The Best SEO Tools
It’s a question that I always get asked and one that many people Google ” What are the Best SEO tools to use this year ?”
There are many bloggers out there who use a wide range of tools for their SEO activities and if that works for them then great. I have seen tools that others use and I find them a pain in the backside to use or I may find their interface isn’t the best and may look to try another option. With SEO tools there certainly is options and in 2016 it is no different as tools and software are being developed all the time to help with SEO.
I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years now and I’ve looked at all the tools there is on the market and tried many of them out. This has taken years for me to do and at a great expense so my review of the best SEO tools isn’t done because I’ve got affiliate links in the post or because the companies in question have paid me to promote their tools, I’ve simply provided you with a current and up to date list of tools that are beneficial to SEO‘s for the year.
If I have missed out any decent tools then please do get in contact with me and I’ll be more than happy to add your suggestion to my list.
SEM Rush
SEM Rush is a great tool which I’ve used for a number of years and it consistently gives me some great data. It provides a wealth of information that many other tools can’t. SEM Rush are always continuing to add new features so it is clearly being developed on a regular basis to improve.
Things the SEM Rush Tool can do:
- Keyword Research
- Related keywords and variations of keywords that may be useful in your niche
- Provides a guide to the cost per click for adwords on keywords
- Website Auditing tool ( The SEM RUSH Bot ) picks up all sorts but very useful to have
- The Keyword Research can be done for 25+ countries, remember what’s good in the UK isn’t always the same in the US or anywhere else.
This is a great tool for doing a bit of research on your own or your competitors’ websites, giving you a guide as to what they rank for and what keywords bring in traffic to their website.
The Dashboard on SEM Rush is pretty simple and straight forward and easy to navigate, so you won’t go wrong with being able to navigate the tool even if you have not used it before.
Please note that what the traffic suggests a website gets is considerably lower than what the actual website gets, this tool cannot see the analytics of the website so there is no way it can pull accurate data, but of course it is a useful guide as to whether someone is getting traffic or not.
There is also a number of other features that I don’t really use on SEM Rush that you might also find useful. This is a paid tool and one that is a must for any SEO as it saves a lot of time doing manual research.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is probably the best backlink checking tool that there is on the market and it’s another that I’ve used for a number of years now. It’s a great backlink checking tool that will help you establish what links your competitors have. I mainly use this to see who’s got what backlinks and all the other data that you will need from a backlink checker.
Again this tool is being developed and it can do way more than it used to, with it also now monitoring keywords and brand mentions on the web so that you can watch who’s talking about a particular brand – this can be used in a number of different ways to benefit you.
It’s the best SEO Backlink checking tool there is at the moment, there are many tools that offer a similar service but this tool simply has the resources to pull in the most amount of data.
They do provide a free trial for this tool which is ideal, giving you the chance to try before you buy.
Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is another great tool that I use on a daily basis and it’s another tool that is great for backlink analysis as it does pretty much the same as Ahrefs but it’s another option. It is a paid tool that has a monthly subscription but the data that this tool provides is second to none, with it helping you to monitor what your competitors are doing.
It’s very easy to use, it has a great interface and it is well used within the SEO industry. If you want an alternative to Ahrefs then this tool is one of the best there is on the market. It also provides the trust flow and citation flow figures that most SEO people look for in today’s market. Majestic SEO is very low cost for what it does, it is certainly well affordable even for those who are starting out in SEO.
The tool shows you new links your or your competitors’ have gained, as well as any ones that drop off for whatever reason. It also shows you why they possibly dropped off which can happen for a number of reasons such as servers being down, site under maintenance etc so you can use this data to come back and check at a later date to see if the link has come back.
It also has some Chrome and Mozilla extensions which are pretty useful tools to have installed on your browser.
Overall this will always be a tool that I will use on a daily basis.
SEO Monitor
SEO Monitor is a new tool on the market and they have recently been nominated for some awards. This tool was built by a team of SEO people who know exactly what data an SEO will use and so it will be a great tool to use in 2016. The tool is designed to help you measure SEO performance alongside a range of other great features.
Upon set-up, you will connect your analytics, search console and the tool will crawl all of the data along with your website and provide you with a range of data on a well designed and simple dashboard.
