These eight SEO tools listed below assist me with researching or staying on top of my SEO efforts and paid search results with my clients based in Sydney and Brisbane.
The research stage is one of the most fundamental stages to help plan an effective SEO strategy, consider new digital marketing methods or processes and provides insight to what even may potentially hinder your SEO efforts and domain authority.
Below are the tools I rely on daily for accurate data. They assist me in developing insights about my client’s and their competitor’s marketing campaigns or come up with new creative ideas about content or on how to distribute content and engage with my client’s potential target market.
I often get asked by business owners or executives who try to pursue SEO on their own “how can I measure what I am doing with SEO?” or “How do I know where to start with SEO?” Accessing and relying on these tools for research and metrics will provide great information, however, your SEO results will be depend on a well thought-out SEO strategy and implementation that is flexible, creative and engaging with your target audience. The tools below will not provide the answers but rather give you insights that will help you to develop your own digital marketing strategy.
Here are the 8 tools I rely on a daily basis:
- Google Analytics
- Search Console
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- SourceBottle
- AuthoritySpy
- Salesforce.com
- Buzzsumo
Let’s dig a little deeper!
Google AnalyticsI login to Google Analytics weekly and run auto monthly reports with all my clients. Google Analytics will help you to discover if there are any unusual patterns happening with your website traffic or to help manage and track website traffic progress with your seo efforts. It also assists me to understand the major sources of traffic, which traffic sources produce lead generation, helps me to understand my target market audience with demographic data. Essentially it helps me to understand which traffic sources are contributing to leads or sales.
Search ConsoleFormerly known as Webmaster Tools, Search Console helps you to understand how Google search engine views your website and provides you with notification if any errors, broken pages, indexing issues or if any adverse actions are taken against your website. Search Console can also be integrated with your Google Analytics to provide deeper reporting on keyword and click through rate data which can assist you to spot hanging fruit seo opportunities.
SemrushI check Semrush daily to review the keywords I am targeting to rank on Google on my client’s behalf. I can also review the performance of their competitor’s keyword ranking and if I notice they have overtaken a keyword, then this prompts me to check ahrefs to find out if any content they have written and or distributed recently contributed to this increase in ranking. Semrush also helps me to identify new and profitable keywords to target that I may not have considered. I can also review my clients’ competitor activity on Google AdWords including copies of their ad copies.
AhrefsI rely on Ahrefs to track the number and quality of backlinks being established for my clients and their competitors as well as domain and specific page authority. I can see the quality of the domain (or domain authority), the social engagement and metrics with these backlinks too. I find Ahrefs to be very accurate with their reporting too.
Salesforce.comIf lead generation is important to your business, then it will be important to integrate and rely on a customer relationship management system (CRM). I prefer using salesforce.com because it can be easily integrated with your website and all your leads can feed into salesforce.com and also be integrated with Google AdWords reporting. The benefit of this is that you’ll be able to see the lead source within salesforce and have one communal area to respond to leads, track the history and activity of your leads and measure the performance of the source of your leads. There is so much more you do with salesforce.com.
BuzzsumoI love the name of this software service. Buzzsumo helps us to understand content with ‘buzz’ and we all know that content that has buzz has more engagement and following. Buzzsumo helps us to identify content that is shared the most and this can be easily achieved when searching by keyword or topic or domain. This can further identify the type of influencers that might take part in endorsing certain pieces of content.
SourceBottleThis is a great online and FREE service that allows anyone looking for relevant PR opportunities to get publicity for their business or themselves. While the service is FREE, this does require you to be on the pulse and have the available time to enquire and respond to opportunities to ensure you don’t miss out on great opportunities.
AuthoritySpyAn extension of Buzzsumo is AuthoritySpy as it pulls together many data sources from across the web including Google, Facebook and other valuable platforms. AuthoritySpy provides us with valuable information including social media following including Twitter and Facebook, Social Authority, page rank and assists with identifying key blogs and influencers. Although I subscribe to most of the paid versions of these digital marketing tools, they have proven to be an invaluable resource I have been able to utilise over and over again with my clients and the investment has been well worth it.
For more information about this blog post, feel free to get in touch with me by emailing me or visiting Digital Marketing Specialists website or calling me on (02) 9239 3113.
