on how to fix them which in turn will help boost your SERPs too.
14/ Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress
Over 42% of the web is built on WordPress. More small businesses, bloggers, and even the Fortune 500 are using WordPress to manage their content & businesses online. WordPress SEO is imperative and the Yoast SEO plugin is the #1 plugin to use. Our team and clients have used it routinely for years because it works the best for managing SEO on WordPress.
15/ Intent Sciences SEO Growth Model
We’re big on SEO performance and steer far away from vanity metrics. When it comes to driving explosive growth via SEO, one of the most important pieces to success before SEO work is implemented goes into the business planning. Over the years, we have developed a proprietary SEO growth model we use together with clients to breakdown all the keywords (head and long-tail keywords) we can target for SEO traffic growth.
From the list of target keywords, we can breakdown the average monthly traffic per keyword, SERP and its average CTR, along with estimated traffic you’d receive by SERP for each keyword. In addition to this, we can give a solid forecast to you business growth by conversion rates too and how many MQLs, SQLs, or online sales you’d receive each month per keyword and where they rank. We get all of this primary search data from Google and your behavioral data. Then, we can compile all the research and develop a very realistic business growth model with our helpful SEO tool.
Ex. You sell cosmetics online. You have the best eyeshadow around. The keyword “eyeshadow” gets 500,000 searches / mo. on Google US alone. Other long-tail searches like “best eyeshadow” or “best eyeshadow for {blue eyes/green eyes/brown eyes/hazel eyes}” etc. can net another 200,000 searches / mo. too. Yet, if we were to break them down, it would look like this:
Eyeshadow = 500,000 searches per month
#1 SERP = 43% CTR, #2 SERP = 21%, #3 SERP = 15%.
Your website’s average conversion rate is 2.5% for organic traffic and AOV is $75
If we get your website to rank at SERP #3 for just “eyeshadow” – you would get 75,000 unique visitors per month, 1875 new customers (@ 2.5% conversion rate), and generate $140,625 in new customer revenue – all attributed to SEO.
But, it’s gets even better. Now, you can use these customers to help promote your content, share deals with friends & family, and generate more customers while reducing your sales & marketing costs at scale.
The Importance of Investing in SEO Growth for High ROI
Whether you’re a startup CEO, small business owner, VP of Marketing, search marketing manager, or even a CMO, there are a few SEO tools everyone should know about that you can use internally, with an SEO agency, or together with your SEO agency to help your business growth accelerate via great SEO. And, we’re not just talking about improving vanity metrics for SEO like seeing your brand name rank at the top of Google for your brand name searches, or keywords that have a handful of searches per month at most (usually it’s you and your team searching those) that will never produce meaningful traffic or customer growth.
When investing in SEO growth, having the right SEO tools can help make all the difference. SEO agencies use these and others, but as a brand, you should at least have some knowledge of what’s being used by the SEO experts. Because, when SEO tools like these are used and combined with top talent SEO marketers that use advanced mathematics, NLP, neuroscience, and other tactics that drive exceptional growth results and very high ROI.
With our 15+ years of experience as SEO experts, we have used and use these SEO tools daily for startups to enterprise businesses. These simple and advanced tools along with our combined experience as experts in SEO have helped us drive over $1 Billion in revenue online for our clients and previous startups too. Often, their investments in SEO growth return 10X+ across their most important business KPIs.
If you want to grow your business via SEO, feel free to Contact Us today.
