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5 SEO Tools You Should Know

It takes a good amount of work to appear at the top of search engine results using internet marketing for your target keywords. Luckily, this is where SEO tools come in.

Having a basic understanding of how search engines and keyword research works is just one step towards achieving a good ranking, but it’s never that easy to push your site rank to page one, let alone to the top position of search results.

According to Slideshare, nearly 60% of B2B marketers say that SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation, and this isn’t something you want to ignore. You have to embrace an effective internet marketing strategy if you want to be successful.

The good news is that there is a number of search engine optimization (SEO) tools out there, some free and some paid, that can help you view your website the way search engines like Google see it. This way, you can improve your ranking and relevance for your target keywords.

In this article, we will explore five of the SEO tools that you need to know about if you would to achieve site rank success.

Ubbersuggest

There’s more to SEO than just what you see on the surface. The more you dig, the more data you’re likely to find. With this, you’re in a position to make more informed decisions in a bid to boost your search engine rankings.

Ubersuggest was developed by Neil Patel, a New York Times bestselling author, and one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes. It is an all-inclusive SEO tool that provides an in-depth look at critical factors such as competitor SEO, keyword suggestions, and content ideas.

Imagine you can reverse engineer your competitors’ SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing strategy. Ubersuggest allows you to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge over the competition. 

The Ubbersuggest tagline says it all, ‘Want more traffic? Ubersuggest shows you how to win the game of SEO’

With Ubersuggest, you can also see the exact content in your space that people are linking to, then approach each of these sites and ask them to link to you. This is all you need to come up with an action plan for improving your link profile and understanding which links will have the most impact on your rankings.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is simply one of the best tools around when it comes to SEO and content marketing. It’s only second to Google when it comes to being the largest website crawler.

It has two standout features;

  • Site Explorer – is promoted by Ahrefs as “the best backlink checker tool in the industry” and is capable of providing a detailed backlink profile of any website. Whether you want to learn more about your website, or maybe you want to see what your competition has been up to, this feature does it all for you.
  • Position Tracker – We all understand that SEO is all about moving your website up the search engine’s rankings for your target keyword research. Through the Position Tracker tool, Ahrefs helps you to see just how much success you are having in your ranking. You can track keyword research and rankings, or even see how your pages are ranking on mobile devices.

When using the Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs produces the “parent topic” of the keyword you looked up. This is a broader keyword with higher search volume than your intended keyword, but likely has the same audience and similar ranking potential. This provides you with more of a valuable SEO opportunity.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an elaborate dashboard that reports on the performance of domains as a whole and their specific pages. It is an undisputed fan favourite in the SEO community. Marketers love the fact that it lets you easily assess your rankings as well as identify changes and new ranking opportunities.

One of the most popular features of this paid SEO tool is the Domain Vs Domain analysis, which allows you to compare your website to your competitors easily. If you’re looking for analytics reports to help you better understand your website’s search data, traffic, or even your competitors, this is the best tool. With it, you’ll be able to compare keywords and domains to figure out what works best in your niche.

Semrush also offers an SEO toolkit that allows you to track a website’s visibility improvement over time as well as identify which keywords it’s ranking for, what the page’s rank is for a keyword and the keyword’s monthly search volume.

Spyfu

SpyFu is an adept competitor keyword research tool for Google Ads. In addition to keyword research, it helps with Pay-Per-Click competitive research, SEO competitive research, and also the creation of custom lists and domains.

This tool helps you drive traffic to your Google Ads campaigns and website, monitor both paid and organic rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and obtain reliable and accurate contact information for leads. You can search your competitor’s website or your own, to easily see how many organic keywords they have. Additionally, you can see how many monthly clicks they get, who their paid and organic competitors are, and the campaigns they’re running with Google Ads. It’s one of the most detailed SEO analysis tools on the market.

While SpyFu has an amazing premium version, most marketers rave about the efficiency of its free features. If you’re just starting out, you can easily grow into the paid features as you start achieving a higher ranking.

Linkody

As a marketer, you spend a lot of time building backlinks to your website, but two questions will always be floating around your head:

Are there any websites linking back to yours? and Are there times when, for some reason, you lose a link?

Answering these questions can be difficult, especially if you rely on a manual tracking process. The best way to understand the performance of your off-page SEO is by having a good overview of your backlinks.  Fortunately, Linkody can rescue you from wasted time and lost productivity. Linkody allows you to discover, track, analyze and has an easy-to-use interface. 

Aside from that, the tool checks your links 24/7 and informs you of any changes so you can take immediate action in case a link is lost or broken. You can also use the free version of Linkody’s as part of a trial, adding to its reputation as one of the best SEO tools.

When it comes to organic SEO rankings, there is simply no easy way to push your website to the top of the search engines. All that you can do is implement a sound strategy, stick with it over the long run, and be ready to roll with the punches.

Once you combine this approach with some of the high-level SEO tools we have discussed, you’ll have taken the first step of the journey to reach your SEO related goals.

Article by:

Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an SEO Agency based in London, UK.

He has eight years of experience as an SEO Consultant and was recently hired by the UK government for SEO training. Joshua also owns the best-selling SEO course on Udemy, and has taught SEO to over 100,000 students.

His work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AgencyAnalytics, Wix and lots more other reputable publications.