You can monitor a number of websites from the Dashboard, you can see the packages SEO Monitor have available and you can also try it out with their FREE 14-day trial.
The tool also has an automatic keyword research tool where it will see what you rank for and make suggestions on other keywords that you might want to rank for which means you don’t have to go and do the research.
With this tool, you can monitor your competitors and see what they are doing SEO wise and measure their campaigns against yours and tweak you campaign accordingly. SEO Monitor also has a search reputation monitor so that you can see who is talking about your branded keywords online.
Another feature of the tool is that you can check for articles that point to your website automatically, allowing you to see what’s being said about you on other websites.
Overall this looks to be a great tool, I’ve only recently started using this and will update in due course if there is anything else I think may be useful for you guys to know about this tool.
Scrapebox
Scrapebox is a tool that many SEO experts will have used for many years, I often get asked the question does Scrapebox still work? To this day I’ve never had a problem with Scrapebox it works very well and always has done, it can do a wide range of things some of which I’ll list below. It’s often thought that Scrapebox is a black hat SEO tool which of course Black Hat SEO’s probably do use, however, it’s not just used to spam. In fact, many SEO people don’t even use 30% of the features that Scrapebox comes with.
Scrapebox can do all of the following to help you with your day to day SEO processes :
- Scrape keywords
- Scrape Emails
- Analyse Expired Domains
- Scrape WordPress Blogs you can comment on
- Trackback Poster
- Analyse competitors backlinks
- Find Unregistered domains
- Extract Emails
- Proxy Harvester
Scrapebox can also do so much more, it’s a well-known tool in the SEO world and it’s worth every single penny of the $97 that it currently costs which you can buy here .
It has additional plugins some of which are free, others which are paid ( but do cost very little ) however, the plugins are very worthwhile. We will be doing a Scrapebox tutorial soon which will go into great detail on the benefits of how this great tool can work for you.
Link Research Tools
Link Research Tools is another tool that helps you analyse competitors backlinks. It’s a tool I love but it can seem expensive if you only manage 1 website, they do have various plans available to suit everyone’s needs. Now it is a great SEO tool and a must have in 2016 for a number of reasons.
Many link research tools on the market today show a snippet of links, not many show full accurate data and a lot of that is because it’s very easy for SEO people to block the bots from the tools from crawling web sites and in turn you will be left with only a snippet of information on your competitors websites. Link Research Tools is a well-developed tool that seems to pull through a lot more data as a result of having more data sources. The tool is simply a link building tool, it’s not a multi-tool like many try to be and it’s because of the fact that they concentrate and develop one area at a time that I believe this tool is one of the best for Link Research.
You can also use this tool for link detox purposes, for example if another SEO has got a range of poor low-quality links pointing at a client’s website then you can use this tool to clean it all up and do a disavow which will make sure that Google does not penalise you for someone else’s poor quality links.
So it is in my opinion the best link building tool there is on the market today.
Serpstat
Serpstat is a new tool that I’ve just added to this list. It’s a tool that I’ve just started using. You will see from the above tools there are tools for a lot of things but none really are that accurate when it comes to assessing your rankings. There are a lot of tools that do throw up some form of data and some of it is fairly accurate. However, with Serpstat it seems to pull in a lot more keywords and it is very accurate which will help you if you are looking for a rank tracking tool that can also pull in local search results.
As well as providing you with accurate data on where you rank, it has some great features. It can be used as a keyword research tool, you can monitor your competitors in both organic search and paid ads and this tool will also pull through the ads if you are looking to see what your competitors paid ads are set up like – this will allow you to make sure that your ads are better.
The tool can give you details on your position changes, so you can see what keywords go up, what ones are going down, and which ones are recently indexed.
You can also check out your site structure, so if you wanted to see all of the URLS indexed then there is an option to see all of the URLS, and you can also check domains for any sub domains they may also have set up that could be ranking. So you can certainly do your research on the competition with this tool.
If you find these tools of interest then you may also like to check out Hello Clicks as they use many of them to help your business conversions and search results on Google.
Further to this, you can do domain comparisons, meaning that you can put your domain up against one of your main rivals and see where you are at against them. This is overall a superb tool and the price at present is very decent, you can even have a FREE account if you are not doing a huge amount of searches.
Need help with your SEO campaigns? Don’t hesitate to get in touch to find out what plans we have available!
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